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http://netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1215462430900sysk-swearing-at-work.mp3 | How Swearing at Work Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-swearing-at-work-works | Swear words are usually considered workplace taboos -- yet the debate continues over whether these words are inappropriate, or examples of free speech. Learn more about using swear words at work in this HowStuffWorks podcast. | Swear words are usually considered workplace taboos -- yet the debate continues over whether these words are inappropriate, or examples of free speech. Learn more about using swear words at work in this HowStuffWorks podcast. | Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:12:06 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=18, tm_min=12, tm_sec=6, tm_wday=4, tm_yday=172, tm_isdst=0) | 5113124 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from howstuffworkscom. Welcome to the house. Stefworks Podcast. I'm editor Candace Gibson, joined today by my trusty staff writer Josh Clark. Josh, how are you today? Great, Candice. How are you? I'm well. That sounds like it can only mean one thing. Today's topic of choice. Is swearing at work a good thing? Josh, you seem to be a pretty gunghair advocate of this. Why is that? Candace, do you remember my wear your Hawaiian shirt to work campaign? The whole thing was just a drive to get everybody to loosen up and get to know each other. Well, it didn't take as well as I had hoped, so now I'm starting a swear at work campaign. Oh, you I knew exactly where this came from. This article you wrote called is Swearing at Work a Good Thing? Yes. And this is based on an actual study. We're not just tossing around words for fun here. This came out of Great Britain, the University of East Anglia, where essentially some researchers looked at what happened to people who swore in the workplace. Yes, they hung around a mail order warehouse. Yeah. And they were looking to see if swearing at work alienated co workers or if it actually brought them closer together with all the salty language and people really showing their true colors. Sure. I could see a lot of cheeky Brits running around the mail order warehouse just cursed in up the storm. It had to have been a really fun study to do, I imagine. Well, I think so. And it's pretty successful, too, because the hypothesis was correct. It really did establish better relationships among employees because they could feel like they were really expressing themselves and really communicating with everyone in an authentic way. Sure. It's pretty much basic social bonding theory. The more you share of yourself, the more you can establish social bonds. Like trust. How can you truly trust a co worker if they've never heard you swear? I mean, think about how much closer you and I are thanks to the words or son of a, you know, that kind of thing. I know I say this every time you send an article to me, but what's interesting, especially about this study, is that the male room workers, like you were referring to these sort of lower level employees. Yeah, they really let it rip all the time. But when they examine how the executives behaved and spoke to each other, no one really cared that much. It was a little bit more reserved and refined. Right. Well, the studies authors were saying that they hope that while management might not swear, they want to see HR directors maybe look the other way or even encourage it, because it does develop social bonds. But, you know, the East Anglia study really didn't put the whole thing to rest. This is whether or not we should allow swearing in our culture, whether it be on work or television or radio, is a pretty big ongoing battle. It really is. And I know, for instance, I was looking at the SEC and some of the rules that they have about swearing and the idea of a fleeting expletive, which is essentially when you just say like hot pizza, and it's not really in context with anything relating to sexual content or bathroom humor. Sometimes the SEC, a lot of networks get away with it, but when you're talking about and there's a toilet in the same sentence, that's not going to fly. No, I agree. And the FCC is actually as strict as you might think their standards are. They're not strict enough for some people. Have you heard of the Parents Television Council? Yes, some more. Okay, well, actually, you may be upset about this. They went after the producers of one of your favorite shows, Gossip Girl. Wow, you're really getting the hang of the swearing at work campaign. Well, you know that I've had to take off my Hawaiian shirt. Might as well. Yes, I appreciate that, too. So they go after Gossip Girl for this kind of steamy ad promo campaign that they came up with, and they also didn't like 30 Rocks Milk Island episode. Did you see that one? I missed it. It was a good one, but the Parents Television Council didn't like it. Actually, these people are pretty scientific. They've released studies of how much of an increase in profanity there's been on television over a certain number of years. So, for instance and this is during the family hour, which is eight to 09:00 p.m., there was a 22% increase from 2001 to 2006 in profanity. Right. They found 815 foul words in 180 hours of programming, which is 4.53 squares an hour. Wow. The most amazing thing is that somebody actually sat there and watched 180 hours of television programming, counted every one of the swears. Well, clearly I'm in the wrong business. But if you want to check out more of our research, read Josh's article on Is Swearing at work a Good Thing? On how stuff works.com. It's been great. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.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." | |
4544b1c2-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-07cf0cfeb5c5 | Short Stuff: How Often Do You Need To Change Your Oil? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-how-often-do-you-need-to-change-your-o | First things, first: Take that oil change reminder sticker off your windshield and throw it away forever and never look back! | First things, first: Take that oil change reminder sticker off your windshield and throw it away forever and never look back! | Wed, 09 Jan 2019 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=9, tm_isdst=0) | 13708781 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. I'm Josh Clark. There's Jerry over there. And this is The Short Stuff, where we improve your life of the better. Yeah. One of our few sort of autocentric. We don't do this kind of stuff. No, we leave this to the car talk guys. God bless one of their souls. They were great. Yeah, they were great. And John Hodgman, our friend, always very sincerely said that he thought we had sort of the most natural rapport since he had heard click and click. I forgot about that. That's a high compliment. That is a high compliment. Thanks, Hodgeman. Yeah. So this one's a little ironic because I am so far overdue for an oil change. It's embarrassing. It's hilarious, man. It's bad. I do the opposite. I show up. I'm like, Is it time yet? Really? They're like, yeah, sure. Yeah, man, I'm so far behind. The main reason is because I don't want to go to one of those I won't mention brands, but one of the no appointment necessary, we can do it in 30 minutes and you're out of here places. Right. And you have to give them, like, the routing number in your bank account because you owe them so much money when you leave. No, there's horror stories of them not really changing your oil and leaving the oil tank empty and not changing your filter. It's recommended to not go to those places. So I want to make an appointment with my mechanic, and I just haven't done it in so long, man. I know how you feel. I got to do it. Do you have a good mechanic? Well, not since I've gotten the Honda Pilot. But I imagine I could go to my other sort of standby mechanic. And it's not like I go to the same place, but it's not like my La mechanic because I had an old junker car. We knew each other really well. Got it. Because I was there a lot, so me and Jimmy were pals. But I'm not pals with my mechanic now. That's why I hesitated when you said you have a good mechanic and La is a bit of a drive for an oil change. Yes. All right, Chuck. Well, how do you know you need an oil change? This is my first question. There may be more. Well, there's a few ways. You mean, how do I know right now? Yes. Oh, because I am thousands of miles over even the highest recommended limit. Okay. All right. Well, wait a minute. Does your car have one of those oil life indicators? Yes. Okay. Has it come on yet? Oh, it came on about six months ago. You need and it says 0% on there. Which freaked me out at first because, as you will learn right now, everyone, if you have a newer car, there are two lights. One that says, hey, you need an oil change. And one that says you are out of oil or close to it. Right. And if you get that second light, you need to stop driving. Right. Literally as soon as you can. That is why I'm really crazy about oil changes now. I've done that. I've driven until the engine was like, done. See you. Thank you for my life. Yeah, I mean, that's what that means. Everyone, I'm not sure if, you know, if you drive a car that runs out of oil, sometimes even a mile, your engine is toast. They can't just like loop it back up again and get it going. Yes. I was almost to the peepeep for Brunch and I was like, my God, I'm going to go eat Brunch first. I just left my car on the side of the road and walked to La Peep and ate and then walked back and dealt with my car. That sucks, man. Remember the peep? Sure. Great place. Was it worth it? How's that Brunch? Oh, it was totally worth it. It was the last good Brunch I ever had. I'm kidding. So we should really specify you said it. But we really need to make clear there are two different oil lights in a newer car. One is, hey, it's time for you to go get your oil change. One is pull your car over to the side of the road and stop driving it now. Yeah, it's really not worth like, oh, I think I can make it right. And the oil system indicator, the one that just says, hey, go get an oil change soon, that's a fairly new thing. And it's because of that new thing that the recommendation of driving or changing your oil after 3000 miles or every three months is gone. That's gone. Unless you have an older car, that's probably not the case for what you need to do with your oil. You're probably okay to go 5000, 7000, 510,000. If you drive a Jaguar the right way, 15,000 is the highest recommended time in between oil changes. So the whole 3000 miles or three months thing, that's gone. But it's not gone. And from what I can tell, from what I'm reading in places like Edmunds, the only reason it's still around is because the auto service industry is keeping it going with everything they've got. Heck yeah, man. Because they want that money, baby. Yeah, I mean, like you said, if you have an old car and when I had my old Plymouth Valiant, it was the kind of deal where I could tell when I got an oil change. Like it drove better. Right. And so modern cars, you can't really tell when you got an oil change? I don't think so, can you? I mean, this is the first newer car I've ever had. No, you really shouldn't be able to. I think it's a real issue if you can tell. I'm going to actually, I'm going to get my oil changed and then follow up and let everyone know. But certainly with a tune up, you can tell yeah, for sure. With that oil indicator. What it's doing, Chuck, is it's analyzing how you drive? It's checking the oil, the temperature, all this stuff. It's basically keeping tabs on your oil. And based on all this, it will turn that light on when it's time for you to go get an oil change. So even if you are beyond the mileage of your recommended time between oil changes that you'll find in your owner's manual, if that light hasn't come on, you're still probably good. Yeah. But I would definitely trust that if you have a newer car, I trust that light over that little sticker they put in your window. That's a big one, because they're still saying 3000 miles. Right? Exactly. First things first. Stop paying any attention to that whatsoever. Unless you are literally related by blood to your mechanic who put that sticker up there, pull it off and throw it away, it is meaningless as a sales gimmick. Okay? That's the step one. Step two is to then go to your owner's manual and look up oil and it will tell you what the person or the company that major car recommends, how often you get your oil. And it's not an arbitrary number that they just pull out of the air. Usually there's a low one and a high one, something like 5000 miles to 7500 miles. And those numbers depend on how you drive your car. Because there's really two ways you could drive your car normally or severely. Yeah, mine is severe. It's not that I drive crazy. I drive like a grandma. But I never get on the highway, which is great. I live near where I work and I don't really ever have to go on the highway. I mean, occasionally if I have some weird errand but my normal everyday driving commute does not involve high speed travel or highway mileage. And that's where you can get away with going a little bit longer. It might be counterintuitive because you would think that's harder on your car, but it's easier on your car. It is. Because when oil, like conventional oil, is stuff they pull out of the ground and refined from petroleum, that stuff breaks down over time and it condenses. Water condenses out of it. And that water can mess up your engine. Right. It can lead to engine part. Ruination, I think is the technical term. Knocks and pings, pretty much. I think that was from lettigade. Yeah. So when you drive out on the highway, which is something over like 10 miles at a highway speed, a distance over 10 miles, you actually get your engine going enough so that it burns off any condensation that might have built up. Which is why if you drive on the highway regularly, that's ideal for normal driving. When you drive stop and go commute kind of traffic or less than 10 miles just about every time. That's actually, like you were saying, way harder on your car than driving it on the highway because of that condensation that can build up over time. So if you're driving it severely, you want to take that lower number. Yeah. That's also why when you go to sell a car or buy a car use, someone will usually indicate, like highway miles, like higher miles, but highway miles is a lot of times better than lower miles that aren't highway miles. That's right. So let's take a little break in here, a little buddy, and we will come right back and talk a little more about some little oil changes. So Chuck, like I said, that oil indicator light is one reason why you can go longer between oil changes. Right? That's reason why. Another reason is because people stopped opening their owner's manual. So for a very long time, cars have come out where they don't say 3000 miles or three months. That's your oil change place saying that, right. Yeah. But also, there's been some pretty big advances in oil technology, too. And actually the way that they make cars these days has improved tremendously. Yeah, for sure. Synthetic oil is something that you may or may not use. You may have made that switch. Again, if you read your manual, they may recommend synthetic oil right off the bat and it is more expensive, but it is way better than regular oil, has a lot more benefits, performance is better just right off the bat. It is better for the environment. Which also, by the way, I meant to say earlier, if you're one of those people that's like, no, I'm still going to get it changed every 3000, even though that's like far too much, because it's just good for the car. It's really not gaining you anything, you're just losing time, money, and it's bad for the environment. Oil changes aren't great for the environment. Yeah, like if America's cars, all the cars on the road went from five oil changes a year, so every three months to three oil changes a year, we would say something like four and a quarter million gallons of oil that would be poured out of America's car every year. Amazing. Yeah. So it's definitely having more of an impact than on just your free time and your wallet. Right. But synthetic oil is better for the environment, so it depends on who you ask. Like if you ask some experts, car experts might say, yeah, make the switch. If you have a newer car, you should totally make the switch. If you listen to other people, though, they might say that you don't need to switch to synthetic unless your car specifically calls for it. I know if you tow things a lot, then synthetics can be better and it can prolong the life of your engine. But maybe if you do trust your mechanic, talk to them and say, hey, what do you think? What do you think about the synthetics? Right? And they'll be like, Why are we talking like that? Yeah. And they'll say, come over here by the soda machine. So synthetics are better for the environment and that they last longer. So there's less being poured out because there are just fewer oil changes. But they're made from chemicals and they're bad for the environment if you just go dump it in the grass or something. Sure, yeah. People love to poke holes in it. No, it's not any better for the environment, you dumb hippie. That kind of thing. So I just want to address that so that you wouldn't get ambushed by somebody who talks like that. Right? I mean, it's not fryer oil. No, but Chuck, I saw that canola oil is being developed to replace synthetic and conventional and it actually lasts longer. It breaks down over a longer period of time and it actually may be more environmentally friendly. And that would be used as fuel or just as the engine oil. Engine oil, interesting. Yeah, like canola oil, you just pour some crisco in there and see what happens. Yeah, don't do that. Do not listen to me. I was just kidding just now. It's like olive oil is a miracle oil. Have they tried that? It breaks down the antioxidants in your engine. You got anything else? Not really, man. I think the keys here this chuck, listen to your oil. Life Light. I know it's not what it's called, but I cannot get the words that it is called together in my head. And consult your owner's manual and when they put one of those three months or 3000 miles stickers on, get rid of it. Oh, I do have one other thing, Chuck. I knew it. If you are one of those people who drives your car less than 5000 or 7500 miles, or however much your owner's manual recommends between oil changes a year, you still want to change your oil because you're probably driving it on short trips, so you're driving it severely. So your owner's manual probably recommend a timeframe too. And usually that's six months. That may be me, actually. So you probably just want to change it every six months at least because oil does break down overall. Alright, okay, so that's the last one. If you want to get in touch with us, send us an email where it's Stuff podcast. How Stuff works.com." | |
a6548818-5462-11e8-b449-c7c17ef1cba9 | How Search and Rescue Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-search-and-rescue-works | There are thankfully about as many ways to look for someone as there are ways to get lost. And the people who dedicate themselves to saving the lives of people who are missing take their job seriously. Learn about this fascinating world in this episode. | There are thankfully about as many ways to look for someone as there are ways to get lost. And the people who dedicate themselves to saving the lives of people who are missing take their job seriously. Learn about this fascinating world in this episode. | Tue, 07 Aug 2018 13:30:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=13, tm_min=30, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=219, tm_isdst=0) | 57897874 | audio/mpeg | "Hello, Atlanta in Georgia and surrounding states and heck the world, we are doing our first ever live Christmas show yes. In our hometown this December. Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring ring. Stuff you should know. So what can people expect? So Chuck, they can expect all the gloriousness of all of our Christmas specials that we do every year but live on stage and with spiked eggnog. Yeah, we're just going to sit up on stage and play all those shows on a tape recorder and be like, great, this one was great. Do you guys remember this? It will be ten times better than that because it's going to actually be an all new show with us live on stage, one night only in Atlanta, Ga. Yeah, it's going to be pretty cool, everyone. And it is December 8 at the wonderful Center Stage Theater here in Atlanta, where I have seen various shows over the years. And we're going to be there now. Yeah, we're going to be there. It's very intimate, cool little theater. So we're looking forward to it. We're looking forward to seeing you go to SYSC live for information and tickets. And let's get in the Christmas spirit. Okay? And on Thursday, August 9, starting at 10:00 a.m.. Eastern time, there will be a password protected presale. You use the code Hippie Rob, and you will get your tickets that day, a day before they go on sale to the general public, which is Friday. So either get them Thursday, get them Friday, either way, come see us in Atlanta for our one time only Christmas special. That's right. They go on sale this Friday. So don't snooze or you will lose. 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 wait for it there is first time ever guest producer Dylan. First time? First time. I confirmed it with him. He's nodding. He said we're the only show here that he hasn't guested as a producer. Oh, really? So the ban has been lifted finally. I don't know if it was his band or it was his band. They finally wore him down. But, you know, he's the regular producer on Afro Punk Solution sessions. Yes, which is pretty awesome podcast. It is hosted by our pals, Eve Jeff Coat. And I didn't pronounce the s on EVs, but it's eve's and verified this and Bridgett Todd from stuff mom never told you. Bridget's Todd. Right. She has an S as well. But they kind of present like Afro Punk, like the tour, the musical tour. The awesome musical tour. They have like a side thing called Solution Sessions, and it's kind of like Ted Talks, but for significant things that get overlooked generally. So like race centric stuff or reproductive rights or things like that, right? It's pretty awesome. It's good. You can get it anywhere. Yeah, look at that. But we got to pay them somehow. I was just going to slide them my half warm sparkling water as payment. No, I've got a cold one here. Yeah. How do you get those out of the fridge? So, Chuck, before we get started again, a couple of other things. There are two episodes in here that I want to do separately. Okay. I bet you I can guess them. Let's hear Civil Air Patrol. No. What? Sure, but that wasn't one of them. Well, that was one of mine. Okay, so there's three, and this is a meaty episode. Jeez. What's the other one, then? I don't know. Oh, you know, it Scuba or we already did Scuba Cat. We did. I forgot about him. Did you interview the guy who made Scuba Cat swim around? Yeah, and it's funny. We often mentioned Jackhammers is our worst show ever. I forgot. It's Scuba Cat. Did you go back and look at it? No, but it's got to be the worst, right? We'll have to have, like, a listening party. That was, like, not even a thing. We'll listen to Jack Hammers and Scuba Cat. It was well, it was a thing. It was that one cat. Yes. And I guess we can just come out and say now that Discovery Channel made us do that, that's, like, kind of one of the only times we were steamrolled. That's funny. Otherwise we have autonomy. I don't know if that was being steamrolled as much as Rick rolled. Well, now I don't even know what you're going to pick then. All right, I'll tell you then. No more suspense for you. Coast Guard. No, I don't feel like you know me at all anymore. I don't. Search and rescue dogs. Oh, dude, I looked at the article. It's at least as big as this one, all right. Robust. And they don't have a lot of overlap. Okay. It's not like doing recycling twice or anything like that. And the other one is getting lost. Oh, well, that's esoteric, right? I didn't expect you to guess the loss. I thought you'd get search and rescue dogs, but there's, like a whole psychology to getting lost, and this is about finding people. I want to talk about getting lost some time. It's just too much to put onto this one, so it's going to be its own episode. Okay, great. All right. And I'll your Mark civil Air Patrol. Because fellow network host colleague John Roderick of Omnibus is or was a member of the Civil Air Patrol. Is he married yet? No. Because that'd be something if you were, like, mayor known as the flying Mayor of Seattle. He'd love to be the Flying mayor, but even still member of the Civil Air Patrol, it's pretty interesting. So he flies did I don't know if he's current, but Roderick, he has a very interesting past. He's an interesting dude. It'd be kind of fun to do Civil Air Patrol and pick his brain. Okay, let's do it. His weird brain. Yeah. All right, flying brain. So we have our two organic show plugs in. Yeah, no, I noticed. And check. So we're talking today about SAR search and rescue. I forgot I wrote this. You did write it back in like a million years ago. Yeah, that's when I was so excited to be the adventure writer. You wrote a bunch of adventure stuff and I was named adventure writer. Here's the funny part of this story. I was named adventure writer. I was really excited. Then after a while of doing this stuff before the podcast, I went into an unnamed boss oh, I know this story. And said, like, hey, man, I really think that I'm kind of wondering about the future here and where I could go and if I could work my way up somehow to do things. And he very politely was like, I think this is kind of the deal, and there is not much of a future here beyond writing these articles. Yeah. And then that same dude would change my life by tossing podcast our way. Yeah. Isn't that funny how things work out? It is hilarious. No future here, right? I think he even put a cigarette out in front of you on my hand. It was really painful, but a reminder still. But you wrote some good stuff. The survival stuff is good. We have more to dig through. I appreciate it. I was nervous going into when I saw this was my article from back then. I was like, oh, man, this is going to stink. But it was actually a decent article. It was. It was an expansive article, too. There's a lot of stuff to it because there's a lot of stuff to search and rescue. There's a lot of different kinds of search and rescue. Right. I mean, you know, now I feel like the sham is up because you already know all this stuff, so I can't tell you anything. I guess I'll tell you guys who are listening to the podcast, but there's a lot of different types of search and rescue, right? There's urban search and rescue, which happens after, say, like, 911 USA. Yes. I've also seen it. US and R. Oh, really? Yeah, it's a little mouthy. It is. There's like marine or water rescue. Sure. Which is usually the one that kind of comes to mind when I think of military rescue. But then there's like combat rescue, like the Scotto Grady thing, which we'll touch on. Sure. And then there's like the normal search and rescue that I think a lot of people think of, which is somebody getting lost in the woods or the desert or something and a bunch of sheriff's deputies kind of spread out and start looking for you deputies and just people. Yes. Did you know that before you research this article that people, like, dedicate themselves to spend their own money on training and equipment and things? Yeah. The reason I know that is because my dad had a touch of this when he owned a Jeep years ago, and I told stories about him going out on snowy days and using his toe inch to pull people out of ditches. So I was just aware of there being a general, like, thing with certain outdoors people where they like to get in in there and volunteer, and if they hear someone's trapped in the woods near their house, they're out there. Like, I knew they existed, but there's, like, an actual process you can go through and become a registered searcher. Yeah. And I think some of these people are just do gooders, and some of them maybe were like, man, I never was able to become the wilderness firefighter that I wanted to be, or the paramedic, maybe I'm going to get the state to force them to hang out with me while we say yes. This is how it can live out. That unfulfilled. I was about to say fantasy, but that means that unfulfilled. Calling, desire, dream, all of them. And then there's the last group, people who are like, I want to see a dead body in the woods. They start joining SAR. Man, don't get teamed up with that guy. Isn't that always the way, though? Sure. It doesn't always work out is the thing. Sometimes search and rescue becomes search and recovery. Yeah, but, I mean, most of this applies to it as well, because search and rescue typically starts out as search and recovery. Starts out as search and rescue. Right. It's kind of neat. Like, if you think about it, there's really no better quick sketch of humanity than a group of people who've never met the person they're looking for, take their time and effort and put themselves in peril to go try to find somebody who's missing and starts out on the hopes that they're still alive. Yeah. And a lot of times what we're talking about there is, like, someone was hiking and got lost, and these people kind of regularly go out and do this. But then the stuff that really gets me is, like, the missing child, where entire communities come together to form quarter mile long lines, walking through a field or the forest together. That's the stuff. This is like, man, I can't even take it. Way to bring it down, Chuck. Hey, that's what I'm here for. Okay, so let's start at the start. So I guess it's professional, right? If you're in the Coast Guard or in the military and you're trained for this, you're a professional search and rescue person, right. It's not like you have your regular duty, and then on the side, you get called out for SAR stuff. Well, I don't know about that. I don't think that's necessarily the case. I think the Coast Guard well, we'll have to find that out, actually. I don't think they're sitting around waiting on a rescue. Yeah. The thing is, I saw that the Coast Guard rescue is an average of 114 people a day. So they're always just rescued. So I wonder if they have like they're just yeah, that's what they do. They're search and rescue. People are searching and rescuing all day, every day. I don't know. I'm stymied right out of the gate. That's work. Sorry, man. But we'll start with the Coast Guard because they're actually the heart of search and rescue. They've been doing this for at least 50 years now. Yeah. There's a school in Yorktown, Virginia called the National SAR School, and it's operated by the Air Force and the Coast Guard. And their motto is really great, always ready comma that others may live. Yeah. And I believe a couple of years ago, they celebrated their 50th anniversary as a school in 2016. Yes. Because when I wrote this, I believe it was the 40th anniversary. It's the most recent. This thing is so old. You were talking about a change that Noah was undertaking in 2009 in future Tense. Right. Like when 2009 comes around, if it does, the gray beard hairs are really showing. So they have three simultaneous classes of students going on at this school at all times. And their goal is a program is to save at least 93% of people and 85% of property that's at risk. Pretty good goal. Yes. And to be ready to be there and ready, I believe, within 2 hours total response time and to be like, ready to go within a half hour. Right. So, like, the moment they're activated to the moment they show up on scene, 2 hours tops. Pretty good. Yeah, that's great. And then imagine like, rescuing 95%, 90%, 93%. Let's split the difference. 93%. 1st, it was 95. And they're like, shooting a little high. Yeah, exactly. But 90 is not enough. Yes. And going through the test and the physical and mental testing for this is tough. Yeah. So when I was researching this, initially, I was thinking like, oh, this is cool, or whatever, but I've actually come to admire anybody who does this, not just because they're out doing this, but there's a lot of things that they're doing that I can't. And now we've really entered that ticket, which is like the rescue swimmers test. So the whole thing starts out with 25 pull ups, which right there, I'm done. I'll give you three tops, maybe 15 chin ups. Aren't they the same thing? Do you put, like, the chin on the bar in a chin up? What's different chin ups are knuckles facing you? Pull ups or knuckles facing out. Got you. So chin up, pull up, pull ups are harder. Yes. Either way, maybe three tops, because chin ups, you can kick and swing yourself up. But a pull up, especially if you do the studly arms apart, pull up. Like that number. Yeah. No, mine are like, right under my face. You got 25 of those followed by 100 yard obstacle course. I'm assuming it's a pretty rough obstacle course. I haven't seen pictures of it. Yes. And this is while you're carrying 250 pound dumbbells again. Have you ever picked up a 50 pound dumbbell? Just once. It's not comfortable. Never do it again. And you especially don't want to do it while you're doing an obstacle course. It's the size of a football field, right? So then you're timed while you march 1 mile, and you think, big deal. This is after you've already done these other things, though, right? And you're carrying a 40 pound rescue litter, which is called the Stokes basket, too. It's that caged stretcher that you see so often on the news and in the Perfect Storm. I like that movie. It's a great movie. Yeah, I don't know about great, but it's a good movie. It's good enough. You convinced me. And then it's still not over, because then you get into your rescue harness, you put on your fence and your snorkel, and you swim a third of a mile pulling a victim in one of these rescue letters. You swim a third of a mile to the victim, and then another third of a mile pulling towing them. You got to do all that in 27 minutes. And I think this is after. It's not like they're like, all right, we'll go rest a few hours, and then you'll do this next part, right? Plus they make you chug a cup of pancake batter at every stop. So that's just the swimming part. There's also the inland training, which you got to learn to climb rocks. You got to learn to repel. There's 180 pound dummy that they'll tangle up in a tree. 50 60ft in the air. Yeah, you got to figure that out. Sometimes you have combo scenarios like, this dude's in the tree, this dude's in the water. Go figure it out. Don't use rocks to get the one out of the tree. No. Doesn't count. Never. So that's pretty Coast Guard, and I think the Air force go in for that same academy. Or maybe all members of the military go to the Coast Guard one, I believe. Yes. So if you're a military search and rescue person, you train at the Coast Guard academy for it, right? Right. If you're just a normal, everyday person and you want to do it. There are SAR schools around the country, but they're all private. There's no accreditation. Right. I think it's probably buyer beware in some of those cases. But I also got the impression that there is actual, legitimate, like, SAR schools. It's not just somebody like, thanks for the money, chump buyer beware as opposed to full, guaranteed, or your money back. Right. You will find your first person or your tuition is reimbursed. And then some of these folks ride horses. It's called mounted SAR and horses, even though it's an age old way of getting around, are really valuable in search and rescue for quite a few reasons. Like, first of all, they're horses, so they can go farther than your dumb human meat body. Sure. Plus they're nice to have around as well. They're nice to have around and they can get you to places where you could kind of walk, but you probably shouldn't be walking. A horse might be a little more surefooted. Or donkey. Yeah. I like how you said if you've been sitting in the lab analyzing stuff for the last few years, you might benefit from riding a horse out to a search and rescue location. Yeah. That's a movie scene waiting to happen, if it hasn't already. It's Wayne Knight just griping all mad that he's being dragged out into the woods. Right. But then they put him on the horse. He's backwards on the horse. Somebody stopped this thing. The other thing you can do, obviously the horse is a lot stronger than a person. So if you need a rescue leader towed up the side or pulled up the side of a cliff, you can attach it to a horse and then you're going to tell them about the radio thing. I never thought of this. It's good. Go ahead. So you can station horses in position along the route when you get further and further into the woods. And if you keep a radio transmitter on each one, it acts as like a radio relay network. Yeah. Just install a bluetooth into a horse's ear, ten horses ears and you've got coms. Yeah. Not bad. It isn't bad at all. I feel like we should take a break. Okay. Alright. Let's do that. And we'll talk about urban SAR right after this. Alright, ma'am. So we're talking about USAR or us and our yes. Depending on who you're talking to. This is a whole different type of fish. Kettle of fish. When you're talking about urban, it's not woods, it's not like cliffs, it's not the ocean. It is enormous skyscrapers that have crumbled in on themselves. And you're sure that there are people trapped inside and you have to figure out how to get into this rubble and get them out without getting killed yourself. Yes. And this is a division of FEMA. Probably should come as no surprise. And I believe in 1991 is when they set this up, the National Response Plan for Disasters. And they have 25 national user task forces. And in the case of a flood or earthquake, what else? Hurricane, plane crash, hazmat spills, tornadoes, any natural disaster, a terrorist attack. Sure. I think they were all called out for the Oklahoma City bombing. Definitely 911, Katrina. They were integral. And some of the bigger ones that you can list off. Basically every single one of these task forces was called in to assist. Yeah. And assist is the key word there because they are supporting local and state emergency systems. Who generally take the lead in these cases. Yes. 31 people, I think, per team for a USAR task force. And how many did they deploy? 20 of these on 911. Like, right out of the gate. Yeah, I think all of them, except for Virginia was activated, and Virginia was at the Pentagon instead. But, like, the rest of them were in New York for 911. I was reading a first hand account from a SAR team member at 911, and they were just like it was just utter chaos. Like, the people who were in charge were all dead when the second tower collapsed. Yeah, he said there was just a total leadership vacuum that got filled pretty quickly, but I've never seen anything like this before. It was nuts. But just the way that they had to improvise was pretty astounding. Oh, yeah. And there's all sort of secondary dangers after a building like that collapses. Right. Well, I guess we can talk about a little bit, but everything from hazardous materials leaking to electricity down to electricity that could shock and kill you, to water mains bursting and filling up spaces and drowning people, every single front you can imagine, they're attacking. So one of the first things they do, again, every search and rescue situation or every disaster is actually operated initially by the local cops. That's who runs search and rescue. And like you said, FEMA is there to assist, and usually the state agencies are there to assist, too. But one of the first things that happens when FEMA's USA teams come on the scene is they have, like, structural engineers who are licensed professional engineers who have experience in construction or inspection or something like that, who come in and say they look at this. So once this was a nice, tidy structure. Now it's a different kind of structure, and it's not tidy at all, and there's a lot of hidden dangers, but their job is to come in and assess the structure of the rubble and figure out how to create safe passage into this thing. And it's pretty amazing that they can do it at all. Yeah, you mentioned the dogs, so we won't get too heavy into that, but I believe the largest deployment of dogs in history was for 911. Yes. I think 80, at least. Yeah. Search and rescue dogs. It worked 12 hours at a time. All right, that's enough about search and rescue dogs. And I value them. Can I say that? Sure. Okay. That's no big news. No, take it back. So one of the ways you want to talk about what they do when they come into these structures and figure out what to do sure. I didn't know this. I guess I'd never thought about what they would do, but there are kevlar bags that you can put underneath up to 70 ton pieces of concrete or metal or whatever and inflate them, and it will actually lift them up to, like, almost 2ft off of the ground. It's pretty amazing. And then once you have that, you start to shore it up. You put in steel beams or wood, depending on how heavy whatever your lifting is, and you actually start to create basically like an old, tiny, minor 49 or mine shaft into this place, just shoring up and lifting and shoring up along the way to stabilize the structure. And then once you have entry into this place, then you start sending in different kinds of rescuers. So you've got, like, the medics who go in. You have people who send in cameras or listening devices to try to find survivors. You got the people who are testing the air quality to make sure that the conditions of the air aren't deadly. Yeah. I mean, can you imagine? This is all like you're on the clock, too, so you have to make sure it's safe to go in there. So you're just not killing people that are going into rescue. Right. But at the same time, you're trying to get people out of there. You're not just like, let me go investigate the scene and what's going on down there. Right. You're on a timer, but you have to make sure it's done safely, too. It's just like I can't imagine how overwhelming that must be, the rescue effort leader yeah, because there are people who are running this whole show. There are logistics people. There are people who are overseeing everybody and making sure that this whole chaotic scene is running smoothly. I can't imagine a more stressful job, especially having that clock ticking on lives just draining away, just hanging over your head. That's just nuts that people do this. Yeah. And you said you've got Hazmat specialists there. You might have to suit up yourself before you go in. You might have heard on your listening device or from a camera that some people are trapped, like 100ft into a place you can't even get. So you send them, like, breathing tubes. Or you might send a rescue letter down there and say, if you can get in this thing and strap yourself in, we may be able to pull you out because we can't get in. Right. But at the same time, you have heavy equipment operators running like cranes and bulldozers trying to pick off the pieces that the structural engineers have said, you can get rid of that one, and they'll lift them up and move them, try to remove as much stuff as they can. But yeah, again, all this the clock is ticking. Do you remember? I think it was the Bay Bridge collapse in San Francisco during the World Series in 1989. Yes, the earthquake. Yeah. It just so happened san Francisco is playing Oakland in the World Series, and that earthquake happened. And do you remember, like, the whole the top deck just fell down onto the other deck on top of people in their cars, and like, some people survived. It's amazing there are people out there that I would just start crying in place and huddle in a corner, but there are people out there that can stay calm enough and are experienced enough to just be like, all right, well, this is what we do, starting right now. Yes. Man yeah. Those are the people who slap people like you and me and tell us to snap out of it shares. One of those people, and maybe some of those people think, can you imagine sitting there and talking about our job right. And explaining what we do, how perilous that is for these two? That's right. I got a paper cut earlier. I wasn't going to say anything about it, but help prove your point. We should shout out the Civil Air Patrol, though, even though I do want to do a show on that. Sure. They are a non profit with more than I don't know what the numbers are now, but when I wrote this, there were more than 55,000 civilian pilots and cadets, and they, since 1941, have supplemented our own military's aviation. It's pretty neat. And like Roderick, he was pretty young when he did this, too. I guess he was a cadet. I got you. That'd be my guess. I'll bet he had the most polished shoes you've ever seen. I have to ask him about it. I've never actually spoken with him at length about it. Yeah. I think it's civilians, right? Yeah. Okay. And it was originally supposed to be like, we're the liaison between the Air Force and the rest of civilian America, but then they said, hey, we think there's some Nazi submarines off the coast of Maine. Can you start dropping bombs, too? And they said, Giddy up. Oh, I'm sure they were delighted. Yes, they started dropping bombs and depth charges in World War II, and things were never the same after that. Yeah. So civil. Air Patrol, your day is coming. Okay. Sorry. I just gave a little more information. Do you want to go back and edit that out? No. All right. So we talked a little bit about some of the equipment you saw, I should say carries with them, but it's impressive. And again, if you were a mayor and your local sheriff or your local police chief for the police commissioner called you and said, we had a building collapse and we need some help, you call the governor, and the governor says, we'll see what we can do, but we think this is a federal thing. They call the president, and the President says, FEMA, get in there. And FEMA comes free of charge with tractor trailers full of supplies. From what I saw, it's about just one task force's. Equipment is like a $1.4 million package amazing. Of 16,400 pieces of equipment, everything from, like, medical supplies, the generators, to the bulldozers to everything. And they just show up and say, how can we help? You're in charge. How can we help? Yes. And it's almost like all the mundane. Things of assembling. It's like assembling a film shoot or something. You're like, well, these people have to eat. They have to go to the bathroom. You need to sleep. Yeah, they need to sleep. They need to rest. So you have to set up like a little village, like in the case of a 911 or any major disaster like that. Yeah, it's pretty astounding. I imagine, this list grows daily because the one thing you don't want to ever happen is to be on the scene of something of a natural disaster and be like, give me the thing. Like, oh, you didn't back that thing. Why not? Well, I like 16,400. It's a nice round number, but like you said, everything from like, chainsaws and jackhammers to like, bolt cutters, which we did an episode on. We'll probably do one on bolt cutters one day. 20 years from now. We did one on jackhammers. We did. Should we talk about Acar? Yes. Aaron C. Yeah. So this is where the extraordinarily trained rescue swimmers and divers come into play. Yeah. This is amazing. I think the stat I got in here was it has a 50% dropout rate. Yes. I go to the school. There's like higher depending on the year. No, I mean, there are other military schools that have higher washout rates, but not many. Yeah, it's mostly Special Forces. I think the Ranger school typically has about the same washout rate as the rescue divers school, rescue swimmer school. It's substantial. There's a really good chance you're not going to make it, actually. A 50% chance you're not going to make it. The Coast Guard says that, and this is pretty interesting. 95% of all sea rescues are less than 20 miles from shore. And 90% of these are only rescue, thankfully, because of all of our distress beacons that were armed with these days. Well, 90% of the time you can find these people pretty quickly, at least. Yeah. And the Coast Guard and I don't remember exactly when it was, but they updated the distress system that they had since the 70s, where you called in on a radio frequency and said, Mayday. Mayday, and tried to give your position. Maybe you had a beacon that was operating on that frequency that they could try to track. They updated all that with something called rescue 21 is in the 21st century. That's way more sophisticated than it was before. And so now they still monitor that channel for voice MAYDAYS. But if you press your beacon, it enters this vast computer and communications network that the Coast Guard maintains in at least a 20 miles area outside of all of America's shores. And you're going to get their attention pretty quick. Yeah. And these beacons now, they operate at 406 MHz. That's the newer standard. Oh, no. They will as of 2009, yes. One day. And I was a young man when I wrote this. Jeez, it's a little pup. Just a little pup. These things are manually activated a lot of times, but they can also be automatically activated. So if it hits water, like not if you spill water on it, but if it's submerged in water, like the boat is sinking, it'll automatically activate or and this is cool, if it goes above a certain G force right. Then that means bad things have happened. Don't take it on a roller coaster. No. One thing I saw about that Rescue 21 is one of the updates that they made to it was it has geolocating now, so they can tell where a distress call is actually coming from. Yeah, like it's satellite pinpointed. Right, right. But that actually does away with the prank calls of yesteryear. People would actually prank call distress calls into the Coast Guard. That's so expensive. And now they can be like, we can see you're calling from Nevada. You're not out in the Pacific Ocean right now, you jerk. Wow. Isn't that terrible? Can you imagine leading the Coast Guard in a wild goose chase? What kind of jerk would you have to be? Or are you like some sort of unstable search and rescue guys? Let's get out there. It's like the arsonists who are also firefighters. Very interesting. I thought so too. And then one more thing about the distressed beacons. There's a new so the weather satellites that Noah operates, NASA has onboard instrumentation that they have an as, our office themselves. NASA does. And their whole thing is basically tracking human beings through their beacons, hopefully just through their beacons and not through like, I don't know, their cell phones. But now if you press your beacon, it immediately goes up and immediately gets shot out to the rest of the there's actually a global search and rescue network. So wherever you are in the world, that distress signal will be spread out. Right. And then in the meantime, as they're getting their resources together, they can start to try to find where you are. But you get their attention almost instantaneously now, thanks to NASA. Wow. Yeah. And then eventually the beacons will be that instantaneous and also give out your coordinates down to something like 100 meters. I thought you were going to say eventually it will predict your disaster. No, eventually, before it happens, it'll just shoot a tractor beam down onto you oh man. Pull you up to the satellite and it will land you at Edwards Air Force Base and serve you a nice hot meal and send you on your way. That'd be great. That's the future. All right, so combat, SAR is next. And I don't know, I don't think about this stuff a lot because I generally just think of the military as like, well, they just do everything. I thought that Gene Hackman assembled like ragtag groups of people that go in behind enemy lines, like ten years later. That's how we did it. What was that? Uncommon valor. That's right. Maybe one of the best post Vietnam movies of all time. I don't know about that. Have you seen it lately? I saw it within the last probably five years. Really? Yeah, dude, it's good. I'm not a gun guy, but when that guy gives Gene Hackman the menu of the heavy artillery I remember that when I was a kid, thinking it was a new one. It's still pretty cool when you see it. I would take that one. Right? Yeah, it's so funny. Like, I think I don't know, we're not gun guys at all. Yet the notion of a gun menu just lights us up. What is that all about? There's some part of our brain just brainwashing from movies? Yeah, probably. I guess. Sure. That's my guess. All right, so CSAR, they're basically kind of the first people to arrive behind enemy lines in the course of battle. And the US air Force takes a lead in this situation. So anytime there's like a Scott O'Grady situation where someone has, let's say, ejected from their jet behind enemy lines dude on fire. Yeah. Well, that's the worst case scenario. Probably. That is when CSAR really earns their metal. The story of Scott O'Grady kind of says it all right. Test their metal to eventually earn a medal. Sure. Is that what I meant? Yeah. I'm mixing metaphors. I think you got it all together. I think the Air Force still is tasked with combat search and rescue. Correct. But they're starting to do it jointly with the Army, I think, as well. But they have what are called expeditionary rescue squadrons. That is the name of the people that you want coming after you. An ers. Yeah. And they go in, like you said, behind enemy lines under a tremendous amount of danger. There's usually two helicopters. One goes in and actually airlifts the person out. The other helicopter is there to shoot by. Shoot at people? Yes. And be like, Stay back, stay back. Because this is the again, it's behind enemy lines. One of your pilots has been shot down. One of you guys has gotten lost or captured or something. These are the people who go in and get them? Yeah, they have planes, too. Long range search planes like the HC 130, which can actually refuel these helicopters to HH 60s, which they said the planes are when there was not much of a threat then I think the helicopters, they use up to a medium threat. But like you said, they have ground support going on, too. Yeah. And there was like a real push to update their helicopter that they use to one that's specifically designed for CSAR. But I think the plug got pulled on it. They're they're still, I think, working with the HH 60s. I'll bet they call them double H 60s. That's even longer. Okay. This is kind of the cool part for me, for CSAR is you only think about this, but if someone has been shot down, and they do have radio coms ability, and they can get in touch with you. You need to be able to authenticate this signal, whether it's a beacon or a real human voice on the other end, because they could be compromised. They could be sitting there with a collision, a cough to their head, and being forced to lure someone into a trap of a foreign enemy, right? So you have to be able to authenticate these calls, and they do that by never giving their full details over the radio. As it stands, they'll say to add numbers or subtract or multiply digits and your call signs and your rank in your unit numbers and stuff like that, right? And then they verify who you are, and then once they verify who you are, they'll come get you. But some conditions are more ideal than others. And when Scott O'Grady very famously went down in Bosnia during the Balkan war, I think in 1995, they received his distress signal finally, I think six days on, he'd been surviving by drinking the sweat out of his own socks and eating bugs and spending the whole time evading, getting captured did just an amazing job of staying alive and staying uncaptured. But he sent out his beacon or they received his beacon or distress signal, like, a couple of hours before dawn, and they're like, this guy has already been missing for six days. We found them. We can't let them just stay for another six days because the ideal conditions are after dark. They couldn't do that. So 2 hours after that, they went in after them, like, in broad daylight, I guess. Wasn't it marines that actually got him out? Sure. And wasn't it like 20 minutes or something? Ridiculous. Two oh, two minutes, yes. From the time they arrived to the extraction yeah. To the time they were gone again. Got you. I'm sure he wasn't lolly gagging. I'm sure he's like, let's go. Yeah. He's like, oh, wait, I forgot my basket I was making with Reeds. I got to go back and get it. Pretty amazing. So I saw about his story. I looked up what happened with him. He released a book called Return with Honor, and, you know, they made that movie behind Enemy Lines with Owen Wilson and Gene Hackman. Again, Gene Hackman in that he was like the guy who was trying to get Owen Wilson out. I never saw that movie. He sued Fox, 20th Century Fox, and then eventually Discovery Channel. He sued overcasting no, he sued for basically appropriating his life story. And the problem that he publicly said he had with it was that Owen Wilson used foul language, was portrayed as a hot dog pilot and disobeyed orders, and that Scott O. Grady was none of those. Now, was he actually Scott O. Grady in the movie, or did they thinly disguise it? Thinly disguised, which meant they didn't need to pay him any royalties. Right. And it also probably meant he lost his lawsuit, I imagine, right? I don't know. I didn't see that. I just saw, like, a 2001 Entertainment Weekly article on it. It's good journalism. Man. All right, well, let's take a break, and we'll talk about some search techniques and other fun stuff right after this. All right. Now, this feels like a no brainer, but it's actually a little more interesting than you would think, establishing your search area. Yeah. So let's say where do you look now? We've moved on to somebody, say, like, lost in the woods is a really good example of this, right? Yes. It happens a lot. Yes. If you're a sheriff's deputy, you may or may not have any SAR training. If you're the sheriff, you may or may not have any SAR training. That's probably unlikely these days, but it's a possibility. But even if you're the only one in your department, you've got a whole department who you need to explain what to do. And the first thing you have to do is start looking for answers to your questions, but you need to know what questions you have to ask first. So you're looking for any kind of evidence, specifically of where the last place the person was seen was that's the first thing you want to find? Yeah. Last seen or I think last seen can also be last. Well, that's not true, because last known position is different. So if someone was last seen leaving a trailhead for their hike, let's say they were last seen at noon, right. Starting at this trailhead, that means that another human being who's now talking to you as an eyewitness, said, I saw this person. Yeah. Like, maybe they either saw someone on the trail or they checked into a ranger station and got their backcountry permit or something. They're like, I'm off. So long, suckers. Right. That is different, though, than last known position. So if someone is missing their last known last seen place may be the trailhead, but 3 miles in, if they find that person's baseball cap, then that is all of a sudden their last known position. If you compare that to where they started, you might be able to reasonably come up with maybe they're headed in this direction and they might be somewhere in this area by now. That would be an enormous break, because if you can figure out when they were last seen, like you were saying, and then when this thing was found, you know the direction and roughly the speed that they're going. Yeah, and there are a lot of assumptions involved here, but hopefully someone wasn't like they dropped their baseball hat and then decided to go in a completely different direction. They did. They closed their eyes and swirled around and just headed out. Yeah, so that's how that works. But generally, it's a circle. Unless you starting from the place they were last laid eyes on. Right? Yeah. Because they could theoretically be going in any position in any direction. Right. Unless you come up with something called the choke point, which is kind of interesting. That is where you have either a manmade feature or some sort of geological natural feature that cuts off an area. Couldn't have climbed that 300 foot cliff. Sure. So now we can go in this direction or cross that crazy river. Yeah. And if it's a cliff, you can just position somebody at that cliff and be like, stay here in case you see them. If it's a river, you can say, well, if they wanted to cross, they'd have to go to this bridge. So stay here on this bridge in case they come this way. That's one thing to do when you have a choke point. Right? Yeah. So if you have a searcher named Cliff and the searcher named river yes. To avoid confusion. And if Jeff Bridges is searching as well, or both bridges. Either one. Well, I think we know that Jeff would be doing the searching. Right. I think Bob telling him how to do it. Maybe he is the boss, the older brother. Right. Man, those guys are the best. Have you met both? I've never met either one of them. But I've just heard interviews with both and they're like brothers should be. Oh, you've heard interviews with them together? No, separately, talking about each other. That is so sweet. It is very sweet. They're like great best buds. That's cool. And very big brother. Little brother. Do not know that. Yeah, it's kind of neat. I wonder what the quads are like. Oh, man. I'm curious about that because Randy is yeah, I know. He's developed into something else. He has. So if you were searching from the last known position no, not the last known position. Last place scene. Yes. The last place scene. Yeah. So that's where you start if you're searching from that and you start heading out and you find that baseball cap, that is a huge clue, like I said. Sure. And probably the people who found it are what are called the hasty search team. Right. Because right when you establish a last place scene, you send some people out who are usually, like, very experienced, very well trained SAR people, and they start scrambling out in every direction in that circle whitefoot looking for yeah, that's part of it. They probably climb a tree like nothing going to the places where it would be most likely that somebody like this would go to. Yeah. And that's when they think, like, this person is in danger. There's a storm coming in or night is falling and it's going to get really cold. You deploy these hasty search teams. They're not out there coming the ground for clues. No, but I think it is a matter of course that the first thing you do is deploy the hasty team. Then you follow up with the deliberate people. Yeah. The Clue team. That's what we'll call them. All right. Colonel Mustard. They get a little slower, I guess it kind of depends. It could be for someone just trapped in the woods, but definitely they use these for those community searches when a kid is missing or something. These are the things you see on the news when people are walking very slowly through the woods, because a clue could be a cigarette butt on the ground, and you have people say, space 20ft apart, and each one is responsible for everything ahead of them and 10ft to the side and 10ft to the other side. And then that way, if everybody's doing what they're supposed to be doing, every square inch of the search area is covered eventually by these searchers. The second group of searchers. Yeah. They'll also use track traps sometime, so they'll maybe go to a trail, a place on a trail, or any place, really, and they will put, like, sand on the ground, and then they can go back and check that sand. If there were footprints, they know that it wasn't their footprints. So that might have be a last known position, perhaps. So, Chuck, if you get lost yes. And they find you and they say, hey, come back with us, you might say, no, I'll find my own way back. I'll crawl back myself even though my leg is broken. Why would a human being do that? Well, because you might get a bill at the end of the day or week or month yeah. Depending on what state you get lost in. Yeah. This is a lightning rod in the outdoor community because there's a lot of facets to this. One facet is, hey, if you did something dumb and you went somewhere where you weren't supposed to go and you weren't equipped to do this or experienced enough to do this, why should a taxpayer have to put your $60,000 bill of rescue right? It's a legitimate point. It's a legitimate point. So they say, pass laws in some states to deter people from doing something stupid. Sure. On the other hand, the other side says, search and rescue is a pure public service, just like you don't get a bill from the fire department. If you do this kind of thing, then people will think twice about calling for help. If they don't have the money and they know they're going to get a $60,000 bill, they might actually just put it off too long, and then by the time they say, okay, fine, I need some help, it's too late, and they're going to die out there. You don't want anybody thinking about money during a search and rescue operation. Yes. I mean, it's sort of a weird balance you're trying to strike between encouraging people to get out and explore the wilderness, but only wanting people that are to go in certain places and that have a certain experience level to do so, and certainly not like the worst case scenario like you were talking about is, I'm in trouble, but I'm not going to send out my beacon. So apparently the Colorado Search and Rescue Board actually put together 15 cases. This is according to Outside magazine, of people who actually delayed calling for help to EW. Yeah. Because they knew that they would be charged or there was a chance that they would be charged. So it actually happens. It's not hypothetical, it happens in real life. So there are some states, like New Hampshire apparently is the last place you want to have a search undertaken for you because they actually do bill. Yeah. They've done something like $70,000 in billing for like 60 rescues since 2008. Those are pretty low cost rescues. Yeah. It's surprising. Like this one guy in this article. Is search and rescue a public service. Not exactly, is the name of the article. And there was a man named Ed Beacon who had an artificial hip, went hiking by himself on a bad weather day, tried to jump onto a ledge and dislocated that artificial hip and took it all the way to the state supreme court when he didn't want to pay his $9,300 bill. And the state supreme court said sorry. Yeah, because New Hampshire has in their law, it says you can be billed if you are shown to have been negligent. And the state supreme court agreed with the case against him that said he had a replacement hip, so a faulty hip, and he knew that there was a large possibility of bad weather. They said, Stay home, old man. Basically. Yeah, but he fought it up to the Supreme Court in law. So after that you got no recourse. Yeah. And there are quite a few states that have laws like this on the books that range from very specific to very broad. And just because your state has this on the books, a lot of times it's to dissuade people from being dumb. Right. It doesn't mean you're going to get hit with a bill. Even if they have the law on the books, it's up to them whether or not they want to pursue that. Right. And then a lot of states have programs that you can pay anywhere from three dollars to twenty five dollars to basically say if you paid this money, that means that you don't get charged for rescue. Right. It's like a communal pot that everybody pays into with the chances of them actually needing it very slim. But if they do need it, then they've got it. Yeah. Which I think is a great idea. Not bad. I think any outdoor enthusiasts that regularly does this would throw in $3 sure or $25 sure for a year. Per year. Yeah. That's not bad at all. Yeah. And the federal government apparently does not although they could always change. You never know. They don't get reimbursed, but they have a policy of not charging. Yeah. Last thing I saw there was an app you know, I'm crazy for apps like Gluco for diabetes. There's also an app called Drone SAR, and it basically takes over your drone and flies your drone in a search pattern for a search and rescue mission. So this is if you're a drone pilot who has lost no, if you have one of those what did I miss? Multi rotor drones that you like to fly around and buzz your neighbor's roof with. Yeah. So you're a drone pilot. If you show up to a search and rescue mission. I got you. I got a drone. You want to use it? It's got a video camera on it. They say, sure. Download drone SAR, and the drone SAR app will take over your drone and fly it as part of the search. Got you. It's pretty cool. Yeah. Shout out to my buddy Lowell. My sister inlaw's boyfriend is a drone pilot. A couple of shout outs for Lowell. He's a drone pilot and a good one. Sure. I've seen him in action, and it's not the easiest thing in the world to do. He doesn't. I would imagine. No, he doesn't crash these things. Although it's kind of funny to see drone fails on YouTube, right, because it's always going great. There was one I saw today where there was some sort of ape or monkey preserve, and they were flying all around. I was like, man, this is gorgeous. Look at all these apes and monkeys doing their thing. And then it flies up close to one, and this monkey just fully takes a stick and goes, whack. Oh, yeah. And then the next thing you see it falling on the ground, and then all these monkeys start descending upon it and poking it and stuff. It's pretty neat. So shout out to Lowell for that. And I meant to say, a few weeks ago, I finally vaped with Lowell what? And gave it a try. I was like, you know what? He's a vapor. We got a lot of flak for dissing vapors. Yeah. And I was like, all right, let me try it. And it was one of those flavored things with no nicotine. No, it had nicotine. Okay. At least you're smoking nicotine. Yeah. And I will say this, it was interesting. So are you hooked on vaping now? No, I never did it again. I took a couple of puffs. I was like, well, that's interesting. It was like, banana. Okay. And I was like, I didn't know quite how to wrap my head around still, like, the pleasure of inhaling vaping banana. But the funny thing is, I can't stop thinking about it. It was weird. I was like I mean, it wasn't like, oh, this is disgusting. But I didn't want to do it again either. That's good, Charles. I think that is the lesson here. I just thought I'd give it a shot. Well, good for you for trying new things. Yeah. Don't ever do that again. Yeah, Lowell's leading me down to bad. You got anything else? No. So we got a whole suite coming. Just wait, everybody. I can't wait. And in the meantime, you can look up Chuck's. Awesome article, SAR. Search and rescue on how stuff works in the search bar. Because I said search bar is time for listener mail. I'm going to call this golf pro. Okay. Hey, guys. Like many in the golf business, my first job included time as a picker as a teenager. And of course, I soon became acquainted with the multiple bangs and clangs of titleist ricocheting off every side of the cage. Remember we talked about taking aim on the driving range at those folks are going to beat them. A few years later, when I was beginning my career as an assistant pro, I found myself supervising these kids, one of whom relished his time on the range and especially the chance to engage in good natured trash talk whenever his cart came within reach. On one such occasion, after a friend and I had missed him on several point blank attempts, he turned the card away from us to make another pass on the far end of the range. Confident that our aim would certainly not be better as he moved further away, traveling in a direct line away from me, he had reached a distance of about 150 yards when my laser beam three iron shot took flight on a low trajectory and never left its target. It came as a surprise to him and to me when instead of the usual clang followed by laughter, we heard a dull thud and a low groan. It turned out our range picker, which is the car, included a narrow gap of about two and a half inches, where the back of the cage met the top of the seat in the rear of the cart. Despite my countless hours in that old machine, I never noticed. Neither had he. Thankfully, his likable demeanor had led him to be well tipped by the membership, and the wallet in his back pocket, thick with dozens of dollar bills, took the brunt of the blow. I don't see how that would have happened. But if he was sitting on his wallet, how did it hit him in the butt? Maybe it was a tiny he has a big butt. I don't know. I don't know either. I would love this guy. So Brian says, I have never made a hole in one. This still stands as my best shot I've ever had. Yeah, that's better than a hole in one. Might argue that it's even more difficult. Yes. And that is Brian. He is a golf pro. Thanks, Brian. In Northern Cali. And he said to both of us, if we're ever out in Carmel and we want to a play golf with a golf pro, yes, we could do that. Or if we want. To actually drive the picker. You would let us do that? I'd just rather play golf. I want to do both. Okay, well, shoot, let's do it. Thanks a lot, Brian. That was also an excellent, well written email, if you ask me. It's great. Brian sweetman. He's the head pro at the Preserve Golf Club. This is basically John Chief or short story great. Maybe uptick, I don't know, one of the two. Yes. If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck and offer us something awesome like Brian did, you can go on to our website, stephewashineo.com, find all the links to our social medias and catch our attention that way. Or you can just go straight to the horse's mouth and send us an email to stuffpodcast@housetepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2018-02-29-sysk-ford-pinto-live-atlanta-final.mp3 | SYSK Live: Back When Ford Pintos Were Flaming Deathtraps | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-live-back-when-ford-pintos-were-flaming-death | For this special live benefit episode recorded in Atlanta, Josh and Chuck go back to the 70s and look at the decidedly ungroovy course of events that led to Ford recalling its Pinto after people started burning up in them. | For this special live benefit episode recorded in Atlanta, Josh and Chuck go back to the 70s and look at the decidedly ungroovy course of events that led to Ford recalling its Pinto after people started burning up in them. | Thu, 01 Mar 2018 17:00:50 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=17, tm_min=0, tm_sec=50, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=60, tm_isdst=0) | 72230978 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. We've already made our big tour announcement for the year, but this is a little different because we have added a show because Denver sold out. So we've added a second show in Denver. Nice. Yeah. We're going to be there on Wednesday the 27th. We added of the show the day before, same place, Gothic Theater, Englewood, Colorado. And you can go to Sysklive.com to get info and tickets for that show and all the rest of our shows, too, Chuck. That's right. Boston, April 4. DC. April 5, St. Louis, May 22 and Cleveland, Ohio, May 23. Come out and see us. Welcome to stuff you should know from howstuffworkscom? Hey, actually, I shouldn't say that yet, Chuck, because we're going to start the podcast later. This is like a pre thing. That's right. A free welcome to this episode, a very special episode of Stuff You Should Know. That's right, because, well, it's live, right. And not only that, where are we live? We are live in our beloved town of Atlanta. That's right. Hot Lana. Well, no, you don't see that. No, no one calls it that. Everybody. But we did this special show at the Bucket Theater, sold it out, by the way, and it was a benefit show. Yeah, it was pretty great. We toured this topic in quite a few cities last year. We had a lot of fun and we decided actually it was your idea. Give you full credit. Hey, let's make this Atlanta local show a benefit show and give all of the dough to charities of our choice. So mine, Chuck, was the National Down Syndrome Society, which is this great organization who advocates for people with down syndrome, obviously. But one of the things that the National Down Syndrome Society is dedicated to, especially right now, they have something called law syndrome. Check out lawsindrome.org. Basically, they're trying to get the laws changed that make people with down syndrome choose between pursuing, like, a career and actually being able to support themselves or not in staying at home and living with their parents, but still getting access to the really great government medicaid health care that they need. So the NDSS is saying they shouldn't have to choose, that we should want them to have both of them. So that's their push right now. And you can go to Ndss.org and they have all sorts of ways for you to donate and you can do that and feel great about yourself. It's great. And they actually sent people from the society to the show, and we met them and they're wonderful. And what a great place to pick. What a great way to donate your money, people. Yeah. Shout out to Colleen and Kayla for coming to the show. Thank you very much. For my charity, I picked the Lifeline Animal project right here in Atlanta. They are a sort of local grass rootsy animal rescue organization. They have a few locations in Atlanta. They're terrific. They have low cost spay and neuter programs. Obviously, you can adopt, you can volunteer. They're really just great. And they do it all, not for fame or glory or money, but because Atlanta has a serious, serious problem with stray pets, and they're just the nicest people. So it's great that you guys are supporting them, and it's a very worthy cause. They are who Emily and I are charitable with every year on our own, anyway. And it was great to officially partner with them and be able to combine with our regular donating and write them a big old fat check thanks to Stuff You Should Know, listeners. Yeah. So here's the thing. We donated 100% of our proceeds from that show. We twisted every arm involved how Stuff Works got T shirts made up. Legendary superfan and friend Aaron Cooper donated his time to design the T shirts. The people who made the T shirts donated them for free. All the proceeds from the Tshirts went to National Down Syndrome Society and Lifeline Animal Rescue. So what we're trying to say now is we're releasing this episode, and we are hoping that you are beloved. Stuff You Should Know, listeners, will take the time to go make a donation yourself in exchange for this free live episode that we're bringing you. That's right. And if you want to just donate regular style, you can go to Lifelineanimal.org. That would be great. But they made it super easy and set up a text donation campaign. So all you have to do is text Lifeline whatever amount of money. So text Lifeline Dollar, sign five to 50155, and you have just donated $5 or however much money you want to donate. It's really easy, right? And you can go to the Ndss.org website and you can donate there. And they make it pretty easy on you. I believe both donations to both organizations are tax deductible. So it's got that bonus, too. That's right. So one more time for Lifeline, you can text to the number 50155, text the word Lifeline dollars or sign and whatever number you want to donate. Yes. And then that's Ndss.org. And away with the show. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. Jerry's not here, but we are with all these beautiful people live at the Buckhead Theater in our own Atlanta, Ga. There they are. Not too shabby, everybody. Yeah. So let's start. Man, I feel great. I feel great. Since this is a live podcast and it's actually set a little further back in time, we thought we would all get into the Way Back Machine. So for those of you who have seen us live before, you know the Way Back Machine is made up. Not a real thing, but it does take a twinkle in your eye. That's right. And a heartful of magic to get into the Way Back Machine. So I hope all of you have that going on right now. That was my best Sarah Silverman impression. It's pretty good. Thanks. So we're all on the way back. Machine. Okay. And we're going back to Detroit, Michigan. Back to, like the mid 60s or something like that, we'll say. Yeah. Back when people still wanted to go to Detroit on purpose. Sorry, ma'am. Yes. I told you. And we're going to fly in and we're very small and invisible, by the way. So we're going to fly in over the shoulder of an up and coming auto executive with a beautiful head of hair named Lee Ayakoka. And Lee, at the time, he was what you might call a young Turk, up and coming, like, ready to take on the world. Great guy. And he had a lot of cred around the company that he worked at called Ford Motor Company. That's right. It's pre Chrysler. Right. And he had a lot of credit because he had designed the Mustang. Right. It was known as Lee's car, even. Yeah. If you are the guy in the lead of the Ford Mustang project, then you've kind of bought your ticket in the car industry. Right. Do you make the car that Vanilla Ice will eventually love? You've done something quite right with your life. Right. Did he have a Mustang rolling in my 5.0 with the rag top down? That's a Mustang, buddy. Is it? Sure. I think it's even in the video. Never been more ashamed to not know the lyrics of a song. Yeah, because it's F in Vanilla Ice, so I don't feel like I should have known it. I just feel like a stooge. Oh, no, it's fine. No, you got a Wean shirt on. You probably should know this, but I know that lyric. I did know 5.5. It's my understanding. Right, everybody? Yeah. I thought it was a Volkswagen Beetle. No. But that does come up starting now, because Liaikoka was one of the few people in Detroit at the time who realized that the American auto industry's lunch was being eaten in the sub compact market. Mainly because no American car company was making sub compacts at the time. Right. We liked our cars very large, like land yachts. Yes. Okay. So Lisa said, the Germans are eating our lunch with their little Volkswagen Beetle, hitler's car. Look it up. I had two Volkswagen Beetles. Those were two Hitler's cars. You supported Hitler? In a way. My mom is over there. She bought that car. I don't know about that. And then the Toyota Corolla was also killing people. Right. Killing Detroit, I should say. Yes. And so Lee said, we need to get a car to market. But I'm not the president. There's a man who is president. And what is his name, Chuck? I can't ever remember, honestly. Oh, no, I do remember. His name is Bunky Nudson. If you're the president of a car company and your name is Bunke Nudson, you got to know you have a target on your back. Right. Nobody's going to let that stand for very long. Especially not Liaoka. Yes. The only thing Bunker in that year would have been president of is the super secret Treehouse Playboy magazine Club. Right. Led by Bunkey Nudson. Right. Or the local union of the guys who sell those, like, monkeys that play the symbols on the street, the wind up ones. All right. So regardless of that, Bunkee, Nuts and was in charge, and Leah Koka had his sights set on that job. And so they settled things in the traditional way in the car industry at the time, which was arm wrestling. So Leia Coca had this thing where we think this is probably how he rose to power. He could rip the sleeve clean off of his shirt right at the shoulder, right before an arm wrestling match. Right. It's very intimidating. And he always kept his arms oiled. Every morning, he would oil them up and very gingerly put the shirt on over him so the oil wouldn't show through. So it really had, like a pronounced effect when he tore his shirt sleeve off and went like that. So when he did this to Bunky nudeson and Bunkee saw that oil bicep, he knew his time running Ford company had grown short. That's right. Fucking Nuts knew what time it was. All that was totally made up. You all realize that the sun silence threw me off a little bit. This is back to the treehouse for Bunker. So Leah Cocoa found himself in charge of Ford, and he said, we got to get a Subcompact going fast, dudes. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to get a project going. I'm even going to give it a code name, which is really weird and sort of kind of a nude and move. But he named it Project Phoenix, which is very cute and a little ironic once you know what this is about. And he said, I want a car. I want it on the market in what, 24 months? Yeah. And normally it took, like, 43 months daily car from concept to production. I coker said no. 24. Yeah, 24. So super fast. And it can't weigh more than \u00a32000, and it can't cost a customer more than $2,000. And he totally should have called it Project 2000 and would have been a super cool name in the early 1970s. Right. That car would go on to be known as the Ford Pinto. For those of you who aren't going, like, flaps, couple of booze, couple of drones, and a lot of like, we're going to fill the people in on this. Okay? Yeah. So the deal with the Ford Pinto was, if you don't know, and you did grow up in the 70s, it had a problem. We don't know a lot about cars, but we know that the Ford Pinto had a problem. If you would hit the Ford Pinto from the rear going very slow. Sometimes it would burst into a fiery ball. And that is not a good thing for a car to do, especially when you're still in the car. That's right. Has anyone seen the movie Top Secret? Remember that one there's Val Kilmer. There's a scene where Val Kilmer, I think, is on a motorcycle. He's being chased by Germans, and he somehow out maneuvers them and they swerve off the road and slam on their brakes and almost come to a complete stop right before hitting a Pinto in the rear, but don't quite make it. It makes that crystal ding sound, and then boom. They just blow up into flames. Right. And this was in the 80s. This was, like, at least ten years after the Pinto had this reputation. That's not that far from the truth, actually, we found from doing this research. So there's actually a lot of choice quotes that we found. A lot of people love taking potshots at the Pinto. Some have written some pretty great stuff. You want to take the first one? Yeah, the first one was from Popular Mechanics magazine, and they said, arguably the most dangerous fuel tank of all time was a rear mounted vessel installed on the 71 to 76 Ford Pinto. It's possibly the best example of what happens when poor engineering meets corporate negligence. Good quote. I got one. There's this guy named Dr. Leslie Ball. He was the chief safety officer for NASA's manned space program. So this guy knew safety. Right. He said that the release to production of the Pinto was the most reprehensible decision in the history of American engineering. There's a couple of things I want you to see. My notes on the phone. Right. A couple of things to note in this quote. One he said was the most reprehensible decision, not one of the and he also qualifies it with American engineering, not automotive engineering. He's including, like, Easy Bake Ovens and other stuff. They have killed, like, millions of people. He's including everything ever built, basically. Yeah. Easy pay governance or death traps, too. So the pito was kind of an issue for Ford, as we're going to see. But there's this one tidbit we ran across that we just love. There was a radio spot for the Pinto in the had to get their agency to get rid of it because it had the line the Pinto leaves you with that warm feeling. For real. This is a fun one of research. All right, so again, I want to reiterate, we don't know anything about the design of cars. We know how to drive cars, and that's about where it ends. But we do know this. The original design of the Pinto had a gas tank that started six inches from the rear bumper. I know that's not a good idea. If I was in Detroit, I would have said, well, that's weird. Why would you want to do that? Sure. Because accidents happen, right? No, one thought about it. No. That's made even worse by the fact that a car critic would later call that bumper little more than ornamentation. Right. Like car is supposed to have a bumper. Just put that thing that looks like a bumper on it, basically. There was a later improved version of the bumper on the Pinto that could withstand a five mile an hour impact. That was the improved version. And again, this is all happening six inches away from the gas tank. That's just one side of the fuel tank. There's a whole other side. And it had its own issues. Basically, yeah. There's something on a car called a differential. We have mechanics there. We don't know what that is, but I did some research and here's what I'm going to call it. It's the magic box that makes the car go room. I think it's pretty accurate. What's so funny is, like, we pride ourselves on chasing down every tidbit of information when it comes to cars. We're just like this out. No idea who would want to hear a live podcast about a car. So this magic box on the Ford Pinto had four protruding bolts facing the gas tank. See, you're getting it now. That in court later on. And this would end up in court. That you see where this is going? Lawyers would call them can openers and we're just going to call them for this show, flaming Death Bolts. I wish we had a sound effect or like a jingle, like Flaming Death Bolts. And we should totally trademark Flaming Death bolts. I think so, too. Or at least that's a band name. I think we should at least call it out as that. All right. You hear that? Are the Flaming Duck bolts behind us? They came out. We were here on the wrong night. So, like I said, there's a lot of good quotes out there, but probably the best of them. The best came from this journalist named Mark Dowie who figures big time into the story. And he probably got across the problem with the Pinto better than anybody. And if I may, please. Okay. Mark Dowe said if you ran into a Pinto you were following over 30 miles an hour. The rear end of the car would buckle like an accordion right up to the back seat. And the tube leading to the gas tank cap would be ripped away from the tank itself and gas would immediately begin sloshing onto the road around the car. Right. The buckled gas tank would be jammed up against the differential housing, which contained four sharp protruding bolts likely to gash holes in the tank and spill still more gas. Now all you need is a spark from a cigarette. And this is me interjecting here. This is the 70s, so every single person in every single car was smoking every single second of every moment they were driving. There are four lit cigarettes in every car at all times. The windows up. Barring that, you could also get it from the ignition or scraping metal, and both cars would be engulfed in flames. If you gave that pin to a really good whack say at 40 mph, chances are excellent that its doors would jam and you would have to stand by and watch its trapped passengers burn to death. That's not me saying this. Your additional what do you call that? Pantomiming acting. It's in the pantomime tradition. Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you. Reading rainbow with Josh gave LaVar Burton a run for his money. All right, so there was 130 miles per hour crash test with the Pinto that found that all 13 gallons, all 13 gallons spilled out in less than 60 seconds. So we all drive here in Atlanta and you all pump gas. You know how fast when you're pumping gas, it's coming out and you're like, oh my God, that's so fast. It won't hold coming out. It's so fast you can't pump tank of gas in 60 seconds. So the Pinto is spilling gas faster than you can pump gas. Think about that next time you go to the gas station. Thank God I'm not driving in the early 1970s Pinto. So the weird thing is that despite the Pinto's reputation, whether it's from Top Secret or you learned about from your older brother, who knows where you heard it from, but a lot, most people, I would even say, know the Pinto is a flaming death trap. It turns out, in retrospect, the Pinto was really not much worse than any other car in its class at the time. Which is not to say that the Pinto wasn't a flaming death trap, but instead all cars were flaming death trap at the time. The idea of being safe if you got into a crash was totally lost on Detroit at the time. It wasn't a thing. So we wondered, okay, well, how did the Pinto actually get this reputation? And to answer that question, we have to go to the Great Periodical room in the sky and we have to go back to the 9th. We all have to die now. That's the great part about it. You can go there alive. Usually when you say the great thing in the sky, that means you're totally dead. It's just in the sky. Okay, all right, great. We're going to the Great Periodical in the sky and we're all living. All right, it's great. We're going to go back to the 1977 section and we're going to find the 1977 year for Mother Jones magazine. Has anyone ever heard of Mother Jones magazine is still around today. Still around. One might characterize it as slightly left of center, maybe. And it was very much the same back in the day. And in this September October 1977 issue of Mother Jones magazine, there was an article by Mark Dowie. That's right. It's called Pinto Madness. You can still read this article today. It was one of the main sources we use. It's a great deep dive if you want to read some more stuff about the Pinto. But Mark Dowie was the quote you read earlier, and he was a journalist there at the time. And this is one reason. You know, this is also the 70s when they released this article in a print magazine. They had a press conference about it, which is adorable when you think about it, especially through today's lens. So they even traveled. They went to Washington, DC. From San Francisco, held a big press conference there on Capitol Hill about a magazine article, and they invited Ralph Nader to attend. Ralph Nader. If you don't know who Ralph Nader is, he is a great American. He was a consumer crusader who cared, really about one thing in life, and that is making sure that corporations didn't screw you over and they kept you safe. And it's not like he got rich doing it. Ralph Nader was a great dude, right? He lived like a hermit. To show that he wasn't being influenced by one side or the other. He had a mattress on the floor of, like, a studio apartment. I think he had a hot plate that he lived with. Ironically. That's very dangerous, now I think about it. It was like, probably one of the safer hot plates, but yeah, I bet it was the best hot plate on the market. Sure, you would think so. But he bought it with his own money. He did. So, anyway, Ralph Nader was there. They got everyone together, and they had this big press conference in Washington, DC. And Dowie starts to poke around a little bit and do a little more research for this article and say, I need to go to these. I need to go to Dot. What was the other one called? The NHTSA. What does it stand for? The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. Correct. The mouthful. Very good. So a lot of common words, but when you put them together like that, it's tough. So he went and started doing some investigating, and he found out that Ford had been carrying out well, they've been carrying out crash tests in secret. And when you're carrying out crash tests in secret, that's probably not a good thing, right? It means that you didn't get the results you were hoping for, so you suppressed the results. You had all the scientists murdered Leahy Coca. Totally. Did you see that? Sure, he probably go to sleep forever, but that was just to get the ball rolling. He had Goons kill the rest of us. Oh, sure. And then you filed the crash house with the Dot. That was the normal thing. So Dow is sitting there going through all these file cabinets, and, you know, there's all these bureaucrats going like, oh, God, why does he keep saying Eureka? What is he finding? Now there's a guy in there with the spy camera. And he figured out very quickly that Ford was well aware of the notion that its Pintos were flaming death traps. Right. And from those 40 crash tests, he found that eleven of them and this is really important eleven of those crash tests had been carried out before the Pinto. The first one had ever rolled off of the production line. Right. He found in these crash tests that every single one of those 40 crash tests, if it was a Pinto, that had not been altered, meaning it was the same one that you would buy at, like the dealership. They lost gas and an impact of 20 miles an hour over. Not very good, right? No, not good at all. So three of these cars passed the test and all three of them had been tweaked for safety. These aren't the ones that you would end up buying. They changed three of them and they all three pass, yet they still didn't use it. And here are the three things they did. One was a plastic baffle, little square plastic that cost one dollars, and it weighed \u00a31. And it went between the flaming death bolts and the gas tank. Solved the problem. Pretty sensible. Did not use it because remember, \u00a32000, $2,000, which I don't know what that is today. It's \u00a32000 and $12,000. The pounds and change. Okay. Gravity is relatively the same. The other thing they did, and this ostensibly was a little heavier they put a metal plate to reinforce that ornamental bumper. In other words, they gave it a bumper and that worked. And then the final thing they did was I think they lined was it the inside or the outside of the gas tank? The inside of the gas tank, yeah, the inside of the gas tank with a rubber bladder. And that worked. But no one likes saying the word bladder at Ford. It works, but it's Brody, so we're getting rid of that one. The point is, they had three solutions before the Ford was being rolled off the line, and they chose to ignore all three of them. Right. Big point here. Right. And in addition to this 2000 pound $2,000 limitation that I coca imposed, that radically shortened timeline also created a climate where really dangerous engineering decisions were being made. Right. Normally when you make a car, you sketch it out. Somebody makes a model of it. Some dude works in clay, you run it into like a couple of walls or something like that. You figure out how many cigarette lighters are going to go into it. There's a lot of thought put into it. And then once all this stuff, this preproduction stuff, is done and you know what the car is going to look like, then you begin this process called tooling. And tooling is where you make the machines that are going to make the car that you're manufacturing. Right. With the Pinto, they didn't do that. They started designing the car. And at about the same time, they started making the machines that were going to make that car before they even knew ultimately what the final design was going to be. So by the time they figured out that they had a really dangerous fuel tank on their hands, it was too late. The tooling was underway. $200 million worth of machines have been made. And Ford said so when they discovered this. We have a couple of quotes here from actual engineers that worked there at the time. And they said, did anyone go to Lea Coca and say, hey, we have a problem on our hands with this gas tank? And this one engineer from the Mother Jones article said, Hell, no. But it was like he didn't say it like that. He went like hell. No. In my mind. He went, Hell, no. That person would have been fired. Safety wasn't a popular subject around Ford in those days. And with Lee, it was taboo. Or taboo like you're a normal person if you talk normally. All right, Delete, it's been a while. It's a deep cut. Yeah, there's about 20 people in here that got that one. That's all right. All right. So I cocade a saying around Ford at the time, which was, Safety doesn't sell. And here's another quote from another engineer. Safety isn't the issue. Trunk space is. You have no idea how stiff the competition is over trunk space. Do you realize that if we put a safer gas tank in the Pinto, you can only get one set of golf clubs in the trunk? And that's a real quote? Yeah. And here's something that you can do when you get home. You can go and look up Ford Pinto ad and search Google Images or Bing Images. Is that a thing? Sure. Bing, Yahoo. Yeah. It doesn't have to be Google. Yeah. Go to Netscape. Or if you're a paranoid type, duck. Duck. Go, that even flew over my head. It's like they don't, like, track or use cookies or anything like that. Oh, yeah. So you're a creep, I guess. Are you stockpile weapons or something? Got you. So anyway, you can look up Ford Pinto ads, and there are all kinds of great ads from the old days. And there's one where there's a couple that I guess is unpacking for, like a camping trip from their Pinto, but it doesn't look like anywhere you would want to go camping. It's just kind of like a field. It's like a ditch. Yeah. Kind of weird looking. And it says this in the text. Just flip down the Runabouts rear seat. The Runabout was one of the Pinto models. Open up the big back door, which we call a hatchback these days, and the big back room makes packing easy. Pack in your golf clubs, those groceries, and those big pieces of luggage. Pack it all in. You make it sound really dirty. There's a big room. In your little Pinto. I'm the sicko because I'm using DuckDuck up. It's the sexiest ad of the 70s as read by me. I like old ads in old magazines because you can smell them afterwards. You know what I'm saying? Like, if you go into Google Images, the ads there, but not the smell. But you know what an old magazine smells like? Great. Fantastic smell. You mean like musty? What magazines are you reading? Any old magazine. It's like an old Penthouse pick up. All right, Jerry, cut that part. I'm not doing my shot yet. And everybody calmed down. My niece left to go to bed. Okay? Are there any other kids here? All right. You have a very deep voice, young boy, right here. Yeah, I'm seven. Bear me screw. So, everybody, I think we can all agree this is going pretty well. You're not going to like this. That means that we need to put an ad break in here. Calm down. We'll be right back right after these messages. All right, Chuck, we're over here listening and we're doing great. Frankly, this is going really well. Agreed. So before we go to ad break, everyone, we just want to say here's a quick reminder. Go to Ndssorg to donate to the National Down Syndrome Society. And Chuck, what's the number for lifeline? You can text to the number 50155. Text the word lifeline, dollar sign and whatever amount you want to give. All right. And now we're from our sponsor. Hey, everybody, we're back. Magic of words. Yes. Thank you, sir. I am wearing me on these. Oh, you know what? We should say this. That's a freebie man. We'll cut this part out, too. But I have to share this. This is a legit tangent. Like all of them. The heavily scripted immune tangent. So you've heard so much. We got an email yesterday. You saw it? I did. Where a woman this is so weird. A woman wanted to send a new pair of me undies to us for us to autograph so she could frame the underwear for her husband's Christmas gift. Now, that is a deep cut. Sure. That's a true fan. At least you wouldn't like and you wear them first. Yeah. Each of you pass it off to the other one, then mail them back to me. Both of those are like, oh, yeah, send them in. Right? Totally do that. He would have smelled like an old magazine right when she got that in the mail, guys. What? Why would you do that? No one else saw that. We should probably edit this part out, too. Jared. This guy right here, that email to our head of sales, though, and he was so delighted. He was like, oh, I can't wait to send this to me on this. You're autographing underwear. They're not going to believe it. That's like David Lee Roth level, except we're autographing me undies for a fan. Some dude not David Lee Roth all right, everybody, we're back. Really thinking sure. You might do it again, though, because you just said that. Okay. Hey, everybody, we're back. I think I just stepped on you again. Stop laughing. Everybody. We need to clean it says Stop laughing. Hey, everybody, we're back. Thanks for hanging there. Thank you. That was a really long avenue. I already know where we were. Now I got it. You're right. I got creepy right before. I know that. I know. All right. I got you. Hey, everybody, we're back. Everyone's going to be like, what the hell happened in Atlanta? That's good enough. We're leaving that in. All right, so by now, everybody, you may be saying, Chuck, Josh, WTF, how could this possibly be going on? How could Ford be doing this kind of stuff? We're going to tell you, WTF. It turns out that back in, the American auto industry was like, the last great unregulated industry in the entire country. And the reason why was because most Americans considered the auto industry the backbone of the American economy. Right. So everyone said we should probably just let the auto industry decide what's best for it. And us, it's consumers because we don't want to mess with them. Yeah. Big corporations love to look out for everyday Americans. All right? But at the time, there was a fatality rate, aka death rate, on America's highways, reaching 50,000 people a year. We did the math. That's a lot. That is a lot. Ralph Nader had a book called Unsafe at Any Speed. That was a big hit. He also had one called Hot Plates. Unsafe at any temperature. Quite as well. Has anyone actually read unsafe at any speed? Don't feel bad. We haven't either. Okay, good. So he released his book in 1965, and it was basically like a chapter by chapter, really wonky, detailed description of how your car was ready and willing to murder you. Right. Not kill you. Murder you intentional. There were, like, chapters on, like, the steering column. It's going to impale you. Or that dashboard. It ain't padded, and your head is going to open up like a ripe cantaloupe when it comes to contact with it. Right. The name of the chapter, I think. Yeah. And the reason that this would happen for both instances is because there's no such thing as seat belts. Right. So he goes to the truck. There were seat belts. It was your mom doing that. Right. And that's how you knew, like, a really dedicated mom in the 60s, because she was missing an arm. Her kid was all messed up at a dent on his head or whatever, because it didn't quite work because her arm came clean off when they both went forward, but he was still alive. She didn't have an arm. It was a badge of honor back then. So Ralph Zader writes this book, and it gets released, and it becomes like, a best seller almost immediately. And it has so much of an impact that the next year congress passed the Highway Safety Act of 1966. Yeah. And this is another way you knew it was a day from way back in the day. The House and the Senate passed it unanimously. So quaint they all got together and said, well, this is what's good for the American people, so this is our job to do this. And they went, yeah, pretty sweet. Pretty sweet time. Pretty sweet. So they passed this thing and the upshot of it was that now the auto industry would be regulated. It was just the way it was going to be. Okay? And the auto industry said, okay, fine, but what about this? Why don't we agree to use something called a cost benefit analysis to decide if we actually undertake any regulations you proposed? Deal. And the Dot and NHTSA was like, well, no, the auto industry went like that. And the Dot was like, all right, fine. We don't want to arm wrestle over this one. Fine. Cost benefit analysis for everybody. Yeah. So if you don't know what the cost benefit analysis is, we call it the cruelest of all analyses because it's basically just a math problem. You plug in numbers and you say, I plug in this. I plug in this. Is it worth it to do this? Which works great in a lot of circumstances. If you're talking about, I don't know, like, what's a good example? Like if you're trying to figure out whether to go a tire distributor A or tire distributor B. Kind of easy, right, exactly. But if you're talking about replacing a fuel tank because it's killing people, it gets a little sticky because one of the inputs on those math problems has to be the value of a human life. There's no getting around it. No way around it. Right. So the NHTSA said, well, I guess we should go ahead and figure out how to quantify a human life. They all went home and kissed their children and they came back to work. And what they came up with, they actually did it. There was a document that said, everybody, this is the value of a human life. We figured it out. $200,725. And what they did was they just went, yeah, really? I thought mine was half that. So what they did was they figured out the average lifespan or the average age, I guess, of a person who dies in a car wreck and then subtracted it from the average lifespan of the Americans at the time in the Iraq, such as they came up with 37 years. Most people who die in a car wreck would have lived 37 more years. And then they said, well, how much would those people make in that time? And they said, well, $200725. The problem with this is that really what they calculated was the cost to society and lost productivity if it's just wages. Right. They didn't take into account some very important stuff, like the value that the individual places on his or her own life, or whether their family wants them to come home after a car wreck, stuff like that. But they came up with this dollar amount and they said, there, we'll get better at it over time, but here's what it is, and it's a primitive step. Exactly. Again, the coolest of all analysis. So Mark Dowie is sorting through all the file cabinets at the Dot and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. It's no faster to say it abbreviated. I know. I would just mess it up, though. So he's sorting through all the stuff. He's going through file cabinets, everyone's worried. And he comes across a document, a memo called fatalities Associated with Crash Induced Fuel Leakage and Fires. And over the years, people come to think like, this is the smoking gun. This is Pinto. It was about Pinto fires from getting hit in the rear. And that's what it is. It really wasn't. That what it was. It was about all cars in the United States and whether they caught on fire when they rolled over. However, the one damn thing in this memo was that Ford used that number, well, almost that number to quantify the value of a human life. But Ford rounded down they rounded down the value of a human life just to make the math easier. Yeah, they made it 200 grand. They cut off a $725. Just made it straight up $200. Right. So they estimated, like, 180 fatalities and 180 injuries in post collision car fires every year in the US. And they said, well, that would cost society $49 million in lost productivity. But if you want us to do this $11 per car safety improvement that would save those lives and those injuries, well, it cost us, the auto industry, $113,000,000. So don't have to do it. Right. Great. See, it racquetball. Ted. Do you guys see Fight Club? Remember Edward Norton's job? That was kind of what he did, right? A little bit, yeah. He had to kind of calculate whether or not it was worth taking a recall. Exactly. And Ford, thanks to Dowie, had just been caught red handed with one of these submitted in the public record. All right, so part of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act was something and all these bills, this gets a little wonky, but bear with me. They're all broken down into sub categories, and one of them was called Vehicle Safety Standard 301. And 301 was basically our government getting together and saying, you know what? We feel like you should be able to get hit from the rear at, like, 20 miles an hour and not explode into a fiery ball. We've talked about it. We know what you're going to say, Detroit, but we've talked about we feel very strongly about this. We feel that's reasonable democrats push for 30. Republicans push for ten. They met in the middle at 20. There are people from Cop County here on the show. They are not happy with you right now, Chuck. That's all right. They are going to let us know via email after this show. Angry at the way you feel about life. So they settle in 20 miles an hour, and that was safety, standard 301. But here's the rub for Ford and the Pinto, is they had a problem on their hands. They knew they couldn't withstand 20 miles an hour. They could barely withstand five. So this would have meant a complete redesign on the Pinto. So they came up with a plan basically to, shall we say, delay the process. Yes, I cook and kill that thing. Kill that. Standard 301. I hate it. They were happy because they didn't have to kill a human. Right? For once. So what's in it? Oh, yeah, I didn't even mean to say that, but it works pretty well. So here's what they did. They got attorneys on the case and they said, here's what you'll do. You're going to file these arguments on the last day that you can file an argument and you're going to get all this data together and you're going to shove it in their face and say, here's an argument. And now you've got to look through all this stuff and you have to satisfy that argument. So they may not have even cared if the argument held up or not. The point was they just wanted to delay things so they could keep selling the very dangerous Pinto. So they did this and they didn't even file them concurrently all at once, which is sort of what you usually do in law, in court. They would file one, they would go look for them all and say, this holds water. It doesn't. They go, Great. They wait till the next deadline and file another one. And all of a sudden, they have delayed this process for nine years. Nine years. They started arguing against it in 1968, and Standard 301 went into effect in 1977. Right? Yeah. Boom. There's kind of like a silver lining to this whole thing, and that Ford's objections actually forced the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration to study the problem of car fires. To answer Ford's objections and say, no, actually, you're wrong. They're kind of a problem. Yeah, they were giving them reams of data and then they went, oh, shit, we just gave them reams. Right. But the Nhcsa also had to contract with people to study this stuff. And what they were finding was that car fires in America were way more of a problem than even Ford, I think, realized at the time. They turned up some stats. Like 400,000 cars were burning up on the American highway every year, burning more than 3000 people. A death is that high? 400,000 cars? Yeah, maybe it's a little high, I don't know. But this is what they turned up. That sounds high here's. 140 percent of all calls to all fire departments in the United States in the 19th, 60s were cars on fire. Isn't that nut? Just last time you guys chose car on fire, this would be like you would see one, and a couple of miles later there's another one, and people didn't have cell phones, so you would have to see a car on fire, have a dime in your pocket, be near enough to a payphone to report it. Right. And that was 40%, and it made the judgment that there was a chance that the person was going to make it in the time that you went to the pay phone. There's a lot of factors here. 40% seems high. Like if you had a Christmas parade in your town, there's a pretty good chance a couple of those cars were just going to catch fire in the middle of the parade. This is insane. This is what the Nhcsa was finding from studying this problem. There's a University of Miami study. They found that rear end impact fires were, quote, a clear and present hazard to all Pinto owners. That was the cane saying that. All right, wait, we got to take another ad break. Okay, everybody, we'll be right back. Don't get up. We'll be right back right after these messages. All right, Chuck, last ad break. It's going pretty well. Just a hot crowd. You got that straight, buddy. And before we go to ad break, we just wanted to remind you again, go to Ndss.org to donate to the National Down Syndrome Society. And Chuck that's right. Or you can text to the number 50155 text lifeline dollar sign and the amount you want to give. And it's that easy? Yeah. And it doesn't need to be an or proposition. It can be an and proposition totes. Speaking of propositions, here's a word from our sponsor. Hey, everybody, we're back. It's a lot better live, huh? They get it now. So the original draft of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act had a part that provided it was very controversial. It provided for criminal sanctions, criminal sanctions against executives of auto companies. And these well, let's be honest, these white dudes that were executives of these auto companies said, well, I don't think you really mean that. Right. That means we could go to prison. You understand? I like, I think we have some lobbyists on the case. They put the lobbyists on the case. And they did get that lobbying out of the Safety Act. Unfortunately. Yeah. I say unfortunately. That's me talking. Sure. Well, you're speaking for both of us, buddy. They end up with, like, five or $10,000 yeah. In 1977 money, which today translates to, like, 40 grand. So if you are an auto executive who knowingly put a dangerous car out on the American market, you could face a fine of $40,000. And from what we understand, that's like, once, one time fine. That was it. So it would be up to the media and the courts to force forward to do something about its Pinto. And, boy, did they ever. The drumbeat started in the that right. Yeah, it started with dowry. Right. Like, Mark Dowe gets a lot of credit for the Pinto article, and definitely he definitely had a big impact, but he gets some undue credit for getting standard 301 to come into effect because it came into effect pretty shortly after the Pinto Madness article came out. It turns out later, research turned up that the NHTSA had said, ford, we're so sick of you arguing against Standard 301. How long will it take for you guys to get your cars up to standard 301 level, which, again, is a 20 miles an hour rear impact that doesn't lead to fuel loss and forwards, like, oh, no. Seems like a big job, right? Four years. And the NH TSA was like, you know, it took you two years to design the car from scratch, right? They're like, yeah, this is huge. Massive improvements to make it safe for four years. So the NHCS said, Fine, in 1977, it'll come into effect. So it was just coincidence. But Dowie's article did have a big impact in the way of shaping public opinion. Yeah, for sure. So what happens is they're starting to be some lawsuits. People that are getting burned alive in Pintos and other cars say, well, maybe we could sue somebody. Is that a duck question? Is there a duck in the house? Okay, let's get back on track work, doesn't it? You're all charmed. Thank you for taking that one for us. Chuck. Jerry, cut that part. All right. So why? That's delicious. It's good. Yeah. Bullet Bram bourbon. It's called buzz marketing, everyone. They don't even pay us for that yet. So there are these people that have this job where they recreate accidents. Sometimes it's for court, for attorneys, for the state, sometimes it's for insurance companies, but they recreate these accidents, kind of show what went down. And some of them started to say and again, it was a radical notion. Started to say, Wait a minute. I think that if you get in a car wreck, you maybe should be able to live through it. It's a radical idea, but maybe they should make cars safer. Yeah, they never go back to San Diego. Hippie. Well, the notion from America. Everyone sort of agreed to this thing where, like, if you get in a car wreck and die, you got in the car wreck, it's your fault. It was my driver's fault. Yeah, it's a driver's fault you can't make cars safer. In the case of an accident. It seems weird now because it's all we think about is auto safety, but it was just not on the radar. Lei Coca was not the only one, but that was thanks to Detroit. Like saying it's your fault. You're a dummy. But everyone agreed to it. Everyone was implicit in Detroit's defense at the time. Everybody was drunk while they were driving, way more than today. So they kind of had a point. But still, they could still make the cars safer and should have even more back then. Yeah, for sure. I don't know. We call them accident recreationists. Reconstructionist. Reconstructionists. Recreationists. Are the Civil War dudes, does anyone here do that? Any Civil War reenactors? There's three who are just sitting there like this right now. All right, quick sidebar. Emily and I went hiking. You guys ever go to Sweetwater State Park? See local show? Emily, remember this? We went hiking in Sweetwater and there were some Civil War reenactors, but it wasn't like what I know about Civil War reenactors is they throw a big battle party or whatever it's called, and they act like it's a big war and they go, Bang. You die. Or don't die. Bang bang. And then that's sort of what happens. Do they do that? I have no idea what they do. But it's a big show, like on a field. Like, I went to one when I was a kid. I remember that. But these dudes were just hanging out in the woods at Sweet Quarter State Park. They had a fire going, and it was like three or four people, a couple of dudes and a couple of ladies in their outfits. And they were cooking, I guess, like a squirrel on a spit. That's Huckabee style. It was no organized thing. And when I was just hiking by, it was like a year ago, like, well, that's weird. Or did you guys just like, back slowly into the woods, don't make eye contact. I guess I approved because it wasn't war, so that's kind of cool. No, they were prepping for war, okay? They were gathering their strength from squirrels, their muskets to go, feigned. Very strange. Don't go to Sweetwaters, by the way. Don't go there. No, not after that. Okay. I didn't know if there's something else. Like, there's a lot of abandoned tires in the ravine or something. All right, so where are you, Jerry? Cut that whole story. I don't know. I think it's a good story. I think we should keep it. Jerry, is she dead? Is she the great. All right, so there's recreationist. That's where I was are saying, maybe you should sue the car company because cars should be safer. And people went, oh, well, that's not a bad idea. Yeah, because it's a revolutionary idea. These guys were saying with the Pinto in particular, I'm starting to notice a lot of charred bodies that are otherwise in perfect shape. Look great. Aside from the charred part. Right. They don't have any contusions. They don't have any broken bones. So, like, these accidents are happening at really low speed. Maybe it's actually a design flaw with Ford. And so the lawyers are like, that sounds great. And they started circling the courthouses like the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz and dropping lawsuits down on a Ford's head. And at first, Ford was like, bring it. We're Ford juries are made up of upstanding registered voters. Right. We're going to be just fine. And Ford won a couple at first, and then they started losing them, and Ford was still kind of like, we're still taking the jury trial on. But the whole thing turned on this one trial in 1977 in Orange County, California, and Ford lost big time, actually, in a Pinto case. Yeah, they lost and this was in 77, they lost $125,000,000 in damages to a boy named he's 13 years old. Richard Grimshaw was very sad. He's burned very badly, and the driver of the car died. And $125,000,000, I mean, that's a lot of money now, but back then, it's a ton of money. And it's what they call you've heard of, like, a symbolic award where they'll just hit a company with a ton of ton of money and it later gets reduced, but all they care about is that the media knows that they got hit with this ton of money. Right. That was sort of the case here. It got reduced to, what? Three and a half million dollars. A lot of money back then, of course. But that initial figure really made a point and sent shockwaves to the auto industry. Yeah. And so Ford changed its tactics. They're like, okay, well, maybe we'll start settling. And we got another quote, and Chuck reads it way better than me, so if you don't mind yeah, this is an attorney for Ford, and I'll read it in the voice of Lionel Hutts, of The Simpsons, the great Phil Hartman. Here we go. We'll never go to a jury again, not in a fire case. Juries are just too sentimental. They see those charred remains and forget the evidence. No, sir, we'll settle. Thanks for that. He wasn't overheard saying that. A TV reporter stuck a microphone in his face, and he said that that was his quote that he gave, like Amazon Alexa didn't overhear him saying that his wife at home later. Exactly. So Ford was like, okay, kill that guy, that lawyer. We're going to start settling. And so they did start settling. There's some benefits to settling. Well, there are some drawbacks, too. One is that it tells the entire world that, you know, your case is terrible, but it says while there's going to be lower payouts to the lawyers and there's going to be lower payouts to the defendants, and it also cuts down on discovery. So discovery, if you go to jury the plaintiff, the person filing the case has legal access to any and all documents that you have that prove their case against you. Right. So with all these jury trials, there was this steady trickle or flow even of yeah, it wasn't even a trickle. It was a flow of damning evidence coming out of Ford going into the hands of lawyers who are happily turning it around and handing it to the media who were reporting on this stuff, which is getting the public just good. And that drum beat that Chuck was talking about started to really pick up. And people were really looking at Ford, like, in this weird, unsettling, non blinky way. Everyone took their shirts off and they put, like, war paint on and just forbes was starting to get a little nervous. They were like us, america. Said you. That got a little weird. Yeah. Thank you for grabbing for that. Thank you, buddy. You got a t shirt that bordered on performance art. I think so. Had I taken my shirt off, it would have been performance. Oh, my God. Do it out of your mind. You guys will not cheer until blood comes out of your mouth. And I still wouldn't take my shirt off. There is nothing you can do to make me take my shirt off. Actually, I would probably be taking my shirt off. That does feel good, though. Now we've reached David Lee Roth level. I wish I had another shot. Oh, my God. All right. That's just having common values, not taking your shirt off in public when people tell you to. That's normal stuff, man. You did good. Is one of thank you, Jerry. Cut out the last year. Shame on all of you. Hometown show. All right. So finally, in 1977, safety 301 came into effect. What we talked about, you should be able to hit a car from 20 miles an hour, not be a flaming death ball. And the 1977 new pencil debuted with a very brand new safety feature. That one dollars, \u00a31 piece of plastic in between the flaming death bolts and the gas tank that they've known since 1968 would save lives. Boo. Thank you, leia koka by this time, and Ford in general were scared to death of the PR crisis that had been growing and growing. And the whole thing again was started by Dowe's article. Not only did he get the Mother Jones readership involved, he really kind of awakened the mainstream media to the thing. So everybody was reporting on this. People were suing for it. It was a huge, big problem. And ayah Coca told everybody, clam up. That's actually a direct quote from his book, his 1988 book. I used to think in a happier time that it was called Straight Talk, but that's a Dolly Parton movie called Talking Straight. I got to say, you sent me this initial. Josh wrote this show and he sent it and he said, straight talk. And I was like, did Dolly Parton play Lei? I never corrected it. I never saw the movie. That would be great. You never saw straight talk. Oh, no. Shamed. Is that going to be your movie crush pick. Oh, maybe that's buzz marketing. Now I have to do it. No, it's called talking straight. In the end, I think Straight Talk might have been the working title, okay? But in it, he says, we were so afraid of this PR crisis. Bankrupting forward. If you could imagine that. They just said, no one talk. Don't talk to anybody. Just clam up. And they thought that if somebody said something the wrong way and, like, there was a scary turn of phrase or something that was just taken the wrong way, it would be seen as an admission of guilt. The problem was, to the public, the fact that they weren't talking was seen as an admission of guilt more than anything. Yes. It was a big deal. Like, 60 Minutes was literally knocking at the door. Morally safer. Was it Ford knocking at the door? And he said, I'm morally safer, and if you're not intimidated now, I got Ed Bradley with me. We've sent two of our best dudes, so you should be pretty worried. And Ford was crouched down under their window, like, so funny. I used to love 60 Minutes. Sure. When I was, like, 13. It's such a weird show to watch as a kid. It's sophisticated. Yeah, it was not sophisticated. Apparently, you were no, it was not. I don't know what the little then after that, you just like, all right, I'll turn the channel. And also, now I think about it, I think it came on after either, like, The Wonderful World of Disney that was great. Or wild kingdom or something. I don't know what that is, sir. That was, like, Full House was on there. That was, like, the 90s. You're way off, buddy. Yeah, I'm so old. Do you see this beard? So much gray. Like the Davy Crockett Story Hour was that one that just makes that up. Well, I'm not that old. Okay, nightwriter. That had a good theme song. This has devolved into, like, shout out your favorite old thing. We're almost done. Everybody calm down, all right? We're hitting the end. So 78 in June, they started their own recall proceedings, and 60 Minutes was on the door. They're knocking. They're knocking. And Ford says, you know what? We're going to undertake a voluntary recall. If anyone believed that, it will make us look so good. I don't know if we mentioned the Pinto was a big, big seller. Like, despite all this, it was a super popular car. It was, like, the best selling Subcompact of the 70s. It very much. Was it's Winona Ryder's car? And Stranger Things, too. Oh, yeah. Was it her car and Stranger Things one? I don't remember. But they featured the Pinto in Stranger Things, too. Night Rider. Spoiler. Thanks a lot. Now I know what car she drives. All right, so they undertake a 1.4 million car recall on just the Pinto alone, but also another car they had. Right. The Mercury Bobcat. Right. Which is, like, more luxurious but equally deadly. Twins. And we're not quite sure what made it so luxurious. No idea. Maybe it had an on board, like, blow dryer brush to feather your hair with while you're going home. You sit in the backseat, and they just have the thing from the hair place that just lowers over your hair. That is the pinnacle of luxury that we can think of for the 1970s. God bless the 70s. All right. The bad news is, though and this is very sad to stop laughing, between the time Ford decided to undergo that recall in June and the time it told consumers, like, internally, they said, all right, June we'll do this September. We announced it to the public. In those few months, there was a very, very sad crash. Rear end you need another shot? No, a rear end impact where some young women died. And there was a prosecutor in Indiana named Michael Constantino that said, you know what? I've had it. I'm done. I know the deal. I'm going to bring these dudes on trial for murder. Murder? Like, he filed criminal homicide charges against the executives at Ford for that crash. Yeah. Very big deal. Yeah. And it wasn't just like a flash in the panel, actually, or these charges went to trial. It was over, like, three years, and over the three years, everybody's reporting on Ford executives on trial for murder every day, and the charges got dismissed. But the public criminalizing of Ford's executives, it was huge. It was a bad PR crisis before. It couldn't get worse than that. Your executives on trial for murder, right? Yeah, for sure. Despite all this, despite the fact that the Pinto was a flaming death trap, to a certain extent, when you look at the numbers today, and when you look at the real statistics, it was not much worse and sometimes better than other cars on the market at the time that would kill you from fire like the Vega or the Gremlin. They would kill you. Right. So we tried to figure out and actually, it turns out there was this 1993 article in Harvard Law Review where this guy said, I've done the math. I've actually figured it out, and here's the number I came up with. It was 27. 27 people is probably the number of people who died in low speed rear collision impact buyers in Pinto. And that's over ten years. Yeah. Like, millions of cars. 27. It's not that bad, actually. Right. It was way less than I think Mother Jones said. Like, 500 to 900. Yeah. And this is so Mother Jones. They said that was a conservative estimate that we just made up. And then I think 60 Minutes, chuck's beloved 60 Minutes said, like, thousands of people had died in Pinterest. No one knew. So they were just making up numbers. But this 1993 article said, no, it's probably 27, actually. Exactly. So in the end, we look back, and the Pinto was, even though it could have been a flaming death trap, what it really was was a very bad victim of PR. The problem was that the way you could die in a Pinto was just too bad to be allowed to continue. Right. The idea that if you've gotten a rear end collision and the passenger compartment filled up with gas, that's bad enough. But the idea that it could happen at such a low speed that you would still be conscious when you caught fire and burned to death, the American public said, that can't happen. It doesn't matter. And so thanks to Dowe's article and 60 Minutes, eventually, for sure, the Pinto was basically laid to waste as far as the American public was concerned and still has a bad reputation today. That's right. In the end, the Pinto took the rear impact, but not in the good way. Not in the good way, in every kind of bad. You know that's true. Never thought about that. So in the end, Mr. Lee Ayacoka would go on to write his legend with Chrysler Corporation by bringing them back from kind of the brink of bankruptcy into huge success in the he was named, I think, by Portfolio magazine as the 18th greatest CEO of all time, just ahead of Oprah, which is bull. Team Oprah up here wrote a couple of books, wrote that biography that Josh talked about the Dolly Parton did not star in, and another called Where Have All the Leaders Gone? And Mr. Ayakoka is still alive today. The ripe old age of 92 in Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, where there is a Pinto to be found. That's right. And that is the story of the Ford Pinto. Well, that went pretty well. Chuck? Yeah. If you want to get in touch with us for any reason, you can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. I'm at Josh Clark and I also have a website called Russeriesclark.com Chuck's on Facebook, at Charleswchbryant, or at stuff you should know. You can email us and Jerry to stuffpodcast@housestofworks.com. And as always, join us at home on the Web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com. Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. 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 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 Condoms Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-condoms-work | The earliest depiction of a condom is found in a 15,000-year-old cave painting. Ever since humans realized sex led to children, we've been using condoms to prevent pregnancy. Join Josh and Chuck for this comprehensive tour of all things condom. | The earliest depiction of a condom is found in a 15,000-year-old cave painting. Ever since humans realized sex led to children, we've been using condoms to prevent pregnancy. Join Josh and Chuck for this comprehensive tour of all things condom. | Thu, 13 Dec 2012 20:41:19 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=20, tm_min=41, tm_sec=19, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=348, tm_isdst=0) | 58919356 | 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. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate covered goodness with real time, data driven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM, let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting. 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. You put us together, rub us and lube. You got yourself stuff you should know. You have a lawsuit on your hands from you, right? Yeah. Got a speeding ticket on the way here. I'm pissed off. Okay, well, everything of the last 15 minutes before you started recording is now explained. No, we talked about regular stuff. That didn't influence my feelings about this. No, but you're still, like you had a burn in your bonnet. Well, for that cop, yeah, man. The state patrol, they don't mess around. No, they don't. Like, there's no small talk. There's no nothing. It's, give me your license, and then here's your ticket. Right. I was like but that was about all. Anyone who refers to you and what the second person is citizen. They're pretty serious people. Yes. I'm going to go to court, though. Why not? Good for you, man. We don't work. You never know why. Get out of it. Yeah, well, give it a shot. Yeah. So aside from that, I had my condom on, so I was safe driving. That's good. Yeah. You always wear one, right? 24/7. You can't be too careful. How often do you change? It? May. That is so gross. All right, let's talk about measure B. Have you heard of measure B? It is a referendum that Los Angeles County floated in this last election that passed 56% of the vote. They said if you're in the porn industry and you're filming, you have to wear a condom. Good. Well, it depends on who you are. If you are a citizen. Yeah, you probably think it's good, especially if you voted in favor of it. Sure. If you're in the porn industry, though, you're like, people don't want to see that. And they're actually talking about moving from Los Angeles, which is a big deal. People don't want to see a condom in their porn movies. I guess. I don't want to see any of that stuff. I don't want to see what's attached to the condom either. Okay, so you wouldn't care. No. Yeah, I guess so. I don't want to see any stuff like that. Apparently there's a longstanding thing in the point and you just don't show condoms. It reflects the unnaturalness maybe of what you're seeing. You're like, wait a minute, that's probably not the pizza guy after all. Sure. It blows the illusion. That's real stuff. Yeah. So they're talking about moving from Los Angeles, which is huge Los Angeles, because apparently in just Los Angeles County, porn is a billion dollar industry. Oh, yeah, dude. In the Valley, just in one county. Can you imagine that? So there's a big kerfuffle going on right now over condom usage in the porn industry. Did I ever tell you about the time I scouted the porn stage for a video shoot? No. Did key for Southern. Driver take you there. No, but I was working as a PA. And we couldn't afford like a real stage. So they sent me out to the Valley of this porn stage to go videotape it and see what it looked like. And it's like a boardroom with a bed in the corner and a candy shop with a bed and a gymnasium locker room with a bed. That was really gross. And I didn't want to touch anything. And as I was leaving, a bunch of big muscles men came in to get their shoot on. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Was it gay porn that afternoon? It was so it's just like, whatever. It's a sound stage. Yeah. They take all comers. And so these two dudes walked in and I walked out. And I don't think we ended up using the stage. I got you. But it was funny. In the conference room set, there was a framed, like, Olin Mills or a painting of Burt Reynolds and Lonnie Anderson, like at the end of the conference room. No way. Yeah. Swear to God. Wow. That's one thing about porn industry moguls. They seem to always have, like, a great sense of humor. I think this is before Boogie Nights even, because I didn't make that connection. It was just Burt Reynolds. That was definitely before Boogie Nights. But, I mean, think about Larry Flynn. He has a great sense of humor. He does. Hugh Hefner, maybe. I think the less hardcore you get, the further away from hardcore you get, the less of a sense of humor the publisher has. I bet there's some mathematical formula in there. We'll see it one day. All right. So condoms is what we're talking about. Yeah. We should say if you're young, you might want to ask your parents if you should listen to this. Oh, man, that is a good COA. Like, I think it's up to parents how they educate their children with this stuff. So you have been forewarned. Go put your little player down. Go ask mom and dad. Should I be listening to this? Right. We're going to be very clinical here, but it's about sex and reproduction, so can't be too careful. I wonder how many kids just, like, pull the cheeks over? What do you think? I don't know. Vast majority. Okay, so let's try this again. We're talking condom, and apparently what we think of as condom usage normal, widespread. It's talked about there's billboards, whatever is actually a fairly recent phenomenon. The billboards and things. Yeah. And just the idea of using condoms, that's pretty recent from the actually, it was HIV that kind of spurred this condom age that we live in now. But there have been, like, another golden age of condoms shortly after the Great War, right? That's right. Venereal diseases were pretty easy to get if you were a sailor on leave in Europe. And so they encouraged troops to use condoms and distributed them in the ranks. Among the ranks. And when they came back home, they kept using I guess they hit a big boom here in the 1940s. Yeah. Post war era died down in the 60s because of the pill. Exactly. And then picked back up again in the 80s because of HIV. Yeah. Because we figured out, thanks to clever things like penicillin and all that stuff, that most of the STDs that condoms were preventing at the time, you could just treat with antibiotics. Yeah. So people weren't too concerned with that kind of thing. And then the pill came along, and I was like, we have no need for condoms whatsoever. Right. But then AIDS hit that's. Right. And then condom usage started to go through the roof, which is good. Yeah. But apparently condoms are an extremely old idea. At the very least, putting something over your penis, whether for recreational purposes or whatever, is at least 150 years old. Right? Yeah. I think Tracy of Pop stuff wrote this article. We should point out she's responsible for the most comprehensive podcasts we've done. Yeah. I never even think twice when I look at and see her name in the bio. I'm like, oh, well, we should totally do this. She points out that 15,000 years ago, we found cave paintings that show images of a sheathed penis. Yes. So it's unclear whether or not these garments and decorations and shades on the penises of Egypt and Greece and India and Japan were for contraception as a barrier method or adornment. I guarantee you they weren't. Probably thinking of the woman's comfort. No. Especially with the kabuto gata, the Japanese version of the penis sheath or condom was made of horn or tortoise shell. They didn't care about the lady's pleasure. That's just mind bogglingly painful sounding. I know. No kidding. So we know people started using condoms as a means to prevent pregnancy by the Roman era, I think. Of course. The Romans. Yeah. Anytime. It's sexy time stuff. They were leading the way. Totally. Yeah. Anybody seen Caligula? Can tell you that. But then by the time Shakespeare rolls around, consumers are pretty common. Yeah. If you count wrapping linen around the penis and tying it in a little bow with a ribbon at the bottom. It's a condom back then. Or stuffing something into the urethra and using a drawstring ribbon to keep it on. That's another way that they did things. I should post photos of your face. Pictures of your face taken throughout this episode. Yeah. Well, by the time Shakespeare's age, people are using condoms pretty frequently. And one of the things they're using it probably the main thing they're using it for is to prevent syphilis. Yeah. Because just like in World War Two, sailors to the New World came and contracted this new disease that was found only in North America at the time, I should say the Western Hemisphere. Yeah. And they brought it back and they figured out after a little while, like, well, wait a minute, I think it has to do with sex. So they started using condoms for disease prevention through that. So this is a pretty big point here. Right. Like, by the age of exploration, people understand that you can cover the penis to prevent pregnancy and to prevent disease. Yeah. That's a huge advancement in society, I guess. Oh, totally. They were on it. They still, like, rolled in their own feces and never washed their hands or took a bath. But they knew how to prevent syphilis with a little something in the urethra with a drawstring attached to that's. Right. By the mid 1700, Tracy points out, they were starting to use condoms made from animal membranes, animal guts, basically, which, if they still have these today, if you use something called cheap skin it is not cheap skin, but it is cheap guts. Intestine lining. Yeah. And you could still buy those. I think they were about, like 1% of the total sales these days. Yeah. And they recommend those only if you are like a monogamous couple that's disease free. And you're just using it to not get pregnant. Right. Because it's very thin, but it's porous, I believe, enough for pathogens to pass through. Yeah. Like you don't want to use that to prevent getting HIV. No, not smart. No. What you want to use is a rubber condom. That's right. Thank you, Charles Goodyear. Yeah. Who gave us not only rubber condoms, but tires, rubber hoses, rubber belts, pretty much anything that they made of rubber. You can thank Charles Goodyear for it because of his process of vulcanization, which is he added sulfur and lead oxide to rubber from the heavier Brazilian tree. Yeah. Which they had been tapping that tree for a while to get this latex is liquid rubber. Right. But yeah, vulcanization is where it became a thing that you could produce, and it was safe and it was stronger and more elastic, so less likely to break. But it was also key thicker and rougher. And you had to go to your doctor to be fitted for one of these condoms. The good part is you could wash and reuse it. It was basically like your condom. You probably have your name on it. I imagine if you got fitted, though, in the doctor's office, that would have to be with an erection, right? Yeah. Do you remember the little reflex hammer? I do. What does that have to do that's how they did it. Wow. Alright. So I guess back in the day, you would go to your doctor and get an erection and he would fit you with a condom. Right. Made from volcanoes. Rubber probably a bit of an investment at this time as a man, so I doubt if a lot of people were wearing them still. So, again, this is what I imagine it basically probably looked a lot like the nipple of a baby bottle. Yeah, sure. I'll bet you there's somebody who collects old timey condom. Some rich dude who has like an old timey condom collection. Yeah, of course there's someone who collects everything old. Exactly. Apparently people were using this this is 1839 when Charles Good, you came up with vulcanization. So we're talking like the mid to late 19th century. People are using these rubber condoms, reusable rubber condoms. And then everybody patted on the back. A guy named Frederick Killian. Killian's red beer inventor, maybe. No, it's possible. He's more famously known, however, for creating a process of making condoms directly from latex, which again, is the SAP of the rubber tree found in Brazil, West Africa, Southeast Asia. Now. And he would take these glass molds that were, you could argue phallic in nature. Kind of has to be. Yeah. And he would dip it directly into latex. I don't think he did it with his hands like that. I'm just like maybe initially he did. So he would dip these molds or forms right. What they called former. Former just in the latex. And he would then vulcanized that. And what you had was a thinner stronger, better, I guess, condom. Yeah. Thinner and stronger. Which is like that's what you want out of a condom because you want to have the sensation intact, but you want to be safe. And also had a longer shelf life. And all of a sudden latex was the way to go. Yeah. Now it's 99% of all condoms worldwide are latex. Yes. And that's a lot of condoms, as we'll see. Yeah. We have some numbers. Yeah. Should we talk about nicknames or not? This seems a silly to me. I thought it was silly, too. Well, let's skip it then. Okay. Maybe we should just drop them in occasionally. Okay. So people know because it's in here, so it's legit. Right. Instead of condoms, we'll say Jimmy Hat. Yeah. Okay. Frederick and came up with the latex Jimmy Hat. Right. I guess if you don't know what a condiment is at all, we should go ahead and say it is a tube. It's a bag like tube that the male penis fits in. It's open on one end, obviously. Right. And closed. On the other, there's a little reservoir tip to collect the semen, supposedly, and it's got a little ring around the open end, a thin rim that you roll down upon the penis. Right. And that is a condom. And it basically blocks fluids from touching each other, which is how you get pregnant and how you get disease. Keeps all those fluids separate. Right. The form of this, the basic concept of the condom, hasn't changed much over the eons, but just these little advances in technology, like making them latex. Latex is not porous. Yes. The only way something is going to get through is if there's some sort of damage to it or something like that. The condoms the same. What you just described is generally been in use for hundreds or thousands of years. Right. Yeah. It's a barrier method these days. I don't think we should talk about all those standards, because my eyes started to water a little bit when I was reading all those with the length of the width and the thickness. No, we should talk about that, but later on, all those standards, when it was just like really? Yes. International codes. There are international codes governing how cars are made. Well, which is good. I'm not knocking that. Sure. It's just not exciting. So, yeah. These days, the length there are at least 6.3 inches. 160. Nice. Well, you did the conversion. Well, I think you kind of have to say an interest, don't you? But have you noticed that how stuff works. Articles have gone metric? Yeah. Now it's metric. First the meat one, the lab grown meat one, both in metric. All right, well, I don't know what to say about that. What about the width? What is the width of a condom when laid flat? 52 mm, which I did not convert to inches. The thickness is zero 7 mm. That's thin. That's very thin. Which, like we said, that's what you want out of a condom. You want something strong, but you don't want to ruin the sexual experience by wearing a rubber glove, you know what I'm saying? Or wear a rubber glove, too, just on them as well. And keep the rubber gloves on your hands. That's right. They powder these things with things like silica and corn starch and magnesium carbonate to keep the latex from sticking to itself in packaging. Or they can come lubed up with either regular lube or made from silicone or spermicidal lube, which this is good to know now that I'm married, but I was showing this back then. Apparently, the spermicidal lubricants can make things worse, specifically nanoxinol nine. Yeah. It says that they found that when used with a condom, it doesn't really do much to kill sperm. And even worse, it can cause vaginal irritation, which can lead to easier disease transmission. Yeah. So that's apparently not a good thing to use nanoxinol Nine on your condom. Very good to know. And that's not knocking in nine, because I think that's what's also you use outside of a condom, right. As a spermicidal. Right. So it's more effective there, I guess. How about manufacturing a condom, Chuck? How about it all starts it all starts either in the forests of Brazil, Southeast Asia or West Africa, which is where you'll find the rubber tree, which is still to the state where latex comes from. Unless it's synthetic latex, of course. Sure. But let's say you're going the natural route, and you go to Brazil and get you some SAP, which, again, SAP from rubber tree is latex. Okay. So you get that, you take it back to your factory, right? That's right. Maybe in Brazil, maybe in Thailand. Who knows? Is that what they make these? Sure. Okay. I think they make them pretty close to the rubber plantations. All the pictures in this article are in Thailand or Brazil or whatever, and that's where you're going to find rubber trees. Okay. Well, it doesn't only contain latex. You're going to probably have some other ingredients in your bucket there of SAP. Well, you add it along the way. Yeah. Antifungal and antibacterial compounds. You want to keep these things clean. Zinc oxide, which accelerates the vulcanization process, stabilizers like potassium laureate sulfur, maybe, which is another vulcanizing agent. Ammonia, anti coagulant. I didn't know that. Yeah, it keeps things from coagulating. Really? Yeah, and other pigments and preservatives, because you want it to have that lovely fleshy look. Right. And strawberry flavoring. Well, we'll get to that, too. So these add to the shelf life. They make it harder to break down because rubber is biodegradable naturally. Right. You don't want it to break down. That's what happened in the old days when the lubes, the natural rubber, would just break down. Your kind of wasn't worth much for long. Right. And Tracy points out this is a good reason why you'd never want to throw a condom, used or otherwise, in a toilet. It's not how you throw a condom away, because it doesn't break down. It's just going to gum things up. It's going to catch all the hair and toilet paper and all that stuff and grow bigger and bigger and just basically become this big, giant condom dam in your sewer pipe. That's right. So what do you do? You wrap it in tissue paper. She suggests wrap that tissue paper and foil, put the foil in a five millimeter thick black garbage bag and bury it in your yard. No, that's how you properly dispose of a used condom. That's not true. But she does recommend the tissue and the waste basket. Yeah, just on the toilet. Or if you're in New York City, just on the street or sideways. We'll do just fine in the back of your cab. Have you ever noticed all the condoms on the street? A lot of them out there. It's a thing. It's definitely a thing. If you live in new York. You know about it? Pointy tiles or something. I just don't get it. Like, are these people having sex in the street? Are they throwing them out of the apartment? Maybe that's what they're doing. That's gross. I know. Can you imagine walking down the sidewalk after a nice dinner? I don't okay. All right, so you've got the liquid latex goes in the vats, and then you've got the farmers, which have been around for a while, and they are glass or ceramic molds of a penis, and they're on a conveyor belt. Dip it into the battery in circle to get a nice even coating and dry it out. And then maybe a second or third dip to make sure it's thick enough. Right. And then it's into the tunnel oven for vulcanization. Yeah. It has all of those zinc oxide and the sulfur in it to help it vulcanized. So when it's exposed to heat, it becomes stronger. That's right. And then after that, I found this a little unsettling, because I just always thought of condoms is, like, untouched. It's like a brand new newspaper. Like you could deliver a baby with it. But apparently after vulcanizing, the condoms are taken off of the farmers. Right. And they are washed. So the condom you're using has been washed before. I just find it odd, I guess. Probably mechanically washed. Right? Yeah, it's a washing machine, and that's to remove odor pathogens and allergens. So it's good that they're doing this, but I agree with you. I kind of thought it was just like it was made and packaged immediately and then it goes on your body. Right? Exactly. Not quite. So you wash it, and then there's quality testing, which is a lot of pretty cool stuff. There's some cool quality tests, if you ask me. Well, let's get into it, then. Well, there's a standard called zipping popping, rolling, and other condom testing. Yeah. What you're testing for is you want to prevent three things that make a condom ineffective. Breaking a condom, not good. Slipping off, definitely not good. And leaking. None of these are good because they're not preventing one thing or two things that you're trying to do, which is either pregnancy or some sort of socially transmitted infection. Not Czech. You notice that it's not STD anymore. It's STI. Right. I didn't know that. When did that happen? Maybe she just made the change herself. Oh, you think? No, I don't know, because maybe disease doesn't quite scientifically capture all. I'm sure that's it yeah. I don't know when that happened, but I'll bet it was fairly recent. I bet you're right. So one of the two tests that they're really looking at is you don't want it to break and you don't want it to leak. Right? Yeah. So they test the condoms tensile strength. Basically, they just get a bunch of third graders in there and blow the condoms up and see how much volume it holds. Until it breaks. Right? Yeah. They're not third graders. That's pretty much the long and short of it. They inflate them, they stretch them, they fill them with water and hang them up. I guess they're testing either whole batches or selected condoms from the batch. Right. And yeah, they fill it full of water and look at it. That's the utter test. Is that what it's called? Okay, I just made it up, but I think it's good. I bet you that's what they call it on the line. And they're either look at it or else if they want to be slightly more scientific, they'll roll it along like water absorbent paper and see if there's any water. Yeah, and there shouldn't be. Remember, again, latex condoms don't have any kind of pores. No. And then there's another leak test which is a lot more scientific, or at least it's probably funer to do. I wonder how many factories use this method if it's super modern or what? And it's such a factory unit. There's also like third party companies that make their money by testing condoms for factories or maybe as watchdog groups. That's true. So how does the electricity work? So there's a couple of different ones. There's one where they take condoms and they put them at top metal rods that have been dipped in conductive solution. Then they run a current through these metal rods. And the condoms, being rubber, shouldn't be conductive. Right. But if there's holes or tears or anything in them, like, the current will run through the condom and then they have a computer watch to see if any condom had a current run through them. Right. Then the other one is where they turn the voltage up. Yes. Dry. Yeah. This is a dry test and they basically like, run a current again through a bunch of condoms. And if there's any holes or whatever, those condoms will burn or melt. Yeah, it stinks. Yeah, burn rubber. Didn't smell good. So those are the main ways that they will test condoms to make sure that you're all good to go when it's go time, you know what I'm saying? Slippage, however, is something they cannot test for because slippage, my friend, is up to you and how you properly or improperly use the condom. Slippage is user error. Yeah. And I'm ashamed to say that we're about to go over the ten steps and how to properly use a condom. I didn't know about one of them. The circumcised step. Well, I didn't know about that. What is it? Well, we'll get to it. So Tracy says storage is where it starts. You got to store it properly. So heat and light is not good. Wallets pockets and glove compartments, in other words, everywhere a teenage boy is forced to store their condoms is not where you should store a condom. It's all bad. You want to keep it in a dry, just sort of room temperature like atmosphere yes. And not at the roller rink. Look at number two. You look at the package, make sure it's all intact, it's not opened, and it has the expiration date. You're within that range. Yeah. And when you do open it, you want to open it carefully. You want to tear along the one side. Sometimes it's a notch. Tracy points out you don't want to open it with your teeth or pointing fingernails. Yeah. You don't want to open your teeth for a couple of reasons, but one of them is you don't want to break it. Right. You want to make sure the condom is right side up. This is the one. I didn't know. I didn't know those are right side. Sure. I didn't know that. Almost 42 years old, and I had no idea that there was an up and a down. I know what you're talking about. Okay. But there is a way to tell what's up and what's down. And the tip, the reservoir should be pointing up unimpeded. I had no idea that's the top. Right. I'm just learning this. So you take that reservoir, right, and you squeeze the air out of it, hold it shut, clasp it shut with your fingers, put it over the tip of the penis. We're doing this. You realize that we've suddenly become a sex ed podcast? Yeah, you missed that. If you are in circumcised, you want to gently pull your foreskin back to relieve the glands. Right. Okay. Which is the tip of the penis. Right? Okay. So you put the condom over the tip of the penis with the reservoir squeeze shut, and then you start to enroll it. Take it, Chuck. That's number six. She also pointed out if you don't have it right side up, it won't unroll correctly. That's why there's a top side and a downside, which now explains a lot. Unroll the condom down the length of the penis all the way to the base. You got to take it to the base. Sure. You want full protection here otherwise, because if you use a condom perfectly, then we'll find out your chances of disease and pregnancy are virtually nil. Yeah. Problems arises when you maybe not roll it all the way down or accidentally get a testicle caught in there. If you need lube, use a water based lube. You don't want to make the mistake of using like Vaseline, I guess it should say petroleum jelly, right. Or baby oil or lotions or anything like that. Anything that could have petroleum. Yeah. That's all oil based. And that's going to not do you any favors in the reliability department. Right. You want it to be water based lubricant. That's right. But she also points out that using extra lubricant is effective in preventing breakage during anal penetration, but in vaginal penetration, it can actually increase the likelihood of breakage of the condom. I did not know that. I did not know that either. We're learning, right? Along with you people. Yeah. I'm so glad I won't PC anymore. Being married is great. Yeah. So after the male ejaculates, this is postcoital ejaculation, you hope. Yeah, that's true. You want to hold the rim of the condom to keep it from slipping off when you exit the vagina and withdraw the penis before the erection is lost. You don't want to have the condom on. Lose your erection while you are still in mid penetration. Sure. And then you want to run outdoors to begin the disposal process, which, as we said, ends in the yard, right? That's right. Remove the condom, wrap it in a tissue, put it in the garbage can, and don't reuse it. No matter what your friend says, don't reuse it and don't wear two of them. Yeah. A lot of people have latex allergies and 99% of late condoms are latex. So some people say, well, latex works the best. I'll just use a sheep skin membrane condom over my penis and then put a latex one over that. Apparently that is basically just really upping the risk of breakage of both. Yes. Or if you think two is better than one. I don't know where this person has been. That's just not smart. You should probably not be with that person. You're thinking about where it's a condoms, just walk away from the bowling alley and go home or the roller rink again. Yeah. And Tracy also points out for our younger listeners, condoms break more often if they're blown up or filled with water before use. So don't use it as a toy and then use it as a disease preventor. Right. And if it breaks, stop what you're doing, get a new one. Yeah, that's a big one because you don't want to be like, oh, well, I went through the first couple of steps doing it, it was fine. And if you're serious about this, then what you're trying to do is prevent pregnancy or infection. You're going to want to replace it like it's worth if you used it in the first place, then you might as well stop for a second to get another one. All right, don't be a jerk, I guess, is what you're saying. Seriously, you're trying to prevent, like you said, pregnancy? Most people are when they use condoms or more than 30 types of viruses or bacterial infections or parasites, right? Yeah. Sex is dirty business. It certainly can be. I think this proves that there is a God. You know you're a pet mom when your camera roll is all pics of your pet. At Halo, we get it because we are pet moms, too. And just like you, we know their nutrition is one of the most important decisions you'll make. Halo is natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science and thoughtfully sourced. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Find Halo at specialty pet stores and online. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker, and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo. So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame, and chocolate covered goodness with real time, data driven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM, let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting. All right, so you know all those diseases and bacteria for the most part. Do we need to go over those? Sure. Chlamydia, genital, herpes, genital warts, gonorrhea, hepatitis B, HIV, of course, pubic, lyse, syphilis, trichomoniasis, yeast infections, these and many more can all be yours if you don't use a condom and you sleep with somebody who has any of them. Yes. And genital wards and herpes and pubic life and a few other STIs can still be yours even if you do use a condom, because they are not passed through the fluids. They are passed through skin and hair and other stuff down there in that area. Yeah. So, Chuck, how effective are condoms? Like you said, when you use them correctly, they work like they've been proven to work. We have come to the pinnacle of male prophylaxis with the latex condom. It totally works. If you use it correctly and you use it every time, you're going to be fine. And they know this by doing studies of specifically serodiscordant couples, which means one couple has HIV, and one person in the couple has HIV, the other partner doesn't. And they found that people who used to kind of correctly every time they had sex had pretty much a nil chance or zed chance of contracting HIV by the end of this study. Yeah. There's a two year period of these couples, so there's a lot of sex going on. It wasn't just like, hey, you had sex one time and you didn't get HIV. It's great. Right. So good study from UNAIDS or UNAIDS? Right. Which does make sense. UNAIDS like they're fighting AIDS. They should be called UNAIDS. Is this United Nations, though? Yeah. Okay. They found that couples that didn't use them all the time, just kind of here and there, had a 14% to 21% chance of contracting HIV during the study. Yeah. And pregnancy prevention is pretty similar over the course of the year. And of course, I don't see any ages or anything like that here. It just says a woman. But a woman using a condom over the course of the year who uses it perfectly for every active sexual intercourse with a man has only a 3% chance of becoming pregnant. So 97% effective. That's pretty good. Sure. If you use a condom typically, which is apparently not that great, not that well, and you're a woman, you have 12% chance of an unplanned pregnancy. But both of those beat not using anything at all, which leads to an 85% chance of getting pregnant. Over the course of a year. Yeah. Just by having sex. It doesn't say how many men or anything like that, how many trips to the roller rink this entails. So what year is it? There's a lot of roller rink sex going on. What got me started was the idea of a condom, like in your pocket? Sure. Remember the condom ring in the jeans or in your wallet or whatever? Yeah. Just associate that with the roller rink and like, kids with half mustaches and mullets and stuff like that. That's where the roller rink reference came from. All right, so some folks say that, you know what, if you make condoms available to my teenager, it's going to encourage them to have sex. Studies suggest that that is not the case. This one study observed over 40 teenagers over an eight year period, which is a pretty good study, if you ask me. By the end of the study, all of the participants were sexually active, and the teenagers who use condoms during their first sexual encounter were not more likely to have more partners than those who did not. But the condom using teens were less likely to have been diagnosed with gonorrhea or chlamydia. So this study at least points out that it's not going to encourage promiscuity, but it will keep you from getting pregnant and disease. Yes. I think being in your teens encourages promiscuity. Yeah. And that's kind of the whole argument. It's like, are they going to do it anyway? And if they are, then make sure they have plenty of condoms. And other people say, well, we're not going to do it anyway. They just need to abstain. And condoms are like the devil's temptation. I'm ready for humanity to evolve more in that realm. It made sense for 18 year old males to be at their peak of sexual prowess and girls being able to get pregnant when they were 14, 300 years ago, when we were living to 30 years old. It makes sense these days. It's just like a cruel joke. Well, you know what's interesting is we're actually going the other direction. Like, puberty is coming younger and younger. The average boy enters puberty, and that doesn't mean sexual maturation, but begins puberty at age seven or eight. Now, that's crazy. And see, nowadays people are getting not everyone, but people are waiting longer in general to get married and have a family, and it's getting harder and harder for older people to get pregnant, much less the man who starts the decline. After 18 years old, you get married in your mid 30s, it's like, sorry, my best days were wasted. Right, well, which is ironic, because by that time, you can grow a decent mustache. I know. All right, so there's this whole thing associated with condoms. They are a unique breed of product. Yeah. If you look at them as a commodity, as a retail product, then they should be the same as candy or a toy or what have you, but something that these other products lack is what's called social marketing, which is what makes condoms virtually unique. There is a great public interest in condoms being purchased and distributed and easily gotten by everybody in the world. True. Whether it's for population control, which is pretty sinister sounding, or through disease prevention. But governments around the world invest heavily in condoms, and by doing that, they basically just buy a bunch of condoms and turn around and sell them at a discount. Yeah, it's called social marketing. And the idea is that if they don't want to make them free, although there are plenty of places to give out condoms. Sure. But they want to make them very cheap for those who can't afford them, because the idea is that if you pay for something, you're more likely to use it. Sort of like the co ed model. These kids who pay for their textbooks, instead of just giving them textbooks, they're more likely to use it. So I don't know why I made that connection. But it's the same thing. Well, it is. It's the exact same principle. You have some sort of ownership over something you've paid for. Yes. And Tracy said the rule of thumb is that a year supply of condom should cost no more than 1% of the target countries per capita gross national product. And I don't think that's just Tracy saying that either. Well, now, she didn't make that up. So the other aspect of it, one part of social marketing is buying condoms and distributing them for cheap. And this is like federal government, national government level stuff. And then the other side of it is educating the public. Yeah. You got to wear them. Yeah. And you have to know how to wear them. We could probably get some federal funding for this episode, if you ask me. How about a little kickback? You have to know how to wear them. You have to know what they do. You have to know why to wear it, why you should wear them. You should be able to explain it in plain, simple terms to anybody who is riding a bus that if they don't wear a condom, they can die or their junk can fall off, or there's all sorts of terrible stuff that can happen to you if you don't wear a condom. Right? Yeah. And it's been pretty successful in countries like Thailand, where they have a big commercial sex industry. In 1989, they started a campaign for commercial sex workers to use condoms 100% of the time, always use them, and pretty amazing results. In 1989, before the campaign, 14% of the sex workers had consistently used condoms. By 1994, just five years later, 94% used condoms. And not coincidentally, STI cases diagnosed among sex workers fell from over 400,000 per year to just under 30,000 per year. Right. That's a huge drop off the condom. That's all you got to do the rest of the world. Watch Thailand. Their jaws fell open, so they started buying condoms like crazy. So, like, in 2000, for example, south Africa bought 250,000,000 condoms, 290,000,000 condoms. Botswana purchased 12 million, 450,000,000 condoms in India. And these are the places where they need to use condoms. Like, you need to use them everywhere, but places like Africa and India are like in Thailand. Obviously, you need to use the condoms. Why? To prevent disease and to prevent pregnancy. Right. But you'd want to do that anywhere. Well, that's what I said. But places that are overpopulated and people are dying because they're starving and where disease is rampant in villages, it's a little more important than other places, I would say. I think it's probably kind of a controversial statement, though, among people who don't feel like you should be using condoms. That's government carrying out population control. Is it? I don't know. I think on its face, yeah, definitely is. The government's very interested in not having a starving population? And one way to do it, it's a control population. But is that a bad thing? Like, if people are willing to use condoms when they have them handy, then why wouldn't you want to provide that to them? Yeah, it's not a bad thing. I'll go to Finn. That till my dying breath. Good for you, man. Yeah. So this is a ton of condoms we're talking about. That was just 2000, right. Many tons of condoms. Right. Apparently the condom industry, which is just loving this social marketing stuff, is producing between eight and 12 billion condoms a year. Right. Apparently we would need 15 billion to effectively cover everybody for a year. Everybody is sexually active. You would need 15 billion condoms. So they're close, but not close enough. Right. That means everybody in the world does it more than twice a year because there's like 6 billion people on the planet. Right. Well, I mean, if you want to average out like that, I think a lot of people aren't, and a lot of people are doing it more. But sure, if you want to throw an average on it. The thing is, we're short of condoms, which is mind boggling. There's only 60 factories on the planet making condoms for the whole world. Yes. So when you look at it like that, it's pretty impressive. But apparently the condom industry is stepping up the call and by 2015 is projected to have to produce 25 billion condoms. There you go. That's a $6 billion industry. That's good. But what's crazy is that's a $6 billion industry, los Angeles County, from porn, makes one 6th of the equivalent of the entire condom industry's. Money in porn? In just porn in just that one county. Yeah. See how everything is connected? I do. So here in the United States, the FDA controls something called good manufacturing practices, rules, and standards for making drugs and things like condoms. So the FDA has standards. There are also international standards. The International Organization for Standardization, they have their own standards that cover these medical devices. They have silly numbers attached to them, but that really means nothing to anyone, does it? Well, in case you ever wanted to know, ISO 40 74 two is the international standard for condom manufacture and distribution. That's right. And we're talking about standards. We're talking about acceptable levels of condoms that are defective per batch. I would imagine the average consumer is like zero. Yeah, that'd be nice. Accreditation for labs that test these procedures, materials, shelf life, stability. They're just making sure all that is up to snuff. Yeah. And again, as we said, the standards are in this manual called zapping, popping, Rolling and other condom testing tools. Is that very repeating? Yeah, condoms used to be. They're a little more acceptable to buy these days. Shouldn't be embarrassed to walk into your grocery store and buy condoms. You said the 41 year old. Exactly. But it's not that way for everyone. It's not that way for every group because they are taboo in some religions. Catholicism famously does not allow the use of contraception. Orthodox Judaism, apparently Islam does allow it if you are married, heterosexuals, Homer foot, and you have reason to prevent pregnancy. And then conservative Christian groups have long promoted abstinence rather than the use of condoms, and sometimes even fought the education and distribution of condoms for reasons we said earlier. Like they think it makes their children promiscuous and they will want to have sex because they now have this condom that is the key to them wanting to have sex. Right. And it's not up to the government to carry out population control. Exactly. 88 in Nevada has been mandatory to use condoms if you are in a brothel. So highly regulated sex industry there in Nevada. Nevada. Nevada. Excuse me. So Josh, who uses condoms? Everybody who can get their hands on them apparently uses condoms. The UN says that two thirds of the world has ready and available access. Ready and easy access to condoms, right. Yeah. And they actually created a definition. You have to cows love the unready, and easy access to condoms mean you have to spend less than 2 hours a month buying condoms, I guess. Like taking a bus into town or something like that. Yeah. If you live in the middle of nowhere in Africa, it might take a while to get a condom. So this distribution net of condoms needs to be pretty wide. Pretty woven. Well woven, yeah. And then you also don't want to pay more than 1% of a person's monthly take home pay wherever they live. That's right. So when you in the world is trying to distribute these and make them available, those are the criteria they look for as far as, like, what they're going to charge people maybe in one of these less developed countries. Right. And we found that because of efforts like this. Condom use around the world has increased, apparently, prior to the 80s. Evaluations of condom usage has just been married couples. I don't understand why? I don't know. Apparently things it was maybe Tadrey or something, who knows? But the Brits went ahead and did a survey in 1950 and found that for their first sexual encounter, 30% of men and women used a condom. By 1990. About 60% did. Right. Yeah. So there's definite increase in condom usage. They found that people who live with their partners typically use condoms less. Yeah. Makes sense. I guess the older you are, the less likely you'd be to use condoms. Probably again, because you're in a long term monogamous relationship. Right. And then people with latex allergies tend to not use condoms. Yeah. And these were studies from Europe mainly, but I imagine it's pretty similar in other parts of the world. Yeah. But hearteningly people in Netherlands, France, Belgium and Britain, they found that the more partners a person had, the more likely they were to use condoms. To use a jimmy hat. A French letter. French letter. I don't even know what that one is. All right. There are female condoms that are fairly new when they come around. Switzerland approved here in the United States and 93. And it is a polyurethane sheet, sort of like a male condom, except it's got two rings, one on either end, one a little smaller on one end, and that fits in the woman's vagina. And it sort of is just like a reverse of what the male condom is. Some of the benefits is a woman can put this in beforehand, whereas a man obviously has to be go time, has to have the erect penis. Right, exactly. Like the woman can insert this anytime. Anytime. Well, I'm sure there are recommendations for how long that you use this thing as well. Sure. But it is another barrier method that protects against HIV and pregnancy. They tend to be reusable. Yes. Because it's polyurethane. You can use oil based lubricants. Yes. And also in places where it's difficult or impossible, because of social norms, for a woman to insist that the guy wear a condom. This is very useful because it's given control of who uses the condom when to the woman true. It is more expensive, which is one of the disadvantages. And that could lead some people in developing nations to wash it and reuse it, which is not recommended. And apparently in trials, clinical trials, it's slightly less effective at preventing pregnancy and STIs than male condoms. But it's way better than nothing, obviously. Sure. What else do we have? We have spray on condoms. Yeah, sort of. Not yet. They're still being toyed with, apparently. Yeah. This guy named I can't remember his first name. His last name is Krause. He's a sex educator from Germany, and he apparently had trouble finding condoms that fit him when he was a younger man. He's 30 now. I get the idea that he was small. Oh, I get the idea. The opposite idea. I don't know, because later in the article, he talked about being small and like, I want to make condoms for smaller guys because oh, I missed that part. Yeah, it's funny. New ideas to have a range of sizes, like six sizes. The market's wide open for small condoms. Apparently, Trench tried it a few years ago and discontinued them almost immediately because they didn't sell any condoms for the smaller man or something. Right. Yeah. Although Magnum condoms have 17% of the market share. They're like 15% bigger than normal condoms. Yeah. And Krause, his theory is that guys that are smaller don't want to walk into a store and buy the small condoms. Right. He's working on the spray on condom, but he's also working on different sizes that I think are a little more the packaging is a little less obvious. It's not like you don't walk up and buy, like, the teeny weenie. Well, I think he wants to make it a little more clandestine. He originally set up this website, which is pretty cool, where you can download this measuring tape that you print out and use, and then you enter in your dimensions in the website, and it brings up all of the condoms for sale in Germany that are, likeliest, to fit you best. This is pretty cool. Yeah. But now he's created the spray on condom. Yeah. Here's how this thing works. You put your penis in a tube, and it sprays from many different directions. The condom latex onto your penis, your erect penis, and then it has to dry, which is one of the problems. It hisses when it sprays. So some dudes are worried that that might ruin the mood. Some guys were a little worried about putting their penis in this tube, period. Sure. And then liquid latex takes about two to three minutes to vulcanize. And in order for people to buy these things, he thinks it's going to have to be ready in, like, five to 10 seconds. Sure. Because it's like, you better learn how to juggle or something to keep the interest going for those couple of minutes. Is that what does it juggling? Juggling or, I don't know, maybe making an omelet. And then there are the anti rape condoms, which are controversial, to say the least. Oh, yeah. A South African doctor came up with these, and they are like, the female condom. But it's also like I hate to say it, but the closest analogy is like a Chinese fingertrap. Yeah. Once the disk goes in, there's these plastic teeth that hold it in place, and only a doctor can remove this basically giant female condom that's now attached to your penis. And the reason she came up with this was because rape in South Africa is out of control. Some survey from 2009 found that one in four South African men admit to raping a woman and that they think possibly 1.4 million women are raped in South Africa every year. That's the population of Phoenix. Unbelievable. So this woman came up with this. It's basically like the female condom that will immediately inflict pain on the rapist. The woman can, I guess, get away, but the man stuck with this on and he has to go to the emergency room where hopefully the police will be there to arrest him. Well, the woman doesn't necessarily get away, which is one of the pitfalls that she admits to. It could encourage violence against the woman in the moment. And another person from the CDC says that it's also a form of enslavement. It's a constant reminder of a woman's vulnerability, and it gives them also a false sense of security. But the psychological trauma of the rape is still there, but at least you're going to catch the guy, is their rationale. And when people have told her this is a medieval thing that you're coming up with, she says, so is rape. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Yeah. And that thing is called the rapeax rapaxe. And I believe it's rapax.com, maybe or something that takes you to the website. But if you type in ratebox into your search browser, that's going to bring that up. Great. What else, Chuck? I don't have anything else. You don't want to talk about the goat condom. That's population control, man. All right, let's talk about it. We are goats to some people. There's something called an olor. That it's basically this impediment that hangs from the abdomen of a male goat that keeps him from it's a barrier to prevent him from penetrating the female during intercourse. Right? Yes. And they use this to control goat population so that they don't starve. Sounds familiar. And it's not something that goes on the penis. I think it's just a physical barrier. A male goat chastity belt that the goat knocks into called an olar. Thank God for that. Yeah. It's good, though, crack wise, but sure it's better than starving goats. That is condoms. Well done. Well done to you, too. Not much giggling. I wonder how many times you said penis. Penis. A bunch. More than we ever have in a conversation, I would say. I would say that's probably fairly accurate. I wonder if we top that. Saturday Night Live gets use of penis. Remember at the nudist camp? Oh, yeah. With Kevin Nealon and Mike Myers. Hey, penis sounds great. Let's see. If you want to know more about condoms, you can find this very thorough, comprehensive article on the subject by typing condom into the search bar athouseofworks.com. You can also type in sex and reproduction and it'll bring up a lot of really good, well written, well researched articles that will probably answer a lot of questions you might have about that kind of thing. Yeah, I think we should start peppering these throughout do a little more sex ed here and there. Okay, that's good. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? For all their days at the dog park and nights sleeping in bed. Your bed. Yep. We mean that kid. Your dog. Halo Elevate is natural sciencebased nutrition for their best health. It's guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands. That means digestive health, heart and immunity. Support healthy skin and coat hip and joint support and strengthen energy. Find Halo Elevate at petco pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores. Learn more@halopets.com. 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 well, since we said chuck said sex said. You know what that means. You know what that means. It's time for listener mail. All right, I'm going to call this music experiment. You guys are awesome. Been listening since about 2010. Just listen to why does music provoke emotion? I thought I would share an experiment that I did a few years ago. I came up with the idea of listening to my music in sequential order by year of release. I remember this guy. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I don't have his name, though. I feel awful. I started dividing it up by five years, and each five year period took about one and a half to two weeks. So he's basically only listening to that era in order, one at a time. Right. So like the fifth week of September 1962, which never existed like that. Well, just in order. Like, I'm listening to the 1950s music. Okay. For this week. So the whole thing ended up taking about three and a half months, which is much longer than I planned. I'm a big music guy, and I started at around pre 1950s. I should note that while I did this, I did my best to isolate myself musically, avoided listening to anything else that wasn't from that period that I was in that week. It's kind of cool. It ended up being one of the most rewarding experience I've had in a long time. Aside from noticing many new things and songs. I've listened to countless songs before. I feel like I began forming a connection with the time period of the music I was listening to. You. I'm wearing a poodle skirt right now. At times I could almost feel the angst or even excitement of events long past, as if I had lived them. Events that weren't necessarily mentioned or addressed in the songs themselves. By the time I was done, I felt. Like I had traveled through time. I had a strange connection with events I had never experienced, except through the music that was popular at the time of those events, many things that didn't make much sense to me musically all of a sudden had a different significance. That's cool. So thanks for the work, guys. It definitely makes my drive to work a much more enjoyable. Thanks again. And I wish I had your name. We'll read it if you send it in. Nice. Okay. Yeah. So sorry. Gary. Billy. Or Johnny or Fred Cole. See, we don't want people with condom stories, do we? Do we? Of course we do. It's like a bad idea. I think it's a great idea. Well, then you ask for it, guys. We want your condom stories. Ladies. We want your condom stories. Okay, if you live in New York City and you can explain that's a good one. The condoms on the street and sidewalk. Great one. Although what's there to explain, really? Well, I mean, where do they come from? Maybe they're coming up from the sewer. Oh, that's a good idea. Maybe they are. Or maybe they're being tossed out of cabs. Maybe they're from the roller rink. Anyway, if you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyteano, and you can send us a good old fashioned email, too. Stuffpodcast@discovery.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 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." | ||
Why should you never scare a vulture? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/why-should-you-never-scare-a-vulture | Being ravenous eaters of decaying flesh, vultures have long been shunned by humans. But because of their disgusting habits, vultures provide a much-needed service to the rest of the organisms on Earth, making them the unsung heroes of their ecosystems. | Being ravenous eaters of decaying flesh, vultures have long been shunned by humans. But because of their disgusting habits, vultures provide a much-needed service to the rest of the organisms on Earth, making them the unsung heroes of their ecosystems. | Tue, 23 Jul 2013 14:07:23 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=14, tm_min=7, tm_sec=23, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=204, tm_isdst=0) | 27936898 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. We both look like we're in some sort of bike club because our hair is equally short when yeah, I got the summer budge cut. Let's see your fingernails. You keep them trimmed? Well, I chew the nails, you know. Yeah, I got mine trimmed, too. Okay. Is that one of the rules of Fight Club? Yeah. I didn't know that wasn't scratching. It wasn't a rule. It was one of the reasons to keep your fingernails trimmed in your haircut. Yeah. You know what I'm going to bring back? I saw Gangs of New York the other day. Again, the fish hook, when the guy fish hooks the dude. That's a classic move in, like, old school fighting. Like, you put your fisticuffs up, and then if you get a hold of a guy, you can give him the fish hook. You're bringing that back, huh? I'm bringing back well, don't practice on me. And I even practiced on myself a little bit because I was like, is that really an effective move? And it hurts, and I didn't even do it. Yeah, it hurts me right now. Just trying it. I'm going to bring back vertically striped pants. Okay. And I'll fish hook you. So how are you doing? It's been a little while now. It's been about three or four days. In the magic of podcast releases, we are right on schedule. Okay. I have a story for you. It's tragic, but it's interesting, and it relates to what we're talking about. Like any good intro ship. Great. So in April 2013, she was hiking through the Pyrenees in France with a couple of friends, and she lost her footing, and she fell 980ft wow. About 300 meters to her death, obviously. And of course, her friends were like, oh, my God. They probably said something like sakura blue or something like that. Right. And contacted the authorities, and the authorities got out there pretty quick. Within 45 minutes, they located and reached her dead body, but what they found was nothing but her bones and her tattered clothing and shoes. 45 minutes. Within 45 minutes, the local Griffin vultures had picked the woman clean. Wow. She went from being alive to 45 minutes later, being a skeleton. And as gruesome as that is, it's actually a really good sign if you are pulling for healthy vulture populations. Yes. And you know what? That actually dispels a myth right off the bat. Vultures actually prefer fresh meat. Yeah. Okay. They don't necessarily like rotten flesh, but they will eat rotten flesh, but they prefer fresh meat of a dead carcass, though. Right. Now, the reason why there were so many vultures where they were able to pick this woman clean is because there's a lot of Griffin vultures in France. And the reason there's a lot and the reason that they're hungry is because the french government says you can't shoot these vultures, leave them alone. And also, farmers burn your dead livestock. So you have a bunch of vultures that are protected from humans, which is their number one predator, who are hungry because their food supply is being burned by said humans. So when an unlucky human slips and loses their footing in the Pyrenees, the vultures pick a dead body clean in 45 minutes. That's pretty quick. Now follow me, Chuck. Over to Nepal. The Himalayas. Very nice back in the mountains. It is. I got my magic carpet cleaned. It is very nice. It smells like a new car. It has a new car scent sprayed on it. Is that coconut? No, new car. Okay. So in the Himalayas, you've got two different groups, the Zoroaster and the Tibetan Buddhists. Yeah. And they hate each other. They are into sky burials. Remember those? Yeah, sure. Okay, so you want to refresh everybody with sky burial is yeah, sky burial is basically when you leave your loved one's body out in a field for the vultures to pick clean. Right. And Zoroaster, very natural, and Buddhists both believe that you shouldn't just bury a dead body, shouldn't cream in a dead body. It pollutes the Earth. So you give it to the vultures, which are kind of the spiritual beings in both religions, and they poop, and that pollutes the Earth. The problem is there are so few vultures in the Himalayas these days that they can't take care of the dead bodies that they put out there, so the Zoroasters and Buddhists are having to ship them out of the country. Really? Yeah. They're not even able to perform sky burials. No, they do, but, I mean, they're not fulfilled. Right. Because there's not enough vultures. The reason why there's not enough vultures, we found out in 2006, is because of non steroidal antiinflammatory drug called dicofinec. Nice. Yeah. And there are 23 species total worldwide, vulture on every continent but Australia and Antarctica, which I was surprised in Australia, and that's like, I bet they would have a ball out there. Yeah. Vulture central. Yeah. It's just wide open territory and dead bodies everywhere. Especially if Nick Cave has anything to do. Exactly. And sadly, 14 of those species are endangered or threatened at this point. And the Dichlophonic is a big culprit. Ranchers used it to on their cattle, and then the vultures would eat and just like from one eating of dead cows would kill the vultures. Yeah. It gave them a kidney failure, and the vultures will be on their perches and just fall over dead. And it wiped out three different species of vultures. Eastern Old World vultures. 95% of the three species were just wiped out. Yeah, I got 99, actually. Wow. The good news is they banned it in 2006 in India, and in 2012, the population increased for the first time in many years. Yeah. So they're slightly on the uptick in that area of the world, at least. But it was a huge mystery of what was going on, what was killing the vultures. And luckily for these vultures, their populations were dwindling. In India, Indians very much prize the vulture as like a necessary creature to create, I guess, or promote sanitary conditions in nature. Yeah, well, I mean, if they're eating the sick animals, then the sick animal bacteria isn't going to get into the ground and leach into the water. Right. And if there are no vultures around, there potentially could be like spikes and disease and things. They're actually really necessary. They really are. Not only are there spikes and diseases, vultures kind of take it for the team, the team being the rest of the earth. They step in and they intercede. Like you said, if there's a cow with some anthrax or something, a vulture eats the carcass. But the vulture's digestive system is attuned to this acidity level that will kill most, if not all, of whatever disease that cattle had. And so it breaks the chain of infectious diseases. And so you think of vultures as like these very dirty animals, but they actually are performing this really specific and important ecological service to the rest of the world. Yeah. And we'll get to some more like vultures or clean facts, which don't necessarily sound like vultures are clean. Well, we'll tell you, we don't want to rent. Yes, they're cleaner than you'd think. Exactly. That's a good way to say it. And also you were saying, like, if the vulture zone around disease can outbreak. Not only that the service that they perform is so vital. The service it is. It's a service to an extent. They're basically nature's cleanup crew and they do it by eating rotting, flesh carrying, and they do it really quickly, like in sky burials before the decimation of the eastern species, the Indian species, they could take care of a dead body in like 30 minutes. 30 minutes. There's no other species that can do that. And so this service, it is a service that they provide. Vultures Inc. LLC it makes so much sense, evolutionarily speaking, that the old world species that are in the Eastern hemisphere and the new world species that are in the Western hemisphere are not related. They co evolved. Two of the same thing evolved from two different groups of animals. They're not related. So it's almost like nature was like, yeah, this is never going to happen, these birds are never going to spread, but we're going to need them over here. So let's just have everything evolved into vultures. Vultures came up separately on two different sides of the world. That's how important they are. Very important. Yeah. The old world vultures, which are eastern hemisphere, like we just said, they're twelve species of those and they are related to hawks and eagles. They nest with sticks and things like you might see a vulture nest, like sticking out on a log sticking out from a cliff like it's a cartoon or something. That's how I imagine it. Western Hemisphere over here is where we have the New World ones. Very progressive vultures. They don't build nest and they're just like we're not into that because we like mid century modern digs. Exactly. Like the California Condor especially. Yeah. And you know, the condor is rebounding. Talking about endangered. They dip to a low of 25 in the 1980s. Yes. And now as a 20,012, there are 405 and they're pretty awesome. Their wingspans get to be like 9ft across. Yeah. I think it's not the California condor, but I think it's one in Africa. It can get as high, as wide as eleven. That's a big bird, man. Yeah, it's huge. Like the bird could take you down. Yeah. And I think people don't like vultures because they feed on carrion and it's sort of gross. Right. People think another myth that they circle dying animals just waiting for them to die. It's not true. No, but because they circle and because like, a California condor can circle up to like, 15,000ft, that's amazing. It is. That they smell these things, right? It depends. They have either really great sight, really great smell, or both. So in North America, turkey vultures have incredible sense of smell, but they're a New World species and they're unrelated to Old World species, so it can go either way. But typically it's either their site or their smell. That's really great. Yes. I like the ones that look like they're wearing feather boas that are completely naked on the neck and head and then just have the big puffy black feathers around the neck. Well, let's talk about that. Why are vultures featherless on the head? Hygiene? Because they're sticking those heads and necks into carrying and rotted flesh and it's actually just a nature's way of saying, I don't want your feathers, your nice feathers, to get covered with blood and guts. Right. So it's actually sanitary. They don't sing either. That's another reason vultures get a bad rap. There's no, like, vulture song like other birds. I guess people do like singing birds. Vultures grunt and hiss, apparently, are like the two sounds they make. Oh, yeah. And that's not going to get you very far if you're bald, wearing a feather boa, grunting and hissing and you're covered in blood and guts. People aren't going to be like, what a nice bird. Well, yeah, it's not just people, too. Apparently animals kind of vultures are like, on the outskirts of all organisms. Like they have no natural predators. Any predators they do have are like egg hunting predators. They don't go after the live alter, they go after the eggs. That's just me. And then you will once in a while, in times of extreme famine and hardship, find, like a big cat attacking a vulture. But for the most part, everything just leaves vultures alone. Humans, bobcats, everybody just wants vultures to stay over there and eat your riding flesh, your disgusting things. Yeah. And they're considered birds of prey, even though they rarely feed on live animals. Even though they will if they get hungry enough, they will. Yeah. Apparently in France, where you can't kill a vulture and you have to burn your lives, they're attacking live animals. Yeah. They're taking away live animals. That's specific to Old World Vultures. They have a grasping foot, so they can carry away things like babies. Like you said, new World vultures are more like chickens and they can run, but they can't grasp. Yeah. And I don't even think the ones with the grasping feet are like they're still not meant to grasp that much. Right. Like, from what I read, the talons, even on the ones that are able to do so, it's not like an eagle or a barn owl or anything. They can, like, snatch your cat off your back deck. Right. So no feathers on the head or neck. It's sanitary. And believe it or not, what's the other thing that makes them sanitary? They urinate on themselves. What? Yeah, it's true. They pee on their own feet. Yeah. They pee on their feet and legs and it kills bacteria. It keeps them cool, like our sweat does. Yeah. Because the digestive system that has such a high acidity is transferred to their urine. And when they pee on their feet, they're basically cleaning off all of the nasty bacteria that got on their feet from crawling around the inside of a zebra or something. Yeah. I'm proud of you for saying urinate and urine. Urine instead of PB. You know what a group of vultures is called? I love those questions. It's always like, I know what a group of crows is called. Everyone knows that. What is that, a murder? Everybody knew that. Apparently, vultures have a lot of names. They can be a group is usually called a committee, which, like we said, they're a necessary service. Right. So that's a committee, a venue or a vault. That sounds familiar. The voltage vultures, when they're in flight, they're known as a kettle, which I thought was interesting. And when they're feeding, a group is known as awake. Thank you, jum your yeah, probably. So thank you for going off in the woods and doing your thing. Yeah. All right, so I guess we should get to vulture vomit. As if we weren't grossed out enough by eating dead flesh and peeing yourself. Yeah, because you're saying, like, they don't sing, they pee on themselves, they feed on dead animals, they'll eat your dead relative. One other thing that vultures are very much noted for is vomiting in times of stress. And they're freaked out when they feel like they're being preyed upon. When they're startled, vulture will throw up. It's called defensive vomiting. No, hold on, hold on. I think now is a good time for a little message break. Okay? And then we'll talk about defensive vomiting, I promise. Okay. Back to vomit. Yeah. When they throw up, they can get away a lot quicker. Yeah. Like, I just ate \u00a34 of cat meat and I just pipped it up so I can fly out of here quickly. Exactly. So that's one reason that avian biologists think that they throw up defensively. Yes. The other one is this. It's a decoy. It's a present to their predator. Like, don't eat me, eat this. Really? Yeah. And a lot of predators, more often than not, will eat whatever they vomited back up. Because it's not always like digested flesh. It can be something like a big bite of meat that they just chewed very recently. Yeah, because that's how they feed their little baby vulture. So it's regurgitation, like many birds do. So it may not be so different for an eagle to swoop down and say, like, hey, that cat meat looks like you just vomited it up and you just ate it. So what's the big deal? Right? And eagles actually do bald eagles specifically love to eat vulture vomit, which is weird because think about this. Like, the bald eagle is a revered animal, but it's not bald. The vulture is. And it eats vulture vomit. Vultures do the vomiting. Yeah, it's like turning everything just on its head. You're anti American. That is not true. So the other cool thing, I guess you might say, about ultra vomit is it's actually a defense in that it's highly acidic. Like, we're talking PH levels between one and two, which is more than gastric and hydrochloric acid in our own stomach and more Corrosive than acid rain. That's some acidic vomit. Yeah, I mean, it's more crosses than acid rain. It's like if you, I guess, poured acid rain on something, that you'd be like, this will eventually do something to you. Maybe if you're a statue, this is going to harm you in 30 years. Well, we're talking PH levels. Yeah, I remember acid rain kills fish in the Acid Rain podcast we did. Yeah. I guess if a fish comes up and scares the vulture, it's in trouble. Or if you bought a goldfish and you filled up your little goldfish bowl with acid rain, it's not good for the fish or vulture vomit. That's true. If this is in trouble. Point is, it's highly acidic and even more so than other birds of preying and carnivorous birds. Yeah. So, like, vultures kick it up a notch. That's how the vulture doesn't die from eating bacteria that would probably kill other animals. So chuck, that's also their digestive juices. Or how they avoid getting sick eating things that would kill you or me. Yeah, see, that's a good point, because I think people probably wonder, how can they eat all this, like, rancid disease and bacteria rotted flesh. That's how the PH of their stomach. Most things can survive, although they aren't perfect microbe killing machines. You can find traces of, say, like anthrax spores in their stool after they eat infected meat. But for the most part, the fact that vultures eat things that may contain disease have the ability to contain that disease and are naturally reviled by pretty much everything else under the sun and stay away from everything else. They are really great at breaking the chain of infectious disease in nature. Yeah. And endangered and threatened. Be kind to vultures. I would encourage vultures. If you're listening, learn a song or two. Wouldn't hurt, maybe I'd like to teach the world to sing there you go. That melts everybody's heart. Yes. Any carpenter standard? Oh, for sure. And also, it may be like one Christmas song just for the holidays. That's a great one. If you have a problem with vultures still hear me now vultures. In the absence of a healthy vulture population, there are still lots of rotting carcasses, more than there would be if the vultures were around. And where there's riding carcasses, there's feral dog packs. And where there's feral dog packs, there's rabies. And dogs don't stay away from humans like vultures do. They attack humans. Rat populations blow up, too, when vultures aren't around. So leave the vultures alone. Good point. I got one more little tidbit for you. Okay. They're actually using vultures now in forensic science, in the Journal of Forensic Science International, they took a body out. Researcher Katherine Spradley of Texas State University, San Marcos, oh, they have a body farm member. Yes. Go boco the cat. For real. Boco the bobcat. Nice. Okay. And actually, I had to look that one up. Yeah. They have a body farm, like you said, and they recently took a body, dumped it out there to see how long it would take vultures to skeletonize it and distribute the remains. Because basically their aim is to see how long it takes vultures to discover a body, how long it takes the vultures to skeletonize it, how far they will distribute the parts, what they do and don't eat. Because essentially, when you find a body in the woods, sometimes it can be ravaged. And you don't know, like, why are there no bite marks? Who ravaged this body? How long has this body been here? It's great. Why are we finding body parts all over the places that some kind of sicko that's, like, tearing these bodies to pieces. So it's a forensic study, and they got a video camera triggered by motion, and it took 37 days, actually, to be triggered and a 30 strong wake of American black vultures. Wow. Took care of the body in 5 hours. And both of those results surprised, like, how long it took them to get there and how long it took them to skeletonize it. Because it's way longer than usual, like we said. Yeah. Well, 300 can take care of the body in like, 30 minutes, so 35 hours is not too bad. Yeah, they thought it was a little long. And then they got a spatial pattern of the discarded body parts, snapped it with a GPS over 15 weeks. And they're hoping that this pattern, like, AIDS forensics in the future. How far has it gone? Did they say? No, they didn't say. Pretty interesting, though. Yeah, that's very interesting. Forensics vultures saving people from being unfairly accused of being a grisly serial killer. Exactly. Also, one last thing. If you are interested and probably are flush with cash, you can go paragliding with vultures. In the Himalayas, there's a man who's trained vultures. So you go flying on a parasail. You fly attached to a vulture? No, you fly attached to the dude who trained the vultures in a parasail. And the vultures, like, hang around. Yeah, they fly around you. They said it's like swimming with dolphins, but like 5000ft in the air. And they will eat buffalo meat out of your hand. Really? They land on your arm and eat and then fly around. And they're like, thank you. One of them's name is Kevin the Vulture. Really? Well, they let you paraglide with buffalo meat dangling from your ankles. Maybe. Probably. Man, I'd like to do that. That's now on my bucket list. On the chucket list. On the chucket list. Is that it? Yeah, that's it. Okay. That is everything about vultures that we could find. Everybody. We hope you enjoyed it. And let's see if you want to learn more about vultures type vulture into the search barhowtofworks.com. And since I said that, it means it's time for a message break. And how about some list in the mail? Yeah, this one's sort of long now that I'm looking at it, but oh, wait, before we do that, can I plug somebody? Yeah. Okay. So we are not 100% sure. I don't think we did plug this guy before. We're plugging him again if we did. Yeah. What's the harm? Exactly. Thomas Trask was one of the finalists in our Halloween Horror fiction contest that we held last year. Right. Yeah. And we said anybody who made it in the Sweet 16 or actually, I think anybody who entered if you went on to publish anything, let us know and we will plug. So Thomas Tres did just that. He wrote a book called Prism. It's a Sci-Fi fantasy and it's on Amazon. And you can buy it as a paperback or Kindle. So it's Thomas traffic with prism. And it's probably pretty sweet because he wrote one of my favorite stories. The quantum suicide of Alice Walker. Yeah, that was a good one. It was mind bending. I would strongly recommend anything Trask. Right. Frankly. Okay, now it's time for some listener. Now, how about that? Yes, this is an oldie it's about tipping, but it's pretty good tipping story. It's a bartender in Vancouver. Did you read this one? No. It's just every time I go into a coffee place now and I don't tip them. I'm like, do you listen to the podcast? All right, guys. I was working for an upstairs cocktail bar in downtown Vancouver. Great relaxing, cool atmosphere. Three dudes walk in Friday night, sat at the bar and we're part of a bachelor party. Being a bartender, I'm pretty used to this, and I realize there could be a lot of money made if I take care of these guys. To confirm it. One of the three guys did one of these numbers where he says, we're going to be here having fun this weekend. We're going to take care of you if you give us some special attention. You know that guy? Yeah. So I went and put buffalo meat on my ankles. They ordered cocktails and beers, ordered in rounds. I made sure I knew their orders, their names, and gave them new drinks when they were getting low. Nice. Basically gave them really good attention. Needless to say, it was great service. At the end of the night, after all the shots and drinks, bill was about $800. The very same guy he told me I'd be taking care of, paid with his credit card in full, handed me a bill hold, and inside was a nickel. $5. Saturday night comes around 09:00 p.m.. Same guys are all in thought about what happened the night before and decided to be a good person, be the better man, and greeted them by name and the smile. Brought out their usual drinks. Acted like everything was normal, even though I was being eaten alive inside. By the time their bill came, it was even more than the night before. Tonight, another nickel. So that's $0.10 on $1,700. Sunday night rolls around. What do you know? The philanthropist roll in. Still aggravated. I was firm that I would be the better person. Still wow and act like it didn't affect me. Oh, yeah, man, I would be spitting in so many drinks. Even if it was despite them, I was still going to be nice. Drinks were shaken. Beers report around $800. Again, another nickel. Monday comes around. The same guy comes in on the day shift and thinking that they're starting early. As if he wanted there as usual. He said no. He was alone, wouldn't be long. Sat down, pulled out an envelope, put it on the bar. He told me he really wanted to give his friend a great bachelor party and had heard great things about the bar. He never met someone more professional and welcoming, even when they made nothing out of it. He told me that he has gone to a few bars and done this in the past. And it got to the point that some places where they wouldn't even serve them on the second night yet, I acted like nothing had ever happened. He really appreciated this, thank me and pointed at the envelope that it was for me and walked out. I almost didn't want to open it. I'm thinking it would be another nickel. Inside was $2,000. Wow. I couldn't believe it. I was ready to kill these people all weekend, and now I just made two grand for keeping my cool. And that man was Don title or family man. I figured you might find it interesting. And that is Brett from Vancouver. He still has the nickels. And I say, good for you. Two grand tip. And I also say, what a jerk to put this guy through this as some sort of, like, twisted test of how nice a bartender can be. Right. It's really like using the social power dynamic between customer and service. Nothing funny about it or fun about it. I've done this before and people have treated me like a jerk accordingly. Yeah. And he's really risking having things put in his drink, too. I just don't get it. So I would go walk in and say, on day one, this two grand is yours at the end of the weekend if you take care of it. Like do the opposite. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely or just tip like a normal person. Yeah. You can just do that. And don't play games. Yeah. Every time. All right. Yeah. That's my tipping story. That's a good story. Yes. Good for you. What was the name of the guy? Brett from Vancouver. Way to go, Brett. If you have a good story about how somebody mistreated you and then treated you well in the end, but you're not still sure if that made up for everything, we want to hear that story. You can tweet to us at xysk podcast. You can join us on facebookcom stuffyhoodnow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com and check out our website. It's awesome. It's called Stuffyouheanow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseoffworks.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. Comnostuff knowstuff to get a free audiobook download of your choice when you sign up today. 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." | ||
56e5d741-5753-4d49-ac23-aed0014aa226 | Short Stuff: Catatumbo Lightning | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-catatumbo-lightning | Catatumbo lightning is one of nature's most amazing displays of showiness, with strikes occurring 28 times per minute for nine hours a day, 300 days a year. So take cover and take a listen.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Catatumbo lightning is one of nature's most amazing displays of showiness, with strikes occurring 28 times per minute for nine hours a day, 300 days a year. So take cover and take a listen.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Wed, 13 Jul 2022 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=194, tm_isdst=0) | 10970738 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and here's Jerry. And Dave is not here, but that's okay because this is short Stuff, and that's just how we do it. And Chuck, I'm excited about this one because I had no, no idea about this, had never heard of it. And you totally scored with this one. Yeah, it wasn't too long ago. It was in the last six months or so, I became aware of the catatombo lightning. I think I was just looking through, like, weather phenomenon, because that's always interesting. I want to shout out ExplorersWeb.com, Scienceabc.com, NASA, Gov, along with some other websites, because there's plenty of websites talking about the catatombo lightning. Yeah, I want to shout out Atlas Obscura, who I saw a pretty neat little two minute video on. Yeah, I watched that and learned some extra stuff, too. So kind of tumble. Lightning is a very specific, very isolated phenomenon that takes place in one specific spot in Venezuela on a very giant lake. Lake. I'm going to say Marisaibo. Marissaibo. Okay. What do you think? I was going to say Marakaibo, but I don't know if that's a hard Sierra seaweed. That's a great one. Let's go with Marikaibo. Mine was way too fancy. One specific part of this lake, even that's that like, localized. Yeah. And so you'd think, like, okay, big what? There's some lightning that happens this one specific part of this lake. And you would be right if it weren't for the fact that these lightning storms take place at roughly the same time every day, about 300 days out of the year. That's right. And you're saying, okay, who cares? Still big whoop, you got some lightning. It is lightning such that you are getting a possible lightning strike maybe every 2 seconds during this time frame such that it almost provides a near constant night sky light. It's that constant. Here's the other thing, too, about it. That just makes this one of the most amazing weather phenomenon around. It takes place over, like, 9 hours. So every night, almost 300 nights a year, this lightning strikes about 28 times per minute over this one localized area for 9 hours. It's amazing. That's remarkable. And like you said, it lights up enough stuff that you can see everything. And there was actually a very famous raid from 1595 that Francis Drake was carrying out, or about to carry out on the city of Maricaibo on the shore of Lake Maracaibo, appropriately. And he was found out because of that lightning storm, he was seen before he could attack, and they managed to repel the attack. That's amazing. It's also known as the Beacon of Maricaibo because it had served as a beacon for sailors over time. It's one of the oldest lakes on Earth, dating back to 36 million years. And it was a big shipping route. If you were going to the port of Kabimas and Maricaibo, you would go through there, and navigators would count on this lightning as a beacon. It's sort of like having a lighthouse around at all times, in a way, except a lot more dangerous, because if you're thinking like, do people get struck by lightning more there and killed more? The answer for sure is yes. Yeah. NASA calls it the lightning hotspot of the world, which apparently in the Democratic Republic of Congo, that used to be the lightning hotspot. But I'm not sure how it ever would have thought to have beaten the catatombo lightning. But now it's official. Catatumbo lightning, it's it if you're talking about the indigenous people, the wari, W-A-R-I they believed that it might have been the work of fireflies paying tribute to their creator guide. That was wrong. Wrong. It was wrong. But it's always fun to hear what the early folks thought about things. Sure. But instead, we now know exactly what's going on, thanks to some friends at NOAA. And I think we should take a break and we'll come back and explain how this works. What do you think? Let's do it. Okay. So the reason why this phenomenon is so isolated and also so reliable it starts about after dusk, and again, it lasts for about 9 hours is because of the geography of Lake Maricaibo and where it is apparently it's right about at the mouth of the Caribbean. The Caribbean is very nearby, so there's a big, steady supply of warm water that keeps the lake warm. Okay, right. That's part one. Yeah. And as we talked about in our wind episode, wind is created when warm air rises and cooler air flows in to kind of fill its spot and even things out. But one of the other consequences of warm air rising, especially warm air in the tropics that's impregnated with human Caribbean air, as it floats up, it starts to come in contact with colder air that often contains colder ice particles. And when that warm water vapor and those cold ice particles collide, they actually generate static electricity. And it's on a minuscule level for each of these collisions. But if there's enough of them and in this area, there's plenty. All of that stuff can create lightning, and it can create it in aces. That's right. And in the case of, like, Maricaibo, what's going on is it's sort of surrounded on three sides by these mountain ridges. So what that leaves is a really narrow little pathway to the Gulf of Venezuela, where that Caribbean sea water is just constantly bringing in warm water through that little channel. And then you're in the tropics there, so you've got the sun that's also pulling moisture from the lake. And then you've got these winds. And I think they found there's this researcher, Angel Munoz. Very nice, right? Yeah. And he did a bunch of research on this, basically trying to predict, like, coming up with a model to predict conditions that might lead to occurrence of lightning, and not just here, but period. And then applying it here to see what the deal was. Yeah, because they used to suggest that it was uranium deposits or maybe methane deposits beneath the lake that were somehow electrostatically charging the air above it. But I guess they've never found uranium or methane deposits to support that. And it's not even clear whether that could happen. So on helmet, Munios said, I think I've got this figured out. He managed to trace and track the wind that's generated every night. And it's so reliable, it has its own name. He calls it the Maricabo Basin. Nocturnal low level jet. Yeah, he needs to work on that name a little bit. Sure. It should at least be an acronym. Yeah, I was going to say it's not even the Nbnlj. Yeah, not a towel in there. So because of the geography and the topography, that wind comes in every night and it's funneled through that little narrow mouth that you were talking about. But as it pushes along inward landward, it eventually runs into those mountains that ring the lake itself. Right. And when that happens, it goes up and it's pushing all of that warm air right up into that colder air. And this wind, this jet, picks up about the same time every day around dusk. So there's your wind right there. And then you've got the hot water or the hot, warm air that's full of water being pushed up into the colder air. Yeah. And it's kind of interesting. So you have this air that sort of has a tidal motion going as well. So this error is flowing in and then receding again. And just the fact that it's happening at about the same time every day because of the way that everything just happened to be laid out and sit in just the right way to make this happen at the same time every day. Well, not every day, but what is it? 300 days a year? 300 days a year. And there was a period in 2010 where it went six weeks without it. And that was a huge deal because it doesn't usually do that. And they figured out those because of El Ninja bringing very dry wind in. Yeah. And to be clear, these are storms. It's not like you just sit back and watch the light show and it's just like this warm summer heat lightning or something. Oftentimes it's accompanied by really strong surface winds. And I don't know what it's like to live there. I think about a quarter of the population of Venezuela lives sort of nearby. Yeah, it's a lot of people. Yeah. I mean, that's just every single day. I guess they just count on these big, big storms coming in. Yeah. So they've got the lightning show, the catatombo lightning, 300 nights a year, and it's stormy. About 160 nights a year. There is a ton. So what's happening when it's not stormy, but you're getting the lighting. I saw on that Atlas Obscura video that sometimes it can be like 100 sky. You get that light show, but it's really quiet, so that's pretty cool, too. Yeah. Those are the money nights to be there, I guess. For sure. Yeah. And I saw one other thing that I not only saw this year, I didn't realize it, but I had some Botter Minehoff stuff going on because there's this website called Futility Closet that is just an amazing website. So I saw this fact in this article, and then last night, I was on Fertility Closet, and I saw the same fact. That means it's worth sharing, don't you think? Yeah. Let's hear it. Venezuela supposedly was named by Amerigo Vespucci, who named it Venezuela because when he got to the Lake Maracaibo region, he saw people living in huts on stilts, and it reminded him of people living in houses on stilts in Venice. So Venice apparently means little, or Venezuela apparently means little Venice. That's amazing. I thought so, too. I think it's so cool. What else you got? I got nothing else. Well, I'm glad we explained it. I loved ones that are like, this is amazing, and here's exactly how it works. So thank you very much. Angel Munios. Thanks to Atlas, Obscura, NASA, Science, ABC, Explorer, Web and Futility Closet. I love it. Short stuff is out, everybody. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
41c2eec2-53a3-11e8-bdec-cf7c78757ec3 | The Tylenol Murders, Part II | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-tylenol-murders-part-ii | The panic that began in Chicago spreads and begins to change the world. The investigation into the murders turns up leads and suspects, but still no one has ever been charged with the murders. It remains unsolved to this day. | The panic that began in Chicago spreads and begins to change the world. The investigation into the murders turns up leads and suspects, but still no one has ever been charged with the murders. It remains unsolved to this day. | Thu, 30 May 2019 20:29:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=20, tm_min=29, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=150, tm_isdst=0) | 43925082 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant there's guest producer. Josh over there gets enough with the pleasantries. Let's get back to it. Chuck. Tylenol Murders, part two. Part two, if you did not listen to the first part in 1982, seven people were murdered by ingesting tylenol tainted with cyanide. All on the same day. All on the same day. America and much of the world is super freaked out. Johnson and Johnson is the manufacturer. And part one of part two has to deal with Johnson and Johnson and how they handled this in a public relations sort of way. Right. Because there were and are a huge company, like you said in the episode one, they held 37% of the market share which was many hundreds of millions of dollars of Tylenol that they're selling every year. And that's in 1980 $2. Right. Which is like Gazillions now. Right. So it was a very big deal for that company. And the way they handled it is taught in colleges and PR classes all over the world as exactly how to handle a big public relations crisis like this. It's literally called a textbook example of how it's done. Yeah, correct. They did a good job because as you remember from the last episode they found out pretty sure early on that this had nothing to do with Johnson and Johnson. Right. Like it wasn't in their factory, it wasn't in their supply chain. That it happened almost certainly and that it probably happened by some crazed person taking them out of the store, tainting them maybe in the store, in the parking lot, then putting them back on the shelf. But Johnson and Johnson can't come out on the news and say, hey, wasn't us. Right. Well, at first though and this gets overlooked and left out of the college business courses and the PR courses. At first, Johnson and Johnson was not in favor of a massive recall. Sure, because that looks good in one way but bad in another. And they actually didn't recall anything until Mayor Jane Byrne held her press conference on Friday calling for a recall of the tylenol in Chicago. And Johnson and Johnson did a little face palm and went yes, we're recalling all of the tylenol in Chicago. Yes, what she said. Right. So by Friday, the 31 September is the 31 in September. Was this October 1? I have no idea. I think it was October 1. Anyway, by the Friday two days after the death johnson and Johnson recalled all of the title and all in Chicago. And that should have been enough to them. That was enough. But this PR crisis was so massive and spread so fast and as we said earlier in part one became global almost overnight. It was not enough. Yes. And so Johnson and Johnson, within a week of the deaths recalled every bottle of extra strength Tylenol in the United States, which is worth about $100 million at the time, took it back to their factories and destroyed it. So they say. Yeah. Both Johnson and Johnson. Right. I wonder if one of them was like, I don't know about this. One of them said, okay, I'll take all the states west of the Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota and some Wyoming, and then you take all the other states. That's a part one joke. They even got an award, the Public Relations Society of America, which is a real thing, believe it or not. They awarded them their Silver and Bull Award for how they handle the crisis. The Tylenol poisoning. That's right. Okay. And high grade foods. Remember we talked about the bad wieners in the first episode? The ballpark franks that supposedly had razor blades but did not. Right. That still created a public relations crisis for them, even though they were just these little jerks in Detroit. And they won the Golden Anvil, which is one higher than silver, because of how they handle the PR crisis brought about by the copycats of the actual Tylenol crisis, which was, in fact, really brought about by two kids in Detroit. Right. Really? Not even copycats. Not the Tylenol crisis. I wonder where those kids are today. Probably in the Senate. I bet one of them was the guy who did our lighting at our Detroit showing. Some more smoke. Yeah. Guys, we did a show in Detroit a few years ago, and very famously, we still use that as the standard bearer for a bad crew. Bad. We had a guy that looked like a former Rhodey for Uriah Heap that was running like a light show, basically during the middle of our podcast and smoke came out, we were like, we had to stop the show. Almost like, Dude, what are you doing? Yeah, well, the lighting was so bad that your highlighter had turned, like, brown and you could no longer hear the word. And you asked him we had to stop the show. And you had to ask him to use a different color light. And his response, because you're a was hanging out and our friend Chris Bowman was hanging out in the sound booth with the guy. His response, according to them, was, you want smoke? I'll give him some more smoke. And we got some more smoke. Like a smoke machine. Yeah, man. And people ask us why we haven't been back to Detroit. That's a big reason. It's a big reason. Not the only reason. Okay, so they won the golden anvil for the Weiner PR moves. McNeil Consumer Products, which is a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson. They actually make Tylenol. Yeah, they make the pills again, the way all the supply chain works is really convoluted. And like you said, they didn't want to recall Johnson, Johnson, everything at first. They want to kind of take it a little slower, I guess. Well, sure, because they found out the drugs are actually fine. Right. Thanks to Pinky McFarland. This is $100 million worth of stock that they were kind of feeling the pressure to recall. That's right. So they were kind of reluctant at first, especially if they were convinced that there was nothing wrong with the rest of them. They had no choice. No, that was the only way to do it was to lose a lot of money in favor of future gains. Yes. But even at the time, a lot of people were like, this is it for Tylenol. Sure. The public has lost faith in Tylenol. So when Tylenol recalled 31,000,050 count bottles of extra strength Tylenol and destroyed it all, there was a chance that not only were they losing $100 million, but that they were losing $100 million of a brand that had already lost the public trust and would never regain it. Which wasn't true, but yeah. No, but they didn't necessarily know that was still up in the air. So it was basically 31 million sacrificial lambs that were killed to show the public this tiny Tylenol is gone forever. That's right. Your chances of dying from taking extra shiny Tylenol are now gone. You can go back to taking Tylenol now. That was one thing that was a big gesture, which is what it amounted to. It was a gesture on behalf of Johnson and Johnson. But they did other stuff, too. They started to do things right out of their reluctance. Once they finally said, we have to just go with this to save face and to win back public trust, they started to do things right. Like including, like, setting up a hotline. Sure. Putting out $100,000 reward for information jump change. Considering how much they had lost already. 1980, $2 still jump change it is. Yeah. And that remains unclaimed. It does. But because of all this, johnson and Johnson managed to regain the public trust and actually managed to position itself as a victim in all of this. Like, yes, there were these, which they were seven murder victims, and Johnson and Johnson, I don't think, ever tried to push them out of the spotlight. But they also managed to portray themselves as the victim of a mad poisoner who may or may not have something out for them. But either way, their brand was taking a huge hit because of this, and they were a victim and were able to generate public sympathy is part of the road to regaining the public trust. Right. Which is why it's taught in PR classes. Yeah. So we'll take you back to 1982. If you weren't around then or old enough to be taking OTC pills and pain relievers. OTC is over the counter, by the way. That's right. Okay. You're down with OTC? Yeah, you know me. So dumb. I love that you played along, though. I appreciate that. You could have made me feel stupid. We've been partners for eleven years almost now. Yeah. That would be one next month or this month, right? Yes. Unbelievable. Not in that way. Okay, so here's how it used to happen. If you wanted to take a pill like a Tylenol, you would get your bottle, you would pop it open with your thumb first. It came in a little box. Sure. But the box wasn't even glued shut. No, you would pop it open with your finger, you would take out the cotton in there and you would take your pill. It was that easy. There was no tamper proofing. The cotton was completely superfluous at this time. Yeah. Cotton originally was introduced to keep Bayer aspirin like the hard tablet from getting crushed in transport. And since they started using capsules and other stuff and figured out how to strengthen tablets, there was no reason for the cotton any longer, but because consumers expected it. I know. Still, today you'll find cotton in your pills, there's no reason for it to be there except because the companies know that you want it to be there. You would be weirded out if there wasn't cotton in your pills. I imagine the cotton lobby had something to do with that too. I'll bet they're not complaining. Big cotton, new fancy OTC pill. Should have MicroModal in there, right? It just comes with a pair of me and these stuffed into your pill pile. You're like, these have been worn. So this was a time, it was a very innocent time previous to this, where you could like and you pointed this out. I remember seeing this in grocery stores. I remember seeing mothers and grocery stores opening food products and smelling them. Yes, that's what you could do. And then closing it back and putting it back on the shelf. Man. Yeah, there's a little mold in this one. Yeah, I'll just leave it for the next person. Forget poisoning. Like, they can be spitting in this stuff. It was allowed. That's just the way it was. America was innocent enough that that was fine. That's how we lived. And that sets up this Tylenol poisoning. It really shows how much of a jarring experience it was for America. Because all of a sudden it's finally sunk in a couple of days. There's something wrong with the Tylenol. Somebody has gone out of their way to poison the Tylenol in order to randomly kill people. And the reason they were able to do this is because it's easy to get into the tile and all tamper with it, put it back, and no one will be any more the wiser. And wait, it's not just Tylenol. Milk doesn't have anything that keeps it tamper resistant. Neither is orange juice, neither is cereal. Neither does cottage cheese. Nothing does. And America reeked out. And this is the reason why this tile and the poisoning is considered widely the first incident of domestic terrorism in the United States. Because it was terrorism, pure and simple. America was terrified. They were petrified not only to take Tylenol or any overthecounter medicine, now they were petrified to drink milk or give milk to their kids. Paula Prince, the flight attendant who was the last one to die in Chicago, she had a coworker who said everything was tainted now. I was afraid to give my kids milk. I was afraid to give my kids cereal. If they could get to the Tylenol, they can poison anything. And that was really emblematic of the attitude, the shock that everybody went through. And as a result, within six weeks, Tylenol said, we got this covered. Yeah. And I have a feeling they did this so fast. There had to have been this idea in place already. Yeah, it was. I saw reference that it was and I imagine it was not done because they're like, that's a lot of money, and why would we bother? Like, it's not like someone's going to poison the medicine. Right. And then that happened. So within six weeks, they had a box that was actually glued shut. So if your little box had been opened, you would be able to tell yeah. That was part one of three of this tamper resistant packaging. That little plastic seal over the top of the bottle after you open it? No, the plastic is over the cap on the outside of the bottle. Yeah, like the plastic foil. And then the actual foil was over the mouth of the bottle that we all have to poke through now to pull out the cotton and whatever still uses cotton. None of that existed until the beginning of 1983. So all three of these are put in place within six weeks. Not only that, they said, you know what, we're going to introduce the caplet, which everyone knows now. We didn't have them back then. Everything was a little capsule that you could literally pull apart and you could snort the Tylenol if you wanted to. Sure. I'm quite sure some people did. I'm sure someone did. But the tablet is a tablet coated with an easy to swallow gelatin. It's solid. I imagine you could tamper with it. And even I even saw, with all these things in place, they said, nothing is tamper proof. But these measures really went a long way to restore the public well, like the good feelings about what was going on. Yeah. Within about a year, Johnson and Johnson managed to win the public's trust back in Tylenol. That's hard to believe. That was really fast. But it also goes to show, like, just how perfectly they did everything from the time they committed to it on. Yeah. And I feel like I remember, like, commercials with CEOs and stuff addressing the public. He became mistaken. I can't remember his name. I want to say Jeffrey Beam. It's like a shoe brand. Gabby Johnson? No. Bill Johnson? No. Jimmy Howard Johnson? Yes. I can't remember his name, but Jimmy Johnson is way far away from that. But he became a public face. He would go on to 60 Minutes and he talked to Dan Rather and Ted Koppa and all those cats. He was out there showing how much the company cared. Yeah. And it had a huge effect. And then in 1983, Congress got involved. They passed what they dubbed the Tylenol Bill, which basically says, if you do something like this, it's now a federal offense. A few years later, in 1989, the FDA actually established guidelines for all manufacturers of any product, really, to make it tamper proof. Yeah. Because it wasn't just the OTC manufacturers that started doing this. They followed suit very quickly once Tylenol came out with it, because they kind of had to if they wanted to keep up with Tylenol. But also the manufacturers of everything, like every product, every consumer product started putting their products in, like, tamper proof packaging, dial, soap started coming, wrapped in cellophane inside the box to trap the chemicals in, I guess. But also to show, like, nobody's injected this with lie or something like that. Although lie is used in the making of soap, isn't it? I remember my fight club. It's pretty funny. Someone injected soap into the soap. All right, let's take another break and we'll come back and talk a little bit more about the profile of the supposed mad poisoner right after this. All right. So this was a very big case at the time. Obviously. Like we've been saying, it was a landmark case. So of course you're going to get psychological profiles, which we should do on profiling, actually. Have we done that? I don't think so. That'd be a good one. Yeah, because it always seems like the trope in movies and TV. But it is kind of like that. No, it is a thing, for sure. It's not like they just make this stuff up. But in the end they said this is probably a man in his twenty s or thirty s who was sort of a Jekyll and Hyde type during the day. He's very ordinary. He could be in the desk cubicle next to you and you wouldn't even know it. Every once in a while you just hear him go, yeah, exactly. But deep in the recesses of his brain, everyone he's plagued with self doubt and has an illusion that a random killing can boost his sense of self worth. Self worth, which sounds like a straight out of a movie. It sounds like a psychiatrist saying, I want to be on TV. Yeah. Listen to me. They also speculated, and this is just completely like conjecture, was that he had probably already taken his own life after the killings. There was one specific person who said that. Yeah. It was, I think, like the medical examiner for Cook County. Yeah. Probably already jumped off the bridge, so don't worry about it. Don't worry, everybody. Yeah. He just threw that out there. I don't know if it was to call people or not, but maybe he's just throwing his two cent in. But I think you kind of said it earlier. I don't remember if it was part one or part two. The whole thing is blurred and become a haze by now. But no one has ever been charged with the tylenol murders. Yeah, that's the ending. But there were a lot of suspects. Remember tylenol set up a hotline and this tylenol task force, 140 person strong task force investigating this, chasing down leads, taking calls on the hotline, thousands and thousands of calls that were coming in. They were trying to whittle those down into actual tips that were worth pursuing. And out of all of them, they deemed 1200 tips or 200 leads worth checking out. Right. That's a lot of leads for a case, even considering you had 140 people working them. And I read somewhere that they started out with like 20,000 suspects or something like that and whittled it down to 400. Yeah. And sort of the sad part is, as quickly as they sort of figured a lot of this out and had that 140% task force, they almost just as quickly, within a few months, realized that we don't have a very good chance at finding this person. Yeah, it became clear very quickly. Yeah, they whittled that down. By the last week of October, the task force was down to 40 people. By the end of the year, it was down to 20. And it was a situation again in 1982 where you didn't have security cameras everywhere, you didn't have credit cards and debit cards creating paper trails. It was a lot easier back then to get away with something like this, to be completely unknown, to walk into a store, maybe slip some tylenol into your pocket, go out to the parking lot and come back in and slip them back on the shelf. It's really easy. You won't even go to the trouble of buying it. Yeah, I guess that's a good point. Steal it and then put it back. But people are using cash. If there were cameras in a place, they were probably trained on employees. I worked at a golden pantry in college, and the only camera we had was directly above us, pointing down at the catch register. It was the one at alps in Atlanta highway. Alps? No, the one on the east side. College Station Road, I think. Okay, yeah. Very interesting job. That's the one where I got the job. I needed a job, I got a job at McDonald's. And I showed up and took the 1 hour training video and they got my uniform number. I went home and I was supposed to show up the next day and I was just like, I can't do it. I can't go work at McDonald's. And I got the golden pantry job later that day. There you go. Which, hey, man, sure. It's like, sign me up from golden arches. The golden pantry. That's like a rags to riches story. I was selling beer and cigarettes. Nice. It was pretty great. You're like? One for you, one for me. Oh, I would never do that. All right, where was I? Oh, yeah, I was a golden pantry. So the cameras trained on the register, you could come and go in a store and no one even knows in the top, nothing to go on. Most importantly, no motive. That was a big one because remember, this is just a Jekyll and Hyde type who you'd never suspect. He's probably at the bottom of the Chicago river right. Who also is engaged in some senseless random killings of people, anonymous poisoning killings, not even shooting. It just made zero sense whatsoever. So, as we said earlier, the cops figured out within about a month, within the first month of the investigation that they were not going to have a break in this case. But that's not to say that they didn't have some suspects. Some people definitely did kind of come to the fore, but not many of them. Yeah, but these two are really interesting sub stories in and of themselves, for sure. The first guy's name was last name Arnold, first name Roger. Roger, that's right. I call him Richard. That's all right. But for good reason. Oh, sure, because you said he was like the Richard Jewel of his day, the olympic bomber. Who was not the bomber. Right, but whose life was ruined because he basically was implicated as the olympic bomber. Right. Same thing happened to this guy. Yeah, he was one of the first named suspects, 49 year old guy. So put yourself in the position, okay? The media is going berserk on the story. Everybody hears about it. It's a mad, anonymous poisoner. And now all of a sudden there's a name in a face associated with it who's a suspect, but he's the first person named. It's like people going crazy, like, trying to get to this guy to interview him. Yeah, I have my doubts about this guy. Not that he did that, but there were a lot of hinky things that they found out about him and then how it all ended up, as you're about to see. So he was a DIY chemist, the big one. There's a big thing right there into chemistry. They said he's a Jekyll and Hyde type. He's probably into chemistry. That's right. He was a dockhand at Juul foods at a warehouse west of Chicago. In Juul foods, there are a couple of different juul Foods are where the tylenol was bought. It's like a grocery store, food market. It's all checking out so far. Yeah. So the cops look into him and go to his house. He has a book, a handbook rather, on methods of killing people, how to kill people. A to Z. I don't know if that's a title, but that's a good one. He had five unregistered guns. It's a big one. He admitted to having cyanide once. Yeah, but he said, I threw it out, like, at least six months before these murders. She's like, when were the murders again, six months before that. That's when it was. And then his wife said they're investigating her and interviewing her. She was like, you know what? Actually, I did take some Tylenol and felt really sick and threw up one time. But again, it was probably due to overeating and it was just at once. That's the fact of the podcast. You can't blame cops for saying this guy is a pretty good lead. Yeah, because you can kind of start to see, like, if you add all the other stuff together and then hear about the wife throwing up from Tylenol, could you see this guy, like, toying with his wife, like, testing it out on her just enough to make her sick, but not to kill her, to see what happened, to see if she would notice. Who knows? Right. But the cops thoroughly investigated this guy and cleared them. There's not a person associated with the story that I came across who the thought he did. I actually think this guy did it. I didn't find one person who thought Roger Arnold actually did it. But in very short order, he proved that he was more than capable of murder because six months after he was cleared as a suspect, he was brought in for the murder of somebody else, a guy named Johnisha Stanesha, I would say. Yeah, I'm going with that, too. John Slovak or something. Yeah, he was 46. He was a Chicago computer consultant. That's saying something in 1982. Yes, probably. So here's what happened. Arnold, there was this bartender named or bar owner named Marty Sinclair who Arnold had thought had initially turned him into the cops and ruined his life, essentially. Yeah. So he goes to kill who he thinks is Marty Sinclair, and it's actually this just completely innocent, random guy who gets shot point blank. And so he, in fact, did kill somebody. He did. Because of what has happened to his life. It was premeditated murder. Even though it was the wrong person. He was definitely created an intentional homicide. He killed somebody on purpose. Mistaken identity killing, though. Right. And because of this, because it was directly related to the Tylenol poisonings, john Stanisha is frequently considered an eight victim of the Tylenol killing. Kind of like an honorary victim in this case. But it is kind of appropriate that he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. A victim of mistaken identity. It would have, like, a slightly different ring to it if it had been the right guy. The fact that it was the wrong guy, poor dude just happened to be in the wrong bar and happen to look like the owner. That is perfect for this saga. Yes. I wonder what Marty Sinclair thought about all that. I'll bet he was not very happy. Probably not. But probably also very relieved. And probably also guilt. Yeah, I would guess there's a touch of that. A range of emotions, I would imagine. Yeah. All over the place. So Arnold ended up serving 15 years of a 30 year sentence, was released in 99, and died nine years later. Yes. So, Chuck, before we go on to the main attraction, as far as the suspects go, I propose that we take a break. Agreed. Okay. We'll be right back. All right, Chuck. So this dude, there was basically two suspects in this whole case over all these years. There are basically two people, and again, no one was ever actually charged with the murders, but this guy came awfully close, and his name was James Lewis. Or was it? It turns out it was. But James Lewis came under the attention of the Chicago PD and the Tylenol Task Force when a letter showed up at Johnson and Johnson headquarters. And it was from, allegedly, the Tylenol poisoner, the Mad poisoner. And in the letter, it said, basically, like, I've spent $50 so far, and the whole thing has taken me about ten minutes per bottle, and I've already killed seven people. I basically see no reason to stop. Pay me $1 million, and then I will stop the killings. He gave a bank account number. It said, Wire me this money. Very presciently. No, that's not the right word. Stupidly, maybe, but is it? No, it's not. So this letter has a New York Postmark, but the bank account is associated with the travel agency in Chicago. And so the cops go, okay, this seems like it was dropped in our lap, but let's go check it out. And they find the owner of this travel agency that had closed up and gone under, and this guy is like, oh, my God, you're kidding me. It's like, no, I didn't write this letter, but I can guarantee I can tell you who did. There's a guy named Robert Richardson. Robert Richardson, it turned out, was the husband of a woman named Nancy Richardson who had worked at the travel agency. And when the travel agency went belly up, nancy lost her job and never got her last paycheck. Well, Robert Richardson was the type of guy who would fixate on this and was even more so the type of guy who would write a letter to frame the owner of the travel agency for the Tylenol murderers in retaliation for that last paycheck. He was that kind of dude. Right. And so the cops started sniffing into this Robert Richardson cat, and they figured out pretty quickly that Robert Richardson didn't actually exist, that he was actually somebody else, a man named James Lewis. Right. So when we joked earlier about is that his real name? And you said it was, it was. His name was. Not Robert Richardson, though. That was an alias. So what they found out was that Robert Richardson was a tax consultant. And this is just a strange, ironic twist. When he was 20 years old, he tried to take his own life by swallowing aspirin 36 of them. Yeah. So that's just neither here nor there. But an interesting little side note. Yeah. The fact that most people don't have that as part of their past. Yeah, it is interesting that it came up. So he had a pretty long rap sheet. He was wanted by postal inspectors for credit card fraud in Kansas City. He was indicted in 1978. And this one is just mindblowing. He is indicted for murder after police found remains of one of his former clients in bags in his attic. And he got let loose because it was an illegal search. But he was caught with the body of one of his clients dismembered in his attic with no good explanation, as far as I've ever heard. Yeah, well, what explanation would be good? Well, we're playing poker and one thing we're doing another juggling swords. So his wife's real name was Leanne, the one who worked at the travel agency and went unpaid. They fled Kansas City in December of 81, and this was as US. Postal inspectors were converging on them about this credit card scheme. Right. So they're like, just bad people. Not the postal inspectors? No, no. The Lewis's. Sure. Great. So they moved to Chicago. They changed their names to Robert Nancy Richardson. He got that job as a tax preparer, but then he was fired after a violent outburst in his office against his coworkers, and then she lost her job when unpaid, they left Chicago. And this turns out this is what got them exonerated from the tylenol. Thing is, they left Chicago and moved to New York before this happened, right before those same months. Right. But if the theory held up that this person went around, most likely in one day and did all this stuff, then it couldn't have been them. No. And here's why. Because the cops had decided that it was done locally. And one of the other things that supported that local mad poisoner theory was because the cyanide ate through the gelatin capsules eventually. So I had a very short shelf life before the whole bottle just turned into a mush of cyanide powder and melted gelatin. So, like you said, it had to have been done basically the day before the 29th, on the 28th. They could not, no matter how hard they tried, they could not put James Lewis or his wife in Chicago that day. Right. They just couldn't. And for his part, James Lewis said, yeah, I wrote this letter. I wrote the letter to Johnson and Johnson framing that travel agency guy, but I did not poison the tylenol. He was always been adamant about that. He's never toyed around with it. He's never messed around. He's never been coy. He's always been adamant that he did not poison that Tylenol, although the Tylenol Task Force tried to trip him up once, I guess, to just get this on the record that he done this. But they asked him, like, in an interview, okay, let's say you had done it. How would you have done it? And he actually pulled an OJ. He showed them how he would have done it. Right? Yeah. He just didn't write a book about it. He just showed them in an interview. Yeah. And he defends this later on by saying it was just a speculative scenario. I could tell you how Julius Caesar was killed, but that doesn't mean I was the killer. Right. I think the answer for me would have been, I don't know, man. Yeah, I'm innocent. I can't figure this out. But he's like, here's how I do it. I've been waiting for you to ask me that. He's eventually found in New York City, he's at the public library with a reference book, copying names and addresses of newspapers, I would imagine, to send them letters, like, Zodiac style. Yeah. Because we got to say this. So the cops figured out who James Lewis was before they found James Lewis, and it became part of the national media circus. It was a manhunt. While they were looking for James Lewis, this guy was writing letters to newspapers. He called in a radio talk show. Oh, yeah. He was really relishing the fact that there was a national manhunt out for him who like, that's what I'm saying. On the one hand, you got to kind of feel a little bit bad that this guy was kind of being railroaded into the rap for these murders after his extortion attempt. That's where the feeling bad for him. You're like, oh, yeah, that's right. He totally brought this on himself. Yeah. So they hauled him out of the New York Public Library. He was sentenced to ten years for extortion attempt in ten years for that original credit card fraud and served 13 years and lives in the greater Boston area today. So still today, I think there are a few people who are like, I could see this guy. Maybe he could be it. Some detectives maintain that the Tylenol murderer could have flown into O'Hare, rented a car, done that circuit, or driven back to O'Hare and flown out all in the same day, the day before. But they could never put James Lewis in Chicago at all that day. Right. So he was cleared finally, although he did serve two consecutive ten year sentences, reserved 13 of the 20 years for that credit card fraud that the postal inspectors wanted him for and for the extortion letter. And like you said, he lives in Cambridge, Mass. Now. But then in 2009, the case, after basically having gone dormant in the early 80s, was reignited by the FBI because they worked up they fought a DNA profile from the capsules and they raided James Lewis's house, demanded a fingerprint and DNA sample. James and Leanne Lewis fought it in court. The judge was like, no, you have to do this before leaving the courthouse. They gave them the samples and nothing has come of it. So I guess that means, tacitly that the Lewis's were cleared once and for all of the Tylenol murders. Yeah. And the DNA thing is an interesting piece because they still have some samples of the cyanide. I guess that the capsules have worn away by now, if it had the cyanide in there. But there was and still is hope that DNA could crack this case just like eight or nine years ago. The Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. Is that a two parter? No, just one partner. Good podcast, though. I don't think so. That was a good episode. Sure. He grew up in Chicago and his parents were living in the greater Chicago area in 82 and he is the uni bomber. So they said, we might as well get a DNA sample and talk to him. And he was cleared. I don't think he was ever a super strong suspect. Yeah. And he probably would have admitted it. So he was like, no, this is not me. Right, so the uni bomber has been cleared. That's right. From the Tylenolmers. But the case remains unsolved to this day. I think they also have a fingerprint work up that they found on one of the bottles and that and some DNA. They're just sitting around with that. There are no suspects. Every suspect has been cleared and there's nobody on the horizon. It's just an unsolved random series of killings that happened. Yeah. They're still working on it, though. There's a police sergeant named Scott Winkelman who has been on this task force for a long time and he says he thinks it's solvable and his department did just solve a 45 year old murder case. Cold case. Man, if they solve this one, that would be, I know, the biggest cold case ever solved. I mean, who knows? But I could see maybe finding like a deathbed letter or something one day. Maybe like, I don't know if they're going to catch someone at the bottom of the Chicago River and haul them off to jail, but I could see the truth coming out one day. I hope so for the families, because Monica Janice, she is the niece of Adam, Stanley and Teresa, she said her family to this day. This is from an article, like last year, I think, said that they have still not gotten over it. She said her grandparents have passed now, but she said literally every day for the rest of their lives, they just cried about the fact that they didn't know who did it. She grew up and has been to therapy her whole life because they were all victims, that this post traumatic stress disorder kicks in sure where she grew up, fearing that any of her family members could die at any time. In that article, by the way, it was really good. It was called the Tylenol Murders. Colon. Is it too late to solve the famous cold case? And that was from an E real Crime and written by Jamie Bartoch. Nice. Joseph Manus her dad says that he still has dreams, like, on the reg about these murders. He said he had one recently where everyone involved was in a room in the case, and then two black men in suits and glasses were laughing about how they got away with murder. Michelle Rosen. She's the daughter of Mary Reiner. Right. She has dedicated her life to investigating this on her own. And she doesn't agree with the loan, the Mad Poisoner theory at all? No. This is interesting. Yeah. She thinks it has something to do with the supply chain and that Johnson and Johnson knew this and covered it up. One of the things that people who believe this point to is that Johnson and Johnson recalled all of that Tylenol, 31 million bottles, and then destroyed them, allegedly without testing any of it. So we will never know whether it was Pinky had the day off. Right. Whether it was beyond Chicago or just local to Chicago. Right. Seems like it took long enough that other people would have died in that week before the national recall was undertaken. But there was something very interesting. There was a post script to all this that does undermine that Mad poisoner theory. Yeah. It was just a few years later, in 1985, a woman in New York named Diane Ellsworth took two extra strength Tylenol capsules and died from cyanide poisoning. But they found I mean, it's just completely unrelated. Was it another copycat case? Well or the original poisoner? Maybe a different cyanide. Right. The cyanide was definitely not the same from the same batch. It was chemically different. But there was another bottle found around the block from where Mary Ellsworth bought hers in Yonkers that did match that cyanide. So there were two bottles of extra strength Tylenol two years later in another state that had been tampered with. The problem is, this is after the three prong tamper resistant packaging had been introduced, which means it was an inside job. Right. I guess because the thing had not been obviously tampered with. Tyler. I was never able to explain what happened. Yeah. And then within five days of her death, eight states outright banned to Tylenol capsules. Right. And Tylenol, for its part, was like, we've been trying to get everybody to take caplets anyway, but they keep taking capsules, so we're making it. And then a guy wrote a book. Right. Scott Bartz. Yeah. A former Johnson Johnson employee wrote in 2011 a self published book on the Tylenol poisonings. And he said, what we were talking about earlier, he's like, this supply chain is so convoluted basically. It definitely could have happened at any point along the way. And his idea is that Johnson and Johnson knew that it was in their distribution network and they covered it up. Self published book. Yeah. You got to know what that for. Sure. I'm not knocking it. No, but it's noteworthy. It does. If there's, like, any hint of journalistic integrity in us that feels like we have to note that. Sure. So that's the Tylenol poisonings of 1982 in Chicago changed America. Changed the world, but definitely changed America. It was the end of some form of innocence that we still had. Absolutely. If you want to know more about the Tylenol poisoning, go online. There's stuff all over the place, and you can go down that rabbit hole and it's deep and wide. Since I said that, it's time for Listener ma'am. This is from Jen from Brunswick, Maine. Hey, guys. Been listening for several years and never thought a perfect time to write in would be related to synthetic farts. Remember the discussed episode we talked about? Synthetic farts? It's a real thing. When I was in high school, my dad came across this stuff online called Liquid A S. That's horrible. Not allowed to curse, right? No. Is that a curse? Let me spell it out, though. Sure. Or I guess maybe you should have said, like, a asterisk. Asterisk. Yeah. There you go. Good name for a product, though. She said he found it on a joke website and ordered some. And I have to tell you, it is the worst thing you've ever smelled. I can't even describe it. It makes you want to not breathe anymore. The tiniest little drop is deadly. So of course, I took it to college with me to play pranks, and boy, did it backfire. I thought it was pretty funny putting a couple of drops in the radiator by my across the hall friend's room and not even thinking about what would happen when the heat turned on. Well, the heat turned on and the whole floor of the dorm was amazingly disgusting and made us just about gag. Smell. Took almost a week to finally go away and have not used it again in the ten years since. Probably it's called learning Your Lesson, but she still has the bottle. She's like, but I kept it, right? Just in case. Thank you for your interesting and entertaining podcasts. This is the first podcast to ever listen to, and it's still always on the top of my download list. Thanks for giving this 28 year old woman a platform on which to tell a story of synthetic farts that is not completely out of place. Sign anonymous. That is Jen Green. Thanks, Jen Green. Very brave of you to put your name on that one, especially. I wonder if you stepped up and said that horrible smell. That was my bad, right? If you have a great story about college pranks, we want to hear about it. You can get in touch with us via our social links by going to stuffyshoot.com, or you can send us an email to stuff. Podcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 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 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 Kilgarif and Georgia Hardstarks, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder One weekend, gurley on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
How Freemasons Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-freemasons-work | There are lots of conspiracy theories about Freemasons, but how much do you really know about this secretive order? In this episode, Josh and Chuck take a comprehensive look at the origins, history, practices, beliefs and famous figures of Freemasonry. | There are lots of conspiracy theories about Freemasons, but how much do you really know about this secretive order? In this episode, Josh and Chuck take a comprehensive look at the origins, history, practices, beliefs and famous figures of Freemasonry. | Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:32:45 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=15, tm_min=32, tm_sec=45, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=238, tm_isdst=0) | 43368503 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And that would make this stuff you should know. Yes. The stuff they don't want you to know. Edition. Yeah, kind of. Whoa, there. Sorry, everybody. Sorry. Chuck, we should apologize for cutting in like this. I know we have some important information that we usually reserve for the end of our show, but we realize that some people tune out. So it's at the beginning this time. Yes. Well, we're going to south by southwest. We're hoping to, right? Yeah. We're up for an interactive panel and we need everybody's votes. The last chance to vote is today the day this comes out. Actually, tomorrow? Is it Friday? Tomorrow all you have to do is go to panel picker SXSW comodsviews 6817. I guess it's ours. Yeah. That takes you directly to the page where you can vote on us, and when you try to vote, it'll say, oh, wait, you got to register. And it takes like 40 seconds to register and they will not spam you. Right. So basically, please go register for us because we'd love to have a panel. South by Southwest. It's just cool. We want to go. And Chuck, south by Southwest reminds me of something else that will conclude our national tour, which we're kicking off here in Atlanta on October 13. Yes. Like we did in New York, we are having an all star trivia event here in Atlanta October 13. And five or six other secret to be named later cities, right? Yes. We're going to be all over the place. We are going to be touring the country, playing people in trivia, having a good time. Wow. It'll be fun. It'll be during the week, kind of break up that weekday monotony kind of thing. Probably Wednesdays or something, I think. Yeah. Well, up until March between now and March. So keep an eye out because we actually did spread it out geographically as much as we could to get as many people there as possible. The details will follow, and it's going to be a lot of fun. Okay. That's it, right? Yeah. Back to our regularly scheduled program. Let's avoid the whole conspiracy thing. I don't even think we should bring up any conspiracies. Sorry. It's going to happen. Yeah. It's a little difficult to talk about freemasons, which is what we're talking about today, without talking conspiracy, and for good reason, too. They are one of the more secretive orders ever created. We just talked about, like, brick and stone work the whole time. You got to get the proper mixture and you got to get the trial just right. I know how to make mud is what it's called. Mortar. It's fun. I can whip up a pretty good batch of it, man. Well, you built a fire pit. Right? I did. I've built walkways, walls, all sorts of stuff. I guess you could call me a Mason. But Chuck, I would be a rough Mason. Yeah. Not a Free Mason. No. Which is the big distinction that we'll get to eventually, right? Yes, we will. But first, let's talk about what's going on in Boise, Idaho, right now. I have no idea what's going on there. Well, I can tell you there is a guy named Krispin Hartung, and he was summoned to Boise Lodge Number Two, ancient Free, and accepted Masons of the Grand Lodge of Idaho, basically to explain himself for going ahead and founding another lodge called the Praxis Lodge, which is considered a modern lodge. And the brothers at the Boise Lodge Number Two wanted to know why he done this. Because it basically flies in the face of the tenants of Free Masonry, at least as far as the York or no, Scottish Wright Masonry goes, which I guess is what most American lodges are. Right? Yeah. Because they were from England. The Scottish ride is England, and the other one is French. Right, right. So the practice lodge is aligned with the Grand Orion of France. And basically they don't require that there be volume of sacred law present as part of the indispensable part of the furniture of the lodge. I'm quoting this practice lodge allows discussion of religion and politics. Yeah. You're not supposed to do that. No. And it doesn't require that members believe in a supreme being. He's not a Mason. He was. And he went and founded a practice lodge, a secular lodge, a guy, a secular humanist, and he was excommunicated expelled from the Boise Lodge Number Two. Did they burn his bowels? They didn't, because he didn't share any secrets. But this kind of stuff actually gives you a glimpse of what the Masons are all about. Chuck right. Secrecy. So they are very secret order, but over time, like, little things have come out in this article will reveal the name of God, the secret word that gets you to the next level after the third degree. There's all sorts of, like it's the least secret secretive order as far as I would think they would have changed this stuff. If you can read these secret passwords on our website, wouldn't they have changed it by now? But think about it. Are you going to change God's name? You can't. It's just kind of like, yeah, everything you've heard is true. This is God's name. Aren't you glad you made it to the fourth degree now? Yeah. So let's talk about the history of the Masons. Right. There's a lot of competing theories of where the Masons came from. Yeah. They range from ones we won't talk about as much like ancient Druids or the ISIS Osiris cult in ancient Egypt, to my favorite story. And this one, I think, holds a little bit of credence, for sure, because they still part of their rituals involved the story. Yeah. So it seems like it might be the way to go or else they just selected the story and they're sticking with it. Yeah, maybe so. Way back in the day, king Solomon's Temple in 967 BC was built in Jerusalem. And there was a master builder, a master Mason named Hiramab who claimed to know the secret to the temple. Because you got to have a secret if you're going to build a temple. Right? Sure. Temple. And three men kidnapped him one day, threatening to kill him if he didn't reveal the secret. He apparently said, no way, I'm not going to do that. So he was promptly killed. And then King Solomon heard about this and ordered some Masons. And these were stonemasons at the time? Just regular stonemasons. It was before the whole Freemason thing. Right. That's where I'm going with and he said, Bring his body back here and bring back the secret of the temple. That did not work. So he says, well, you know what? I'm going to establish a new secret. And here it is. And here it is. It is Mahabone. That's the secret. The secret is a word and the word mahobone means the Grand Lodge door opened. The secret is the password that they use to enter the third degree of masonry. So if you were thinking, I'd like to become a Mason but I want to start out at the third level, I don't want to become an apprentice. Right. No, just go ahead and go into a Masonic Lodge and say Mahabone. And they'll be like, I would say Mahabone. And they would like, go, yeah, you mispronounced it. Or you just leave the h out to be like turn your bowels. Right. So that's the party line of the Masons of where they came from. The more likely explanation is the boring. Right. I think it's kind of interesting, though. I like it because most of the t's are crossed and the I's are dotted. But in the Middle Ages, Masons were a well, there were two kinds, like we said. Yeah. There were rough Masons like me, just jerks who knew how to mix mud together and could work with stone. That was pretty tough to screw up because they were so big. Or there were Free craft Masons, free Stone Masons, or Freemasons that worked with intricate carvings and soft stone. Freestone is like the soft stone that you can actually carve designs into. And it took some serious skill right. So to protect their wages, to make sure that they were differentiated in the minds of employers like in their secrets, right. They initiated trade guilds. Right. It's like a union sort of. Exactly. These trade guilds founded lodges where they stored their tools, their secret tools. And they ate and basically hung out together. And then after a while, they just went the extra mile and said, you know what? I want to make sure that there's no rough Masons at our lodge, so we're going to come up with secret handshakes, passwords, that kind of stuff. And the Masons were born. Yes. And that would make sense, too. And then we can't talk about any of this without talking about the Nights Templar for a second, because we've gotten railed about the Nights Templar with the Friday the 13th show. Yeah, we have. So, for goodness sake, the Nights Templar is another theory. And the deal there was the Knights Templar, there were monks that basically guarded a passage from Jaffa to Jerusalem to protect Christians on their way. And they were pretty rough, apparently. And they at one point discovered King Solomon's riches in the temple there's. The real secret. Yes. And it was apparently the biggest stock of cash. It was probably just dollar bills is my guess. Right. And they took it all. And King Philip. What is that? The Fourth of France said, arrest all those dudes so I can get their money that they just stole and they were imprisoned. And then it's a bit of a mystery of what happens, but one theory is that after they were released from prison, they went into hiding and emerged as Freemasons later on. Right. That's one theory. That's just yet another theory. And King Philip IV may or may not have had them arrested on a Friday the 13th. Oh, is that the deal? So, Chuck, there's a couple of theories and probably the likeliest, theory of where Freemasons came about. We know that modern Freemasons, we can trace their history pretty well. Yeah. Over time, we've got these Masonic lodges and they're just kind of hanging out and it's really like a trade guild and only what are called operative Masons could join. Yeah. That's literally people who were stonemasons. Right. The thing was, these three stonemasons, or Freemasons, kind of fancy themselves, like, I think they cultivated their intellectualism as if we had to further separate themselves from rough Masons. Right. And so they started, like, having discourse at these lodges and talking, and they developed they were so smart, they developed a philosophy. Right. And one of the big, I guess, tenants of Freemasonry is religious tolerance. Right. Yeah. They're very liberal, religiously speaking. They didn't like the hardcore Catholic rules. Right. And later on, I think well, a couple of things happened. Catholics were forbidden to join Freemasons at one point by one of the Pope's. Right. And then I think that went away. And then at one point, they were accused of not allowing Catholics in as a Freemason, but they said that's not true either. Right. And again, we saw that in that thing that's going down in Boise right now. That could be like a typical Masonic lodge. You have to have a sacred volume. Right. But in keeping with that religious tolerance idea, it can be anything like the Quran, it can be the Jewish Old Testament, the Talmud. Right. Pretty cool. Or the New Testament? The Bible? But you have to believe in a supreme being. That's another major tenant of Freemasonry. The thing is, it wasn't necessarily like the Christian God and the idea of religious tolerance, of believing in what's called the Grand Architect, right. That definitely jibes with enlightenment thought. So these Masonic lodges where you had to be a Mason who could carve into stone, started attracting people who were basically tourists. Yeah. Like artists and aristocrats. All of a sudden there was this cool club and they said, well, I want to be a Mason because you guys get together and you're all smart and you talk about stuff that's neat and secret. Right. And so they started letting in speculative instead of operative Freemasons, they started letting in speculative Freemasons. And speculative as a word. As a word, yes. And it became basically like the fraternity gentleman type of club that it is today. Right. That was like the beginnings of that. Gentleman's club is a well, gentleman is an operative word because the Freemasons have never allowed women in except in some very, very unique circumstances. There was one famously a woman named Elizabeth Aldworth who was caught eavesdropping on a Masonic, I guess discussion or whatever in a lot. And they found her and said, okay, you can join. So they conducted her I think it was one of those deals where, like, well, gosh, she knows the deal now. Right. But I guess I don't know if funny is the right word, but the reason that they gave for not admitting women was they were afraid that women were going to distract the guys from their intellectualism. Sure. There's clearly a division of the Higher Self and the Lower Self and they associated the lower Self with women. Right. And then secondly, that women were too gossipy and would reveal their secrets. Right. And apparently Elizabeth would go around town after that wearing her Masonic clothes. Her apron. Yeah, her apron. Really? That's what I heard. God just told me. Who did you word on the street? Chuck? Go ahead. Well, I should mention, officially, in 1723, their constitution was written by a Scottish Freemason named James Alexanderson, almost at Alexander. And this was basically the first official set of like laws and rituals and stuff. So that's in place in 1723. Right. And five years prior to that, four Masonic lodges in London combined to form the First Grand Lodge. And that tradition has been followed in the States. There's typically one Grand Lodge in a state and you got to answer that lodge. Right. Especially if you start a secular lodge. Right. We should mention quickly too, though, since you mentioned the female member. There are a couple of sort of spin offs that are all female ones called the Order of the Amaranth and one's called the Order of the Eastern Star. And those are for the ladies that want to get all of Masonic. Right. So, Chuck, let's talk about American Freemasonry. Yeah, why not? So, like we said, the whole Enlightenment movement really became fond of the ideas of Freemasonry. And there's a lot of conspiracy theory about whether or not America was founded by Masons. And, yes, it indeed was to a large degree, for sure, George Washington. You could make a case that he helped found America. He was a Mason. Benjamin Franklin Mason, and several other guys who signed the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and ten of them sign the articles officially. So some people say it's one of the myths that everybody that was signed the Constitution was amazing. Not true. No, but enough where they had a real hand in shaping the United States. And actually, like the dollar bill, the pyramid with the I above it is about as Masonic as it gets. The Masons love their symbology. And I read an explanation in us. News and World Report, which means it's true by a guy who has written about well, mysticism in America named Mitch Horowitz. Right. And he basically explained that what the unfinished pyramid with the eye floating over it means is as humans are capable of great acts of engineering and technology, probably you could extend that to kindness and generosity. Sure. But we couldn't finish anything unless it's blessed by Providence, which is represented by this i. So it's a hopeful symbol in that this pyramid will eventually be finished. We will eventually be successful because Providence winks upon us. Right. That's one explanation. I'm sure there's, like 5 million other explanations that include everything from the Nazis to caligula, but that's what I understand that means, and that's a pretty wide range. The point is, though, is that there is a Masonic symbol on our dollar bill. Yeah. Which makes me wonder if the Knights Templar found the dollar bills at this Temple of Solomon. Maybe they got that. They had all the singles. They're like, let's make it rain. It all makes sense. There's also a theory that some Masons had actually organized the Boston Tea Party and the French Revolution yeah. At St. Andrews Lodge in Boston. And there's a couple of reasons they point to. One is that they did not meet the night of the Boston Tea Party. And then there was some letter T on one of their scrolls. And that sort of been called out as maybe there were some there, maybe there weren't. But amazingly, the Boston Tea Party has still remained a secret to this day. Like all those dudes swore secrecy and with 100% verification, cannot happen at this time. That sounds pretty Masonic. Yeah, true. So after the American Revolution, the successful Masonic overthrow of the British rule yeah. Basically, the American Mason said, hey, we were under the purview of the provincial lodge. We got to go. We got to make a clean break with everything here, including masonry. So they formed their own official lodges in the United States. And it kind of took off in America. You've got the York right and the Scottish right. And the York, like you said, is French, and the Scottish right follows the English traditions. And apparently the French tradition is the one that's secular Scottish tradition. You have to have that sacred volume and a belief in a supreme being. And you can't talk about religion or politics under the Scottish right. Right, yeah. And we have Scottish Right hospital here, too. I never really thought about that until I read this. Yeah. In the shriners as well. That's another example of their Masons. Yeah. That was kind of an offshoot of Masons that shrines with their fun little cars that they drive around in parade and they're fezes. So, Chuck, let's talk about religion. Right, okay. A lot of people think that freemasonry is a religion in and of itself. Probably not true. Yeah. I mean, this is what I don't get. They say that you have to believe in God under the Scottish right. Well, yeah. That's the first question they ask you when you get in your little ceremony there. If you're following a Scottish right now exactly. But then they also, on the other hand, say, but we're not even allowed to talk about religion in our meetings. Right. What's going on there? I don't know. I think it's probably like one of those things where they just figured out pretty early on, after having held meetings for centuries, that they're like, wow, you just can't bring up religion and politics. It ticks everybody off, believe me. Don't go their friend. Right. They also don't follow the traditional JudeoChristian view of God as a supreme being, necessarily because they call God the great architect of the universe, which actually sounds pretty deus to me. Yeah, right, that's a good point. But again, you have to believe in God. You can't talk about it, but you have to swear an oath upon a sacred volume right. Or Book of the Sacred Law, which could be a Quran at the downward or the New Testament. Yeah. They're kind of open minded to an extent. As long as you believe in God right. And as long as you don't tell any secrets, because we'll burn your bells. Right. So if you want to become a Mason right, and you have picked up that you've said that your bowels may be burned if you give away secrets, you've come to terms with that, you want to enter the brotherhood, what do you do? Well, you have to be sponsored. You have to fill out your application. Basically, you got to get two sponsors from the same lodge to say, to vouch for you, I guess. Then you are voted in by a secret ballot. You are asked whether or not you believe in God, and you have to answer, yes, I imagine. If you say no, then they'll just say, it's probably isn't the place for you. Then they will point you to the French Orient. And you have to have a little bit of money. I mean, you don't have to be rich, but you have to pay the dues and keep your dues up like any club. And you're expected to be philanthropic too. And if you don't take part in that stuff is probably frowned upon. So you got to have a little bit of money. Right. And once you are accepted, you start out as an inner depress and you're initiated, right? Yeah. This is pretty fun. And you have to tell the story of the King Solomon's Temple and Hiram Abyss. And basically, you act it out. You act out this tradition in blindfold. And then you are Hiram Abraham and you were murdered and you pretend like you're dead and you're reborn. And you're amazing now. Yeah. I'm really curious about the artistically way they give you there. Yeah. And also, I can't get the image of slacks out of my head. Like, there's some guys wearing the clothes that he was wearing at work, which is Doctor's High slack right. And like a short sleeve button down right. Acting out that he's just died and is reborn. I'm hoping that there's, like a robe involved or something just kind of dead in any fashion choices. So that's kind of interesting ritualistic, for sure. Then you begin your rise to the top. Although they say that most freemasons don't get above, like, what, like three degrees out of the 30? What's, 13 in the French tradition? But I guess the Scottish ride is 33 degrees of freemasonry. And as you graduate, you get more secrets told and more threats against telling those secrets. Well, go ahead and tell them the threats. I know you're chomping at the bit for that. And the Masons, we should say, by the way, deny this. This is speculation but this has come out, supposedly, from other Masons that this is the punishment for revealing secrets. Yeah. So apparently, if you're an apprentice, which is the first level and you tell secrets, your tongue is torn out. Free craft. Which what number is that? That's the second degree. Oh, really? Wow. They will actually tear your heart out, which will probably end it for you. Right. And then the master Mason is the famous bowel burning that I've been speaking of for 15 minutes now. And one has to imagine that they're burning your bowels alive. It's not like they suffocate you with a pillow and then burn your bowels. Like you're probably alive while your bowels are being burned. Yeah. And the first time I read this, I thought it said, Your bowels are turned. And I thought that was some ancient, like, being drawn and quartered. I was like, oh, my gosh. Your bowels are turned. It must be awful. But then I saw it was burned, which is even worse. They just go, Joan Collins. And you're like, oh, my bowels are turned. And then if you're a royal ark. Then you have the top of your skull sliced off, which is no fun for anyone. No. Again, presumably you're alive. And we should say the Mason still says this is not true. But when you get to that third degree, the end of the third degree, the Master Mason degree, and you have kept the secrets. Your bowels are intact, your heart is fine and your tongue is fine, you finally get the name of the Great Architect of the Universe as part of your initiation to the Holy Royal Arch, which is like the fourth degree. Right. So, Chuck, what is the name of the Great Architect of the Universe? Are we going to reveal this? It's in the article. It is Yabulon. That's what it is. I know. And apparently that stands the J-A-H stands for Yahweh, which is the Hebrew God or God for Hebrew? In Hebrew. Right. Yahweh meant I Am in Hebrew. Oh, really? And the B-U-L is for ball. B-A-A-L which is the ancient canaanite fertility god. And then on is you did not mess with no, you don't want to mess with him. Right. And on is for Osiris. Yeah. The Egyptian god of the underworld. Right. So basically what you've got is like this three different aspects. You have like, life, death, sex, existence, embodied by these different gods and then all combined together. Yeah. Which is convenient. Yeah. So which degree is your favorite? Did you look these over? Yeah. My favorite is king of the brazen serpent. That's the 25th degree. Oh, yeah. My second favorite was the Intimate Secretary. Nice. There's also the 18th degree is the Knight of the Pelican and Eagle and Sovereign Prince ROSECRAFT of Harridom. Yeah, that's pretty good, too. Yeah. There's so many Masons that are like, you guys are making fun of us, you jerks. We're not. I'm not. Timothy Hutton is out there angry, is hunting a Mason. Turk 182 is a Livid right now. He's a Mason? Yeah. Wow. I got a list. We'll go over that later. Okay. And I'm sure that you have movie references, too, I expect. No, not really. Crazy. So, chuck. Flintstones. What was that? The Royal Order of Buffalo. That was literally forgotten about that. Yeah, they were the big buffalo hat. They had fences, right. With like, horses coming out of them. Was it the water buffalo? It seems like water buffalo. Maybe it was water buffalo. Wow. Yeah. You just blew my mind, man. I forgot all about that. I did, too, until just now. So, Chuck, you've entered a lodge. Okay. Let's say you're up to the third or fourth degree. You're not running around Idaho forming irregular lodges now, and you are buying for office, let's say. What are some of the positions available to you at a typical lodge? Well, it starts up top with the senior warden. Well, I'm sorry, there's a master, right? That's the top. That's the guy who's running the show with a lodge making sure everything is abided by. Abode by. So you got the senior warden after that. Right. Then a junior warden. Right. You got a treasurer. Of course. There's always a treasurer. There's a secretary that writes down everything that's going on. You've got a senior and a junior deacon? No, I've met a senior or junior deacon. I don't know which one he was. But you, me and I toured the George Washington Memorial Masonic Lodge in Alexandria, Virginia. It is awesome. Cool. I'll put that on my list. Yes, you should. On my bucket list. We actually signed up Ben Bowen from stuff they don't want you to know. Really? To their email. That's awesome. Yeah. We'll talk about that in a second, too. And then it depends on where the lodge is and how they are structured. But you can also have an inner guard, like a bouncer, a chaplain, director of ceremonies and an organist. Yeah, just for flair, then. That's what I was doing. I equate organists with slacks. Do you? All I think about is baseball. I used to think of church and I think of baseball. Let's talk quickly about the symbology. There's so much to it, but the very standard. If you look at the Mason symbol, it's a right angle ruler, a compass and a G. Right? Yeah. Take it away, Chuck. Well, the G stands for either God or geometry, which was obviously a pretty sacred thing to a Mason. A stonemason. Right. It's either God or geometry. My money's on geometry. I would say geometry, too. Yeah. And the square actually means something. It encourages you to be a square dealer, essentially, like Swingblade says. And then you have the compass, which stands for creating boundaries in life. Right. And there you have it. There you have it. That's a symbol of what it means. All right, I guess it is time for conspiracy theory. Maybe. Yeah. We got to throw this in there. If you ever suspected the Masons of having in their past an allegiance or confederacy with a group called the Illuminati who spent on throwing over the church and government and establishing a new World Order right. You're actually right. Let's hear it. There was a guy named Professor Adam Whitehall bishop we'll go with that one. Who in the 18th century founded this group called the Illuminati. And the Illuminati basically said, we think that government's corrupt. We think that the church is corrupt and we need to get rid of them. But this is not something that you can do in the open. So we're going to form a secret society. And speaking of secret societies, we like you, Masons in Bavaria. So let's hook up. Let's do this together. Yeah, you're really doing it. Right. So the Masons in Bavaria and the Illuminati hung out for a while, joined forces, and then the Masons realized that these guys were going to get them all killed. Yeah, they're great. And they broke off their engagement with the Illuminati and their date with destiny was postponed. Right? Yes. So what I thought was nice was the government, bavaria said, no Illuminati, you need to disband, which they supposedly did. And some people still think that since we're talking about conspiracies, we need to say some people still think that they're involved together and that they're trying to control that was implied by my pregnant pause at the end. Yeah. They think they're trying to control the banks of the world and the governments of the world all secretly together. Right. One view of the Masons is that the Masons that you see every day with, like, the stickers or the magnets on their cars or the shriners and their little cars are basically just distractions in that these people at the higher levels, the 33rd degrees, they're actually running the show. Right. It's all big front. Right. And these are the people who, like, actually run Goldman Sachs, decide that the euro is going to happen or whether or not Greece is allowed to exist as an economy, that kind of stuff. I think now is when we should bring up our cohort. That stuff they don't want you to know, which, for those of you not in the know, it's one of our video podcasts that a couple of our video dudes do a great job. And it's very awesome. Yeah, it's cool. And they have a lot of fun with it. And they don't believe all this stuff necessarily, but it's fun to dig it up and do fun little videos about it. Fun. Yeah. And they did one on Mason's. And one of the theories is that the layout of Washington, DC. Was designed in such a way by Freemasons to align with ley lines and ley lines of these supposed energy forces. Like electromagnetic lines. Right. That's what it is. I think so, supposedly. And they did a couple of cool shots of, like, aerial shots from Google Maps where they line up these pentagrams, the streets in DC. You've been there. It's crazy. I've seen that. We saw that episode together. Remember? They debuted it for us. Yeah, it's good. I just watched it again today. And if you line the streets up, supposedly they match up with ley lines in accordance with the Washington they call it the Washington Ivalisk, not the Washington Monument. Right. And those connect to other PowerPoints on Earth, like Stonehenge or Missing convenient Truth. Exactly. And they concentrate energy, and they say that they can use this energy in DC to do everything from cause natural disasters to hallucinations. And these are ley line theories. And yet they can't come up with a decent left handed can opener. I know. Crazy. So I don't believe that stuff. It's all a bunch of bunk, if you ask me. It is. But I mean, thinking about Freemasonry in the United States is kind of a national pastime among the 16 to, say, 34 year old set. Right. Yes. And it hasn't always been this way. We went from Mason's founding the United States to the point we're at now, which is, hey, Masons, how's it going? You guys just do your own thing. Thanks for being philanthropic. Right. To somewhere in the middle, there's a bump where there was a real movement that was antimsonic, that was so strong and pronounced. It had its own newspapers and a political party based on anti freemasonry. Right. For good reason. One case, at least. Yeah. Well, there's a guy in 1826 who is named William Morgan, and he came out with a book called Freemasonry Exposed, and it basically laid out a lot of the secrets that we now know today about Freemasonry. And that kind of got the public sentiment whipped up. Like, who are these people? Why do they believe this stuff? This is kind of weird, right? Yeah. And I saw a couple of things. I saw one thing that said that he tried to get in and couldn't, and that's why I wrote it. And then I read a thing that said that he was actually a Mason and they didn't allow him above a certain level. So he got all ticked off and said, all right, I'm going to expose all your secrets. Sure. I mean, there's sour grapes written all over that book. Sure. But probably I think some people may have taken that whole thing with a grain of salt had it not been for what happened to William Morgan. Like he disappeared. Yeah. He was abducted and taken to the Niagara River. Yeah. And again, there's varying accounts on what happened because there's very little evidence in this case. But the story goes that he was formally arrested for a debt that he owed to an innkeeper, which this alleged debt was a very hinky thing. And they put him in jail, and the jail keeper took the night off and had his wife sift in for him. And these three Masons came to the wife and said, hey, can you give us this guy? Can we go into our custody? And she said, sure. And then they stuffed him in a trunk, drove him to Canada, and either paid him to stay in Canada or drowned him in the river, right. We don't know what happened. Depends on how much money they had. Yeah, I guess so. But I took it that they never found William Morgan's body then. I don't think so. If he conceivably lived his life out in Canada where he drowned, that would indicate that they never found him. But he disappeared right after he wrote this book. Yeah. And that whipped up a frenzy of antimisic sentiment, basically. Right. And so in New York State, the number of lodges went from 480 in 1825 to 75 in 1835. It's a big decade. Right. So it went south. It went parachute for him for a little while. And the Civil War was such a national horror that everybody kind of forgot about how much they hated the Masons, and the Masons were allowed to flourish again. And here we are today. Yeah. And there's other weird theories about bad things they've done. Like, they were in on the Kennedy plot, the Kennedy assassination plot, or the Jack the Ripper murders. Right. But there's no water that can be held with any of that. But if you really want to learn about Masonry freemasonry. Right. Yeah. Apparently, the Freemasonry for Dummies and the Complete Idiots Guide to Freemasonry are dead on because in the list of complaints against him, a former master of a lodge in Boise who was basically calling out this guy and telling him he had to come to a Masonic trial right. Cited specific page numbers in these two books. So if you really want to understand Masonry, get the Complete Idiots Guide. Wow. Or the Mason's Guide to Dummies. Or Masonry for Dummies. Both of those, yeah. I have one. Do you really? I got it from Matt Frederick. Really? That's got you so into that? I do have a list, and if you go there's an official list on the Internet of, like, hundreds and hundreds of famous men that have been Freemasons. But I just earmarked a few that I thought were interesting. Bud and Costello Mason. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Both Masons. Yeah. I'm sorry to interrupt, but we should say that the Masons were very much down with the abolition movement. They allowed, I guess, the African Lodge, number one, to be established in Boston in 1009 seven five. Very forward thinking a lot of ways. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. And that became the Prince Hall Freemasonry, which is segregated by huge part of the abolitionist movement. And we're talking a century before the real deal. Yeah. Wow. And I also read a thing that should mention that they were targeted during the Holocaust as well. Really? So you add them to the list of homosexuals and Jews and anyone that had crossed eyes that the Nazis were like, let's kill them, you know, cross eye is called Stravasmus. Did you know that? We're just throwing the knowledge out today. So next on my list is Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier Henry Clay. How about that? Well, he was the speaker of the House. He was hawkish, right? Yeah. He was actually the grand master of Kentucky. Wow. And our buddies, I guess. And the Henry Clay people. That was enough for them. Are they from Kentucky? No. Okay. They're from La. Yes. Weird. Cecil B. Denill arthur Conan Doyle. John Elway and Scotty Pippin. Freemasons. Yeah. How about that? Harry Houdini. Timothy Hutton as I already said, jesse Jackson and Peter Sellers. Harpo Marx, and then, of course, for some reason, mark Twain and John Wayne. I was like, well, of course they're Freemason. Yes. They just kind of fit. And that's just a few I mean, J. Edgar Hoover, Clark Gable, there's tons and tons of these famous dudes back in the day were freemasons. Well, it was the hip thing back then. Well, that's freemasonry. Attention all freemasons. If you're going to send guys to kill me and Chuck, please at least let it be Scotty Pippin and Timothy Hutton. Okay to burn my bowels. What if Scottie Pippen burns your bowels this weekend or next week when this is released? I'd be upset. It would be quite a story. So that's it. If you want to learn more, you want to see that. All 33 degrees of freemason, right? You can type in how freemasons work in the search bar, howstep works.com. And I guess then it's time for listener mail. It is, Josh. I'm going to call this one of a couple of prison emails that we're going to be reading. I'm going to stretch these out over a few weeks. We got some awesome email from former inmates that set us straight in a few ways. And also you guys said we were dead on. Yeah, I think what I learned from the email was it's hard to do a definitive prison podcast because they're all a little bit different. Like this one girl wrote in, she's like, they're not allowed to have cigarettes in prison. And I replied, oh, yes, they are, with a link. And it just depends on what state and what prison it is. Each prison has its own personality. They do. This is from Anonymous. She requested or he requested? Thank you for the prison podcast, guys. I grew up in Attica, New York, not in the prison. My father was a correctional officer until he retired just this year. I lived about a mile away from the prison, and when I was a kid, they used to tell me that it was a castle sort of is. Standing in my yard. You could hear the guards speaking to the prisoners in the yard. And we even went to an annual picnic for the guards and their families every year on the prison grounds. It was always surreal to ride in a hay wagon around the prison grounds and see the prisoners behind razor wire, playing basketball and hanging out. No one had ever escaped during my stay there, but when I was in high school, a few prisoners did escape from the minimum security prison that's behind Attica, and they were caught very soon after and their bowels were burned. They were burned by Scottie Pippen. It is hard to feel any sympathy for these prisoners for me, because I grew up in the shadow of this institution. And when you know families that are affected by the death of the guards during the riot, it changes your outlook. I think people want to root for the underdog and believe that there are so many wrongly convicted innocents in prison and the guards are evil, but in reality, most of the guys are pretty bad guys, and most of the guards are just trying to do their job. In fact, no one mentions the stress that the guards go through working in a place like that every day. My dad used to have nightmares. He once grabbed my mom while he was asleep and told her to lock in. So that's sort of like our sleep thing. It's parasomnia. And she said it's almost like they have sort of like a post traumatic stress disorder. When my dad finally retired this year, it was as if a huge burden was lifted. He was less irritated and he was less snappy with the people around him. So kudos to the men and women who go to work at these places day in and day out, working midnight shifts and holidays so we can all be safe. That's from Anonymous, and that's a very good point. Thanks a lot for the email. Anonymous. I appreciate that. It's a weird name. It is. It's so unique. If you want to send us an anonymous email, that's perfectly fine. Just say anonymous because we'll be able to tell from your email address who you are. You can wrap it up and send it to us at stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Want more housetofworks? Check out our blog on the hastofworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's is ready. Are you." | ||
9757bb9c-361e-11ea-938d-2fa44c63f970 | Short Stuff: Mexican Jumping Beans | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-mexican-jumping-beans | Mexican jumping beans are a real thing and they really do move around. It’s not magic, it’s nature! | Mexican jumping beans are a real thing and they really do move around. It’s not magic, it’s nature! | Wed, 19 Feb 2020 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=50, tm_isdst=0) | 11641049 | audio/mpeg | "Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer, school's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus with Amazon music you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's other Josh over there. And this is short stuff. Giddy up down Mexico way. Chuck. Yeah. If you're wondering where Jerry is, she's fine. She's out for a couple of weeks and we happen to be recording a lot those couple of weeks. So in podcast years it probably feels like Jerry's has been out for months and months. Yeah, not true. It's not the case. Just two months now. She's doing great, but really everyone pray for her, right? That's a pretty good tuck. That was very nice. I think Jerry's going to appreciate this. Probably so if she ever hears it. No, she won't. She probably won't. Not a chance. So when you were a kid, were you aware of the idea of something called Mexican jumping beans? Yes. Okay. So was I, I think probably from cartoons or something like that. And I'm not sure if I assume that they actually existed. Did you think they existed? I don't remember when I first saw them. Oh wow. You still never seen them, have you? No, I've seen them on the YouTube. That's it. Yeah, I've seen them in person at some point and I don't know if it was just because you can buy them in little souvenir packs and stuff like that. So I don't know if I saw him when I was a kid or when I was an adult and finally went to Mexico. I don't know. But I've seen them before. Well, there was like a glory day in the where you could walk into like a KB toy store in the United States and find Mexican jumping beans for sale. The golden age of Mexican jumping beans. That's right. But I guess we just kind of spoiled it. If you were aware of Mexican jumping beans and thought they were just kind of made up like snipe hunting or jackalopes or whatever. No, they're actually for real. Chuck can verify that. But the thing about them is they're not actually beans, they're seeds. But they do actually move and kind of jump a little bit, move around, at least on their own. And for a while at first, no one really had any idea what the heck was going on. We just knew that it was kind of cool to watch and a little thrilling, especially before the television and even really before radio, this is what people did. They stood around and watch beans roll around on their own or like ant farms or flea circuses. Yeah. Simpler people. Sure. So they should have just called the Mexican Jumping seeds, because that's just as good to me. I don't know why the bean made it more marketable, necessarily. Maybe because they look like beans. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, they're seeds. They should just call them that. Hey, escortin Hernandez, the jumping bean king. He could tell you, oh, we'll get to him. Okay. But they are seed pods. They're from a plant called the Yerba de Fletcher or the Sebastiana Pablo Niana. Very nice. Is that right? You said Latin and Spanish in the same breath. That was really great. That means herb of the arrow, which was taken from the fact that the poison from the shrub SAP was used sometimes to tip the poison for their arrow tips from local tribes. Right. I think I looked it up. I think it might be the yakui who did that. All right. Well, it's a deciduous shrub. It's got leathery leaves. It's dark green, but then turn red in the winter. I bet it's beautiful. It is. I think I look up pictures that look nice to me. Okay. I've never seen them. I've never been to the Rio Mayo. I hadn't even heard of it. But it sounds creamy and delicious. Well, that's the region where they're found in Sonora and Chihuahua. I can't even get a good laugh out of you with my dad jokes anymore. They're that bad? That one was okay. All right. I wasn't sure if you were serious or not. No. So they grow in these rocky slopes, and back in the 1920s is when they first started to kind of hit the States. That's when they came stateside in San Francisco. And there was an article in The Chronicle about the little freakish brown seeds that just basically delighted people of all ages. Yes. Mental Floss had a pretty good article on this. It said that these beans cavorted about to the edification and delight of children and grown ups. Yeah, well, actually, they said seeds. Yeah, they did. They called it seeds correctly. Right. Because this is pre joaquin Hernandez. Right. So I guess I wonder if he really was the one who changed it over to beans. Who knows? I bet he's a smart kid. Maybe take a break. Okay. I think we're at the halfway point. Sure. 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. 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 take off into Adventure. The hard part is deciding where you'll go first, because when you earn 50,000 Advantage bonus miles after qualifying purchases, adventure is on. So fasten your seatbelt and put away your tray table because there's so much world to see. And the city advantage. Platinum Select Card is your ticket. You can learn more at City comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. Okay, Chuck, enough dillydallying. Let's get to Joaquin Hernandez, please. Who is he? He is a guy who, in the 40s, was twelve years old and was aware of Mexican jumping beans. Although they weren't called that at the time. He knew they were kind of interesting, but he thought maybe if you marketed these things just right, you could really have like a novelty on your hands. Joke shops will go bonkers for these things. And he was absolutely right. He's like, kids are dumb. Yeah, kids like me. Yeah. It's amazing. This guy was twelve years old and he became the literal jumping bean king over the following decades. I think Alamos and Sonora, where he lived, is now the jumping means capital of the world. It will probably never give up that title. Why would it? So early on, like people did not know what was going on with these things. They were just delighted by them. Some people were kind of curious, some people had an idea. But there were early theories before it was widely understood, things like that. There was a static charge or something like that, maybe making them bounce, or there was gas trapped inside that was somehow exploding, who knows? It turns out that botanists and biologists, or entomologists I should say, figured it out. Maybe the L three linda had. Yeah, it was a joint effort, but the entomologist, that's who I'm going with, said, you know what? You know what's in there? There's a liveliving moth larvae in there and that is what's making these seeds bounce. That's right. The jumping bean moth laid this little eggs in the flower of that plant and then of course, the eggs are then in the seeds, starts to rain in the springtime and that seed develops and matures, and it splits into three little guys. Right. They fall on the ground. And then those they don't always, but usually those little smaller parts have the mars lavey inside. Larvae. Larvae. And they're in there screaming, Help. Well, they're doing all sorts of things. For one, they burrow, or they make their cocoon, I guess, in the seeds, because they eat the seed from the inside out as they're kind of going through this metamorphosis into a moth. And if you have Mexican jumping beans, you can get them still. If you have them and you take care of them, you could actually witness the moth emerging from the seed eventually. But in the meantime, it's eating the seed from the inside out, which causes movement. And then also, they weave their cocoon. They spin their cocoon inside, and they suspend it from the interior walls of the seed. And so when they move about, their movements are telegraphed through the cocoon and the silk that's, like, attached to the seed, which creates enough energy or enough force to actually move the CPOD. Yeah. And I think where did you get this? Was some of this from the mental place article? No, there was another thing that I will mention in a second if you will keep talking. Okay. I'm not stalling, am I? Now, the cool thing that they mentioned is that if it was just the little larvae inside, in order to move that beam like it moves, it would smush itself if it was just, like, slam dancing against the walls. That one was all Josh. Oh, that was all you. Yeah. All right. Well, the fact that those silk cables from the cocoon are attached is what makes it move. And then the example of the whip makes a lot of sense. When you use a whip, the whip crack at the end has way more force than what you're doing with the handle of the web. Right, exactly. It's the same principle, basically. Right. And the stuff that I base that on came from Wayne's Word. It's an online textbook of NASA natural history. Nice. Yeah. Check it out, everybody. Yeah. That's one of the cooler facts of this one. I think the other one that stuck out to me were shot out like a little jumping bean moth. Are you saying you like the fact that I made up out of whole cloth the most? That's your favorite one. It finally happened. Thank you, Chuck. The other one I thought was really interesting is you expose these things to heat to get them to jump around, and they think that that might be an adaptation. Basically, that when these beans are out there baking in the hot sun, they're, like, trying to scoot over into a shady spot by making those movements. Yes. Isn't that amazing? That's pretty remarkable. It really is. So if you have Mexican jumping beans and you want to make them jump for your friends. And they don't actually jump is not quite the right word. They move about. They kind of shimmy. They'll roll tumble. They don't really catch air. Exactly. Well put, dude. In a very 80s gleaming the cube way. That's right. But to make them really move, you just expose them to heat, put them out in the sun. And so they try to move out of the sun. Well, if you can kind of keep them in the sun, they're really going to start moving. The problem is, this can kill the larvae inside. Yeah. The problem is it's super mean. It really is. So, like, if this happens out in nature, if the larvae can't move the sea pod to a shady spot and actually dehydrates and dies from the heat, that's circle of life kind of stuff, right? Yeah. But if you believe that every living thing deserves respect and be treated well right. Then do not give these to your children. No. Because if you do kill them and it's just for humans amusement, that's a little mean. Yeah. I mean, just think of the kid where this being, if the adaptation theory is correct, is desperately trying to get the shade, and little Timmy keeps just shoving it right back in the sun with a magnifying glass on it. It makes you want to shove little Timmy that's right. As if he were the kind of kid who would squish a ladybug or something. Good point. So there are people who say, hey, you can keep these things as pets if you want, everybody. In fact, there's a website called Jaybean.com. Okay. And Jaybean.com says you can keep them carrying around in your pocket, and the body heat will make them wiggle. If you actually want to let them actually come to fruition, you want to keep them in a cool place so they don't have to wiggle. They can use their energy for eating, but you want to keep them wet so you miss them once a week. And eventually, if you take care of them, you can see a moth come out sometimes. Amazing. It is amazing. Mexican jumping beans are chuck. Amazing. That's right. Well, that's it. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I don't either. So there's this short stuff, adios. 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." | |
86a297ea-3b0e-11eb-9699-23b24eeb8bf4 | How Transcendentalism Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-transcendentalism-works | Every teenager in America knows the transcendentalists were a handful of goofy 19th century philosophers who were into walking in the woods, but they were also so much more. Anyone who focuses on the beauty and the good in the world can’t be too wrong.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Every teenager in America knows the transcendentalists were a handful of goofy 19th century philosophers who were into walking in the woods, but they were also so much more. Anyone who focuses on the beauty and the good in the world can’t be too wrong.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Thu, 05 Aug 2021 14:42:34 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=5, tm_hour=14, tm_min=42, tm_sec=34, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=217, tm_isdst=0) | 34764669 | 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. Jerry. Jerome Rowland is here with us somehow, some way. And this is stuff you should know. Transcendentalism. Man were you into transcendentalism when you were a teenager? Of course I was. Yeah. In college, mainly as an English major is when I kind of got into it. Okay. I discovered these guys at age like 14 nice. And was super into them for a while. Couldn't make heads or tails of a lot of the stuff they were talking about, but something about it just hit me just right. So I think I caught, like, the ethos of it, but not necessarily the intellectual aspect of it. But I was into them big time. They actually led me away from church. Oh, yeah, that's good. I met the transcendentalist and that was it for me in church. I started going to the woods on Sunday mornings instead. Yeah, this is one that hits home for me because as everyone knows, I love being in the woods and I love camping and I love my camp. By the way, we got a bear. Did I send you the picture? No, you got a bear. Do you have one, like, chained up at your campground or something? No, I have a trail cam set up, which is a motion activated camera that you just strapped to a tree. And hunters use them a lot and stuff, but I got one and pointed it towards my camp area. And we've been calling it Crowcam because we've gotten 400 pictures of crows since I set it up. And every once in a while I get a picture, come through at night the next morning, and I'll be really excited because, like, maybe a fox or a raccoon. Never anything. And the other morning I woke up and it gives a little thumbnail and I saw a little thumbnail. I saw a large creature, and I freaked out to rush to the app to ambiguous and it's a bear, dude. Pretty neat. A little blackie. I'm going to text it to you right now. Okay, please do. Just wandering through the camp and there was something about it that just thrilled me to no end. To know that I'm sharing the woods with this squeezy little bear. That's pretty cool, Chuck. And he's not going to attack me. Don't worry, people. He is. Archie there's never been a bear fatality in Georgia, and I think only two in the history of the southeastern United States. Great. That's cute. Looks like you could take that bear anyway if you wanted to. Do you see them? Yeah, it's a cute bear. Isn't that crazy? He's out looking for a picnic basket. I guess so, but long way of saying that I love the woods. And so transcendentalism in college is something that kind of hit home and then for a little while, I was kind of like, but wait a minute, is this just a bunch of who, lazy people and a bunch of, I hate to say, mental masturbation, but what do they actually do? But then this made me feel a lot better about it because the Transcendentalist led to a lot of great progressive reforms. Yeah, totally. Yeah, that's definitely phase two of being into transcendentalism, is hating the transcendentalist. I think so. Really resenting them for who they were and all that. But this brought me back to it for sure as well. I'm a big time friend of Thoreau's now. Again, I used to think he was just a complete useless waste who just dropped out and probably lived off his parents money or something like that and did his own thing. It was not like that at all. And I think we owe Thorough an episode, frankly. I think he's a pretty cool dude. Yeah, a lot of myths and legends around the row. And real quick, before we dive in, I did post that picture on my Instagram at Chuck, the podcaster. Very nice shout out. That was some good social media promotions. All right, so we're talking about the mid 1830s and this idea that these people came forward with very anti establishment ideas where they basically said, everybody has the light of the divine truth, and we should all be self reliant. We should all look within ourselves to find that light, and we should be self reliant in many ways, spiritually self reliant. Or maybe you want to go out to the woods and live and be self reliant on yourself. But basically everyone is entitled to freedom in this country back then, supposedly. And still the case, supposedly. But it led to a lot of great things later on with these progressive movements. But initially and throughout the sort of the heyday of transcendentalism, it was just a lot of thought and talking about and writing about these thoughts. Yeah, it was a philosophical movement. It was a philosophical movement associated with action and doing things as much as it was about sitting down and writing things out and figuring out arguments and theories to root these things to. And actually, that's where the Transcendentalists tripped themselves up as they took something that was very pure and didn't really need any rooting in theory. It could just be like walking through the woods is good in and of itself. It doesn't need a theory that explains why it's good in and of itself. And so when they did try to do that, they actually kind of shot themselves in the foot because they couldn't do it. And that's one reason why you start to hate the transidentalist after you really start liking them, because a lot of it is just kind of gooey when they tried to explain it, because it didn't need explaining. I saw somebody describe it that it didn't need theory any more than an airplane needs wires to hold it up. And yet they tried that because I think they wanted to explain it and they wanted to be taken seriously. Emerson definitely considered himself a philosopher, whether he was or not. I think a lot of people would consider him a philosopher, but when they tried to ground it in philosophy, it kind of got screwed up, like trying to nail Jello to the wall or something like that. It has been called the first sort of distinctive American philosophy, like truly American philosophy. And it was influenced by a lot of things, though, like kind of any movement. And this one starts out with the Puritans who came over, who said that they were very much individualist. And it's sort of that root of individualism that helped sort of inform the early Transcendentalist thoughts. Yeah, the Puritans took I guess we actually kind of talked a little bit about it, that Protestant work ethic. They also brought within the idea of self reliance, of like being able to make your own way in the world. And it took shape for them in the form of religion, where there is this idea that if you were a good Christian and studied your Bible religiously, you could be as close to God as if you were some Catholic in Italy who had to go through a priest in a cardinal and a bishop in the Pope to get to God. That's not how it worked. The individual was able to connect with God as well. And that was a big difference in Puritan thought. And that was one of the big things that grew out of it when they arrived here in America, was the idea of self reliance in the individual. And that very much influenced the Transcendental. Alist yes, European Romanticism certainly played a part, too. That was sort of the first emo movement where feelings mattered, basically, and emotion mattered. It wasn't all about reason and order like it was in the Enlightenment. And things really took a turn after the Paris Peace Treaty of 1815, because previous to that, during the American Revolution and the War of 1812 and Napoleonic Wars, you couldn't really go to America. I'm sorry, Americans really couldn't go to Europe and didn't even have a lot of great access to the literature of Europe. But after that Paris Treaty in 1815, the travel floodgates opened and a lot of sort of scholarly literary types went over to Europe and started studying Goethe and Byron and Shelley in wordsworth. And it was like lighting a fire, basically. Yeah, they missed out on the beginning of Romanticism, which was a big response to the French Revolution, which was in a larger way of response to the Enlightenment, because the Enlightenment changed everything. We had a really good episode about that, if I do say so ourselves, but it placed an emphasis on reason and rationality and facts. And then the French Revolution came along and the people took control and they weren't able to uphold the ideas or the ideals of the enlightenment of things like free speech and freedom of thought and instead turned into a bloody fascists who killed 40,000 people in a year or two. And so that led to this recoiling being repulsed by the idea of just cold rationalism and adherence to facts. And instead it turned into that Romanticism that basically said, imagination, beauty, goodness, these are the important things. These are the true things that are the eternal truths of the universe that bring you to Godliness. Forget facts. Facts are stupid, basically. Yeah. I find myself, the more we've done the show become really interested in what causes movements to happen, whether it's a philosophical movement or nose to the grindstone, get out and do something movement. I just think it's really interesting because it's about a bunch of like minded people coming together in a very specific time and place or it could fall apart very easily. And in the mid 1830s in Boston, Massachusetts, a minister named George Ripley got some people together who were thinking along the same lines as him, who were inspired by the same literary greats of Europe and the Romantics and formed the Transcendental Club. And they eventually started publishing a three time annually literary paper called The Dial. I think they had about 300 subscribers. At its peak, it cost $3 and they published it in four volumes for about four years. And this had poetry and prose and literary and music criticism. And it was a literary magazine like we think about today. But it was happening way back then in Boston. Yeah. And it kind of was focused on beauty and imagination and transcendental ideals, which was basically that if you had imagination, that was the thing that kind of brought you to a communion with the universe or God or the divine. Whatever higher experience you were looking for, it was going to be through imagination. And one of the ways I saw it put Chuck was not that they didn't like facts. They were kind of slaves to facts because the fact was there's badness in the world, there's badness in the universe and they just couldn't account for that. They just couldn't make heads or tails of it because they were so focused on good. But they preferred imagination over facts because they considered the imagination of the individual to be more powerful than facts. Like facts were that Plato died a couple of thousand years ago and you'll never get to meet them because you're separated by time and space. Imagination is that you can go wrestle, have a tickle fight in a meadow with Plato if you want, and that can make you happy. You can go experience that if your imagination is fine tuned enough. And then doing that, that kind of starts to make you question reality. Like, just how real or unreal was that tickle fight you just had with Plato and your imagination is what took you to overcome those facts. So to them, society was becoming increasingly industrialized and preoccupied with money and economy and stuff like that. And it was losing its way, it was losing its imagination. And this was a big response to that. And that was a huge ideal of the transcendentalist, that it was the imagination of the individual that could make you a happier person, more attuned to beauty and goodness, and that if you were off doing that, you're going to connect more fully with other people. And then if enough people did that, then you would have a much better society. That was ultimately the first goal of transcendentalism. The earliest kind of goal of the movement was that. That's right. And little known fact, plato's tickle spot was his thigh, inner thigh, upper inner thigh. That thigh like a horse eating corn. Yes, exactly. There's a birthmark there to guide the way, even. All right, let's take a break. We'll talk a little bit about Walden Pond and Thoreau and whether or not he was who we think he was right after this. All right? Henry David Thoreau, one of the recluse, one of the all stars of the transcendentalist movement. Chin beard enthusiast. He was a chin bearder. He was one of these guys. He went to Walden to live deliberately. He went to the woods to live deliberately, as he said, in 1845, and built a cottage on Walden Pond near Concord, Mass. For a couple of years. And this is one of those where if you have someone who doesn't like the row, they will be very quick to point out a lot of things. You know, he was only half a mile from the main road, and he went into town all the time, and he was less than 2 miles from his main house, and he ate dinner at Emerson's all the time, and his mother and his sister would bring him baked goods and donuts every weekend. Nice. Those are all true things. So I think it bears saying that over the years, the idea that thorough was this luddite who just went to live completely by his own resources, all alone in the woods, like the great History Channel Survival Competition show. And that is not true. And I don't think he ever purported that to be true. He wrote about the interesting aspects of being out there alone in his thoughts and his books, and I think people got that confused and just said, oh, well, that's all he did out there. And he never saw people. He had parties, and there were people everywhere. He walked into town just about every day. That wasn't the whole point of it all, was that he was going to go be self reliant as a survivalist or antisocial. He wasn't, like, turning his back on society. No. And he likes some technologies, too. So the road is misunderstood, and I think not because of his own hand and writings, I think, because people have romanticized this idea of this, like hermit, basically, and this is not the case. Yeah, no, I mean, the facts are this. He did build himself a one room house on some of Emerson's property right alongside on the shores of Walden Pond. He spent his time writing, reading everything from the Greek philosophers to religious texts, whatever he could get his hands on. And then, more than anything, walking in the woods, like, spending his time out in nature and just enjoying it on its face, like, finding the beauty in nature and seeing it absolutely everywhere and letting it increase his spirit and lift his spirits. That's all he wanted to do in life. And then when he needed money, he would go work as a surveyor or maybe make some pencils in his family's pencil factory. Apparently, they made the finest in the country at the time. And then he would make that money and then go back and go live by doing what he wanted to do. It wasn't necessarily to tell people how to live. That's how he wanted to live. And he went and did it. And however you feel about thorough man, I mean, just the fact that he did that, how many people do that and do it not because the CIA is after them or the government's listening in on their affairs or trying to keep them off of the pastor land. This guy did it for his own purposes. He wanted to go live a life that he found fulfilling like that, and he went and did it. That's off to anybody who does that. Yeah. And I don't know if you're maybe a little bit younger as a listener and you think, well, that didn't sound that radical, and there are plenty of people who do that kind of thing today. It's true. But that's not how it worked in 1845. Like, if you were a grown, able bodied man, you were expected to have a job and contribute to society and work. You didn't spend time reading and writing and taking walks in the woods for pleasure. That's just not how things were back then. So it was a very radical thing back then to do. It was also very radical to say, you know what? I don't want to pay my taxes, because you enslaved people here in the United States, and we're in a very awful war against Mexico. And so, you know what? I'm not going to fund this stuff anymore with what little money I make, so you can stick that in your pipe and smoke at US. Government. They came after him. They arrested him. He spent a night in jail. Someone paid off his debt. Do you know who that was? No, he never knew. It was an anonymous relative, and he was not very happy about that at all. Right. Because he didn't want to just have someone pay it. That was the whole point. Right? Yeah. And they forced him out of jail the next day and he was like, no, I'm trying to do something here. It didn't work. Right. But his very famous essay, Civil Disobedience kind of grew from this experience. And he has a really great quote here that kind of hits home to me and anyone who thinks they might can change things or can't let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it. Again, just not necessarily a blueprint for an action, although there was plenty of action later, but just sort of a thought like something to ponder. Yeah. And on that poll tax, I think it was a head tax, which I think is the same thing. Yeah. And he hadn't paid it for years. He was inspired by another transcendentalist, Amos Alcott Louise and May's father, who is a big transcendentalist thinker. And he hadn't paid poll taxes for several years because of slavery as well. But then with the Mexican American War of, I think, 1836, when Thoreau started organizing protests against it and calling for other people to not pay their tax, that's when he was finally arrested, sought out and arrested. And I was reading a little bit about that war and why he and others protested against it. It was apparently an extraordinarily unjust and unprovovoked war where a lot of American volunteers went down and committed war crimes and atrocities against Mexican civilians for basically unprovoked. And there was a lot of reason for people to oppose it, but that didn't mean that there was a lot of people opposing it. It's just that you can really kind of look back historically and find yourself siding with the people who protested against that war. But at the time it was pretty radical to protest against. It was a fairly popular war until the press started reporting from the front lines and people started finding out what was going on down there. People in America were whipped up into this anti Mexican fervor at the time, and we invaded Mexico at the behest of the public. So to stand in the way of that, it was a very brave thing to do. And that's pretty typical of what Thorough and the transcendentalists were into. They would look at something and say, this is morally wrong. This is not okay. I'm going to stand up against it. Maybe it'll inspire other people or not to do that, but at the very least I will have done what I think is moral. And I found another quote, chuck from Civil Disobedience that I thought kind of got that point across really well too. It said that Thorough believed it is not a man's duty as a matter of course to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong. He may still properly have other concerns to engage him, but it is his duty at least to wash his hands of it and not give it practically his support. So in that sense, he was like, I'm at the very least not going to pay taxes to support this. I might not be able to keep the US out of the war, but I'm not going to give you money to go fight that war. I don't want to pay taxes anymore either, you know, I mean, it goes to a lot of unsavory stuff. So there you go. It's only that easy. Maybe some benefactor would pay my fine. Right, but then that's supposed to tick you off because that means that they didn't get your point. No, that'd be fine with me. All right. So I guess we should talk a little bit about some of the activism that sprung from this movement, because all these cool, hippie dippy philosophical thoughts and usings are great, but action is what is really interesting to me. And again, that's something that I don't think we talked a lot about in college. It was more just sort of an English class right. Type of thing. They should not just be taught in English class or even just philosophy class. Like they should be taught in civics and history. Yeah, I feel like that really does them a disservice, and I never put my finger on it until you just said that. So thank you. Thank you. Sure. I'm going to change the educational system. And that's where they started to. The transcendentalists knew that education was the key. They thought it should be free. They thought anyone should be able to go any race, any creed. That's radical women. It was very radical. A lot of them were teachers, and quite a few of them even founded their own, like, really forward thinking progressive schools, I think, including Peabody, Anthrop and Bronson Alcott. Yeah, I think that was Amos. Good old Amos Alcott, Louisiana. Oh, was that his first name or something? Yeah, I think Bronson, that was his nickname because he was so tough. Hey, come here, Brunson. Yeah, they identified education as most social movements, too, is like a key. And they definitely went after that. But I think also, like you said, it was in part because that was their background. They had seen first hand what needed, how much improving it needed. And one of the things, Chuck, is like what you just described, what they thought the education system would be, it pretty closely resembles what we have today. And when you see this stuff and you just take for granted what the transcendentalists were for, it really gets across how successful they were over the course of a couple of centuries, because these were the first people who were agitating for this stuff in America. Yeah, they were the first ones to kind of wake up and say, wait, a lot of this stuff is going wrong. This could be better this way, this could be better that way. And they ultimately far past the times when they died. We're successful in that. I think that's a great time for a break. You set us up nicely. Thank you. All right, we'll talk about more activism right after this. So one of the big ones that the Transcendentalists were involved in from the outset was abolition of slavery. They were fervent anti slave activists and not just, like, writing lectures and sermons and letters and speaking out against slavery. And again, this is the 1830s, maybe the 1840s. This is not like there were a lot of people who are still totally cool with slavery in the United States at the time. These were some of the first people speaking out about it. But these people also put their money where their mouths were in a lot of ways, including Thoreau, who was, if you were a whole home about thorough before was it personally a conductor on the Underground Railroad? That's right. He got in there, got his hands dirty. A lot of the anti enslavement movement were women of the Transcendentalist movement. One of the rock stars of the Transcendentalist movement was a woman named Margaret Fuller, who she was never apparently super comfortable being sort of tagged as a Transcendentalist. She hung out in that crowd, but she was not religious. She was, by all accounts, probably agnostic, maybe even atheist. Sort of danced on the fringes of the Unitarian Church. But religion, it was not a part of her sort of mindset. So that's where she kind of differed some from the standard Transcendentalist. But for a little while, I think for two of the three years she was the editor, two of the four years of the Dial, big friend of Emerson. She wrote a book in 1845 called Woman in the 19th Century, and it was really one of the first sort of protofeminist tomes, and she was way ahead of her time. She went to women's prisons to interview them. She was a literary critic and an editor and a writer and advocated for women to have not just jobs, but, like, any job. She's, like, go out and be a ship captain if you want to. Really forward thinking woman was Margaret Fuller. Yeah. She started, I think, at age 29, these things called The Conversations, which was a series of discussions and talks that were super feminist, which was, again, really radical at the time, because we're talking the 1830s, and she likes the row. She actually died young. She died at age 40. And so we remember Margaret. Did you see how she died? Yes, it was astounding. So Margaret Fuller went to Italy to become part of the Italian revolution, right? Yes. This is how she spent her last couple of years. The revolution fell. It wasn't successful, but she fell in love with the younger revolutionary, had a child, and they sell back to America. Right. And then yes, Fire Island almost truck almost all the way back to America. They had a shipwreck, I think, about 50 yards from shore oh, my God. And died. Some people weren't like, apparently the rescue attempt, even though they were so close to shore, was just not strong. I don't know why. I'd like to look a little bit more into it, but apparently Thoreau grabbed Emerson and they were like, I don't know how much longer it was after the shipwreck, but let's go try and find her, at least body. And I'm not sure if they ever recovered her, but very tragic death. Yeah. She her son and her husband all drowned. I know. And again, she was age 40. So it's pretty astounding and remarkable that we remember her because her productive years were just an eleven year period from age 29 to age 40. But it just goes to show you what a powerhouse she was. I mean, she went and fought in the Italian Revolution. That's just super BA. Yeah. And it seemed like any job that she had, she just did great. Emerson when the Dial was founded, that was the first person he thought of. He was like, Well, I need to go get Fuller on this, because she's a crack writer and editor, and I think she was supposed to make, like, $200 a year doing that, but never got paid a dime. The Dial was not a big money maker. I don't think they even paid the contributor, so it didn't last that long. But very forward thinking literary magazine. And Margaret Fuller was a big reason why it happened to begin with. Yeah. So obviously, feminism and women's suffrage and equal rights for women were huge parts of the transcendental movement, as was abolition. And I looked to see how transcendentalism ended, and apparently it was like a it never ended. Man no, it was like a sparkler. Like, it burned really bright for a very short amount of time. So, like, the whole transcendental movement lasted maybe to the 1850s. One of the big things that took it down was Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau, two of the really big central figures of the whole thing, died fairly young. The Road died of tuberculosis in his early 40s. Emerson remained. But again, there was a big problem in getting across what the transcendentalists were all about, because they would get tripped up in theory and all that stuff. And then also I saw that the scientific method started to gain ground around the 1850s, 1860s, and people turn their attention back to logic and reason and the Enlightenment ideals, which kind of took them away from that romanticism of the transcendental lists. Yeah. I think my takeaway from this now, restarting it all these years later, is it's a philosophy that doesn't have to go away completely. And I think a lot of people would argue that it's still very robust in a lot of ways. It's just sort of morphed and taken on different forms. But, you. Can have transcendentalist feelings and philosophies and also believe in science. And I don't think those things have to be separated out. So while it did burn bright and die out, I think clearly the kids of the were inspired by these people and people like you and I and college kids still today that read this stuff for the first time. I think everyone can take a little bit of that with them if they want or not. But it's certainly not outdated, I don't think. No, it's not for sure. I think that spirit still continues on today. For sure. And anybody who cares about social justice, environmental justice, those are all very much transcendental ideals. And anybody who stops and appreciates the way sunlight is filtering on a flower or something like that, you're being a transcendentalist right there, it's really easy to over explain. It's really easy to also just kind of be whatever that transcendentalist ideal was. But that was it in a nutshell, just appreciating the beauty in the world so much that you basically dedicate your life to appreciating it and not taking it for granted. Yeah. And every time I go to the family camp and I have that cooler full of beer and my mini bike and my solar power lighting up those beautiful string lights through the woods and I'm burning the fire. I got my Bluetooth speaker playing some fleet boxes and I'm burning that fire from that firewood that was cut by the nice gentleman who delivers it down there and stacks it for me. I really find myself at one with nature. Very nice, Chuck. You're a transcendentalist. Cut and dried. I like camping. Let's just leave it at that. I like glamping. Yeah, it's almost clamping. Yeah, sounds like it. You have me a bluetooth. You're still sleeping in a tent on the ground though. That's fine. You got anything else? I got nothing else. So look for a thorough episode some day. And in the meantime, go out and appreciate the beauty in the world. And since I said appreciate the beauty in the world, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this chickens in ancient Rome. Remember we talked about that? Which one was that? There weren't chickens anymore. Superstition. Ancient. Superstitions. Right. And we heard from a few people about this. People that know a lot more about ancient Rome than we do. Rome is from yeah, exactly. Mike Trina. Hey, guys. My wife Keturah is a big fan of your podcast. She was listening earlier today and asked me about this. My degrees are both in Greek and Latin language and culture. Chickens were relatively rare in ancient Rome, although they did exist. Chicken was a delicacy that only aristocrats would eat and even then, only on rare occasions, the peasantry would rarely eat meat at all, except on festival days. Chickens were, however, prized for their use in divination, like we talked about with the wishbones. And we're often carried with armies into battle so that the Augers could attempt to determine the auspices of a coming conflict. I recommend the Book Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome. Atkins and Atkins. The edition I have is oxford University Press has all sorts of great info about daily life as an average Roman citizen. That sounds like a cool book. It does. I can't wait to read the chapter on chickens. Yeah, that's from Mike. Thanks a lot, Mike. That's exactly what I was hoping to hear. Or the kind of thing I was hoping to hear when I asked for your help, so thank you for hearing me. I also blasted you with the ESP plea for request, so maybe that's where you really were prompted to respond. Who knows? I wonder if that's an audio book. I'd like to listen to that one. What's it called? Chickens in Rome by Mike. No. It's called handbook to Life in Ancient Rome. Very nice. And it was Mike who wrote in, right? That was Mike, yeah. Well, thanks a lot to Mike, and thank you to your So. For telling you that we needed your help. And thank you to everybody out there listening and podcast land. If you want to get in touch with us, you can send us an email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom Roman style, and send it off to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
How Rainforests Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-rainforests-work | It's been called the world's lungs, the world's pharmacy and the world's air conditioner. It takes up only 6 percent of Earth's land, yet houses 50% of the world's species. Find out the math behind why they may be gone in 40 years in this episode. | It's been called the world's lungs, the world's pharmacy and the world's air conditioner. It takes up only 6 percent of Earth's land, yet houses 50% of the world's species. Find out the math behind why they may be gone in 40 years in this episode. | Tue, 09 Oct 2012 17:20:39 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=17, tm_min=20, tm_sec=39, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=283, tm_isdst=0) | 37662374 | 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 the little dinosaur friend of yours, he's kind of become a fixture or she. Yeah, it looks like a she, I guess. What's her name? Dina. That was sharp. Thank you. I appreciate that. Not as sharp, however, unfortunately, as the blade of the Kettleman's chainsaw cutting down their tropical rainforest like crazy. Yeah. Or burning it. Yeah, crazy. Well, that's what they used to do, supposedly. I don't know if you know this or not, but I read a couple of books by a guy named Charles C. Mann. One called 1491, the other is called 1493. And in it he talks about how there's a lot of evidence that the Amazon basin was a completely human managed creation. That it's not like some virgin tropical rainforest in this natural state. That it was, like, created. Like we planted it. Yeah. And managed it. I think he says if that's the case, then it's like the largest public works project ever undertaken in the history of humanity. But one of the pieces of evidence is this, like, slash and char agriculture, where it's like you set the forest on fire, but you don't let it burn all the way down into ash. You, like, put it out and it leaves these stumps of charcoal, which actually make the ground more fertile. Which, it turns out is a surprising factor, if you ask me. A surprising fact of the podcast. That the ground, the soil in this incredibly lush Amazon rainforest, or any rainforest, tropical rainforest, we should say is really not very fertile at all. Yeah. At least deep down. That's a good point. Yeah. And that is in this article. And I thought that was pretty interesting, too. I thought this article was jam packed with stuff. And then it just takes a really depressing turn at the end. Yeah. Because everyone knows what's going on with the rainforest, and we're going to read a plug later. But our old friend Joanne, who nominated us oh, yeah. For an Emmy nomination, of course, we learned quickly that spoken word albums, you don't have a shot. It's who do you know? Well, no, it's kind of a ripoff, because all the spoken word Emmys I'm sorry, grammys. All the spoken word Grammys are people reading their autobiographies who know everybody. It's just such a ripoff. I know hard working folks like you and I can't be nominated for Grammy because Tina Fey read her book out loud and have a microphone, and look, it's so funny. She's got, like, a man's forearms. It's hilarious. I love Tina Bay. But anyway, Joanne Stanley and I think I'm pronouncing that right works for the Amazon Institute. Right. And she's one who kind of got me thinking about this today. And we're going to plug her organization later. Okay. You can adopt a sloth. Oh, yeah. That's great. Pretty neat. So having said that thank you Joanne. You know my big problem with those programs is you don't actually get to take the sloth or the kid or whoever home with you. It's a symbolic adoption. I think it's just like giving money to somebody is what it amounts to. Pretty much. But yeah, I think that's a good thing to plug. Chuckers. Great. Chuck, I want you to know something. The tropical rainforests on Earth cover 6% of the dry land on the planet, not counting the oceans. Right. But they are home to about 50% of the species on the whole planet. Is that mind boggling? I'm just going to go ahead and say this whole podcast, you will be blown away by the numbers, the sheer numbers of diversity going on. Yes. And sadly 6% now used to be 14%. Yeah, it's going away at an alarming rate. There's a statistic given at the end of this article that I've heard many times with some of these kind of hippie ecology statistics, you have to kind of go back and look a lot of them. They're just so staggering and it's very important stuff that some sensational ones kind of slip through the cracks and get reported over and over and over again. Right. Okay. So there's a statistic that at the current rate of deforestation there will be no tropical rainforests left on Earth in 40 years. And I looked it up and apparently that's fairly close to accurate. So at the rate that it's being deforested today, which is about 50,000 acres a day yes. 1.3 acres a second or something like that. 1.5 acres a second. Okay. Every second. Yeah. That is depressing. Yeah. So 500 acres a day. So if you take the total acreage of rainforest left on Earth and divide it by 50,000 acres lost a day, if you do that constantly, 24 hours a day, every day in 40 years there's no rainforest left at this rate. You want to hear something else Gary? Yeah. 500 years ago there were 10 million Indians living in the Amazonian rainforest. 10 million today less than 200,000. Yes. That's the Amazon alone. Right? Yeah. Amazonian rainforest. Well, the Amazon is by far the largest rainforest. The Amazon makes up 54% of the tropical rainforest left on Earth. Of all the tropical rainforests? Yeah. But all in I think there are more than 80 countries through Africa, Australia, Asia, Central and South America. Right. And we're talking tropical. We're not talking about you in Seattle and you in Oregon. Those are rainforests. They're beautiful. They're not tropical rainforests but they're not tropical. You try to find a sloth in there, you can't do it. No sloth? Not that I know of. I don't think so. I guess let's talk about weather. Okay. Lots of rain and rainforests. Yes. They don't call it that for nothing. Now did you convert these inches to feet because it's startling when you do. No, I'll give you inches first. And if you have that conversion, that's great. 160 to 400 inches of rain per year. 13 to 33ft of rain of rain every year. Because it rains a lot in Georgia, right? Yeah. No. It makes Georgia look like the Sahara Desert. Yeah. Maybe even the gobi for those of you living outside the United States. And what other country was it that use the Imperial system? Liberia. Yeah. We're talking 406.4 to 1016 CM. It's a lot of meters. There is no dry season like you have in some places. Like where you have monsoon season, dry season, it's wet all year round, spread out pretty evenly. Temperature remains pretty constant. Hot and muggy then dip below 60. That's because tropical rainforests form a band around the equator between the two meridians. The tropics things don't change a lot there. Right. Because the where is it? The precession of the Earth doesn't create seasons like it does elsewhere in the northern or southern hemisphere. Sure. We get a little further away from the sun, it gets a little cooler. Right. So what you have hot, wet and green. Yes. And the reason is like monster green. Monster green. Like I guess we should start at the top with the canopy. I drew also, Chuck, if you need any help, I drew a little diagram text to picture. You need to put a little happy face on your sunshine. I didn't bring a pen. We can add that later. But if you need this, this is here directly. I appreciate that. The canopy, we're talking giant trees, 60 to 150ft tall, forming the thick canopy such that only like 1% of light will eventually hit the floor of the jungle. And then above that, sometimes you're going to have these, and I see you drew them. What are they called? Emergence. Emergence. These trees that are so stubborn and intent on getting sunlight, they're like, you know what, I'm going to go even higher than the canopy right. And steal all that sunlight for myself. Yeah, they're crooks. Crook trees, basically. There's a lot of crooks that we're going to get through this. Yeah. Okay. So one thing that I learned from reading this is the tropical rainforest is a real, like, dog eat dog ecosystem. Maybe we should just get rid of it all. I mean, it's brutal plants, like sucking the life out of other plants. Yeah, that's just how it goes. That's what it's like in the jungle. Josh so you've got the canopy level? Got the canopy. And you said another factor of the podcast to me, only 1% of the sunlight that hits that canopy makes it down to the forest floor. Yeah. And another cool thing that was pointed out a little later is that if like, one of these trees dies and there's a hole in the canopy and little sunlight gets through it's, like everyone and everything goes berserker plants and animals like sun. We got to get to it that is our life. And they like scrambled toward these little sunspots. It's like that Rush song. The trees. Yeah. That was a good one. That was in the way proggy early phase. Then I like Prague Rock because I like Rush. Yes. Well, apparently their new album is pretty good. Everything they did was good. No, I mean they had name one album of theirs that wasn't good. Well, I mean, anything since the late eighty s to me. No, man, I'm telling you. Well, they're getting high marks where they're new and for being like sort of a throwback to their old sound, that's great. I actually don't like their earliest stuff. Like 20, 112. Not that big one. Boy, that's a dude conversation. Have you ever been to a Rush show? Yeah. Five girls there. Yes, it's true. And they're looking around like this. Yeah, exactly. And the guys don't even notice them because getty leaves on stage and I'm wearing a wizard's hat. All right, so the forest floor, where it's nice and dark and dank, you're going to find what you would probably expect, which is a lot of moss and fungus. No grass. No. You'd be hard pressed to grow any grass on the forest floor of the tropical rain. I think you're right, because there's not much light. Like, we're talking about 1% of available light. Yeah, the one percenters there on the jungle floor. So, like you said, let's say a tree dies, there's an opening. It's kind of like a rent control apartment. Everybody's scrambling for it. Sure. This happens probably more than you would think. And it's not even necessarily a tree dying. A tree could just fall over, as we'll see later. Yeah, but when? That's not the case in an area where there's seedlings trying to grow, most of them die because you have to make it 60 to 100ft to the top of the canopy to start growing branches. And it's remarkable. It takes a lot of light to generate or to undertake the process of photosynthesis to get that tall to ensure your survival. Anyway. Yeah. And if you are one of those lucky 1% ceilings oh, wait, I just confused two different statistics. Yes. If you are one of those lucky ceilings that happens to have an opening in the canopy and makes it all the way up there and starts growing, makes a nice life for yourself, you are probably going to be subject to basically what are parasitic plants? Not carnivorous plants, even parasitic plants. Yeah. The epiphytes actually grow onto giant trees. They use that as their ladder to get to the top. Well, they form the understory, too, so you have the canopy and then just under that where there's still some light coming in, but nothing like above the canopy. You have those epiphytes and those are like ferns and orchids. Yeah. Which are very beautiful. Airplanes. Yeah. Plants. Because the roots aren't in the ground, they're on the side of the tree. Yeah. They're like the succubus, and they can eventually kill this tree if they get to the top and they're doing fine up there. And then their roots spread out and choke the tree to death. Then that tree can actually decompose, but the lattice framework is still there. So the epiphyte is just like, great, thanks for the ride. Sorry I killed you. Thanks for the ride, lady. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So an epiphyte can turn into a strangler. It's basically an epiphyte that's gone bad. Well, like you said, it's doggy dog. Everyone's trying to get up to the top. I know, but if you're an epiphyte oraliana, which is a I think that's how you pronounce it yeah. Which is basically a vine that can grow all the way up and then start to sprint. It's like kudzu. Yeah. You're not doing anything really on your own. You're dependent on some other organism. Whereas if you're a tree, you're all doing your own thing. Yeah. But then you're dependent on the sun. Well, yeah. Rain should hardly be faulted for that. Everyone's mooching off of somebody, except, I guess, the sun. The sun is the one that's providing it for everybody. All right. Stops there. You were talking about the infertile soil. It rains so much that the nutrients get washed away really easily and they don't ever get to penetrate deep into the earth. Right. So Jerry laughed at that. Very nice. And it wasn't unsettling or off putting. And so what happens is you get a very thin layer of fertile soil. So what you get there is very thin, not very deep roots. And in the end, you get trees that fall down pretty easily. Like here in Atlanta, when we go through heavy drought, you'll also often see, like, trees falling down during windstorms because their roots never got super low. Yeah, this is exactly the same thing. Exactly. But some trees have adapted a way around this call buttresses, which is basically like a trunk coming off of the trunk and just going down to stabilize it. Yeah. Did you look those up? I've seen those before. It's pretty cool. I mean, it's like a stand almost surrounding the base of the tree. It's kind of neat. Yeah, it's a buttress. Yeah. Well, a buttress of any kind is a support system. You're one of my buttresses. I appreciate that. So I think that is worth saying again, the reason that the tree roots are shallow is because nutrients are scarce. And one of the reasons why is because it rains so much. Right. Yeah. But even still, these plant species and animal species, as we'll see, they've just adapted for life in this really high up. Like, everything that sustains life is basically up there for the most part. And all of these plants and animals have made these awesome adaptations to live high up in the air in a place where nutrients are really hard to come by and there's a lot of competition for everything. A lot of competition. I just think it's best like a buttress, it's like, oh, well, I'll fall over if I don't grow another trunk. Fall, grow another trunk. Well, or the epiphytes can get to the top and then leap from tree to tree and further seal in the canopy, which is kind of cool. So we should talk about bacteria for a minute. Plays an important part. What? In any ecosystem yeah, but especially in the rainforest, trees break down bacteria with food, provide bacteria, food, bacteria. I agree, trees break down bacteria, food, and then the bacteria poop that out and feed the trees. Right, and they're just like it's a great little relationship symbiotic, everybody gets what they want. It's like those little birds that pick bugs off of the back of what a hippo? Is it a hippo that does that? I don't know, I've seen that. Now there's a bird that picks food out of the mouth of a hippo. Really? It's really dangerous to be that bird. But the hippos are like, thank you. Yeah, and here's another mind blowing status if we want to talk about diversity, let's say you live in northwest Oregon and you're like, dude, we've got, like a dozen tree species here in this forest, it's, like, so diverse. Yeah, hit the Hecky sack again, let's get out of here. 300 different distinct tree species in the rainforest. 300, yeah, but just trees, they're really spread out. Yeah, so, like, in an acre, you might find just, like, a few of that species. Yeah. So there's a bunch of different species packed into one acre? Yeah. I mean, it's crazy. 10 million animal species? Yeah, that's a lot. Unfortunately, they are being destroyed at the rate of 50,000 species per year. Experts say that we are losing 137 plant, animal and insect species every single day through the deforestation. 137 species. Not just like, oh, that bug died, it's like, all of that bug died today on Monday, and guess what will happen tomorrow? All of another insect will die. 137 of them. That's great. It's just like, it's the saddest thing ever. And it's not just sad, too. I mean, we'll see in a second what the problem is when that happens. Biodiversity is important, and if you're talking about the cradle of biodiversity, then it becomes even more important because it's, like the cool part of town, and then the suburbs as far as planet Earth goes, and then the exurbs, we can't even talk about that. All right, but out of these 10 million, of course insects are going to be the most abundant and then out of all of those, ants are the most abundant thing in the rainforest. Yeah, I found somewhere that they make up 30% of the biomass of a tropical rainforest. Really? From what I understand, the entire biomass, the trees and all that stuff. Wow. The ants make up 30% of that. Yeah, I bet they're not fun to deal with. Yeah. And something like 15%. So half of that is fire ants. Really? Wow. Can you imagine? Have you seen this incredible movie? It's called Medicine Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It's an Indiana Jones movie. There's the fire ants in there. It's just crazy what they can do to amay. It's such an abomination. Did you see the South Park about that? Is it great? It was great. It was also probably like the most disturbing I think you saw the park you've ever seen that would happen. Yeah, you should see it. We can't say it on the other side. No, I shouldn't even be endorsing that episode. So these insects also have a very symbiotic relationship with the forest, because they, along with birds, help spread the seeds around, because there's not a lot of wind going on. There's like zero bead. Yes. So seeds aren't going to propagate by flowing through the air like they do elsewhere. So you got these little insects eating them and then carrying them off. Ten to 20ft away. Or birds carrying them miles and miles away. Pooping them out. Pooping them out. And then you're spreading seed. Yes. Which is probably another reason why each acre has so many different kinds of plant life going on. Right, yeah. Well, I think that's definitely why the birds also especially like, say, hummingbirds, which there's an abundance in the tropical rainforest, they will get pollen all over themselves as they go from orchid to orchid. So that helps propagate orchids or epiphytes, which typically can't really get from tree to tree. Right. So when you have an orchid that's evolved specifically for a hummingbird, it's going to attract those hummingbirds with your delicious nectar and help generate new orchids. Nice. Elsewhere, I associate hummingbirds with the sun for some reason. Yeah. Probably just because where I live. Yeah. But it's hard to imagine them, like, in the dark jungle. Well, I think in the understory, which is where the epiphytes are, it's not that dark. It's like 100ft down, where it's like you can't really see. Yeah. Reptiles, obviously. Tons of reptiles and amphibians. If you want to avoid snakes, then the Amazon rainforest is probably not where you want to go. Yeah. But a lot of these are being smuggled out. Evidently, live animals are the fourth largest smuggling commodity. Smuggling out these live animals for resale, is that for bush meat or just for pet? No, pet. Black market pets. This is a documentary that I haven't seen it yet. Yeah, I was kind of surprised. Behind drugs, diamonds and weapons. See, that's such a BS. They always say that. It's always like those and then whatever you want to put behind it. I've seen counterfeit materials for being smuggling for fourth? Yeah. For like, black market stuff. It's like whatever you're talking about, it's always the fourth one after those. Yeah. Drugs, diamonds, weapons and knocked off firbies, right? You might be right, Josh. I think I am, but I'm going with it. But you did talk earlier about the different types of adaptations for the animals. Yeah. Like little webs of skin, like a flying squirrel and other animals to allow it to soar between trees. It's creepy. Pretty neat. Prehensile tails. I love a prehensile tail, which is just like an extra hand, especially for a grasping hand, basically, is what it is. Not like a card playing hand. Yeah, more like a branch grabbing hand. I'm going to hang on to this and carry my body weight with my tail so I can use both hands. Watch me show off. Exactly. I'm a howler monkey. Can you do a howler monkey impression? No, can you? No. Okay. I don't know anyone who can, either. I'm just hoping you I bet that guy from Police Academy could. Oh, yeah. Michael. Do you remember it? Michael Winterbottom? No, I don't know. He was good, though. You know. We're going to get some emails about it. Yeah, that was Michael so and so, lots of bats, and then thus, lots of bats at dude. There's a park in Zambia called Sancta National Reserve, and it's home to the largest bat migration in the world. Every October, 10 million bats come to Roost and eat these mangoes that are ripening nearby. Wow. And they cover everything. And apparently when they take off at dusk, they blot out the sky for like, 20 minutes in every direction. That's so scary. Yeah. I'm sure they just want the mangoes, though. Yeah. They don't care about you. But, man, I even like bats and I'm creeped out by that. Yeah. Austin, Texas, has nothing on those. Oh, yeah. They have that tunnel, the overpass, whatever, gorillas grade apes orangutangs pigs, big cats and bats. Gap. By the way, another thing I found in 1493, that was a huge industry like bat guano mining because they used it for fertilizer for so long that people made fortunes, like oil fortunes, off of these things. And it was all in these tropical areas. Wow. There were, like, quarries that they were digging out back guano from the big names there that got rich. Oh, I don't remember. Okay. I would imagine they were mostly in Brazil. Okay. It's not like the gettys are the standard. I don't think so. The standard Oil. I know it's standard. Really? Sure. People like we talked about indigenous tribes are being basically shoved out at an alarming rate. And these people, it's really sad because they have these medicine men who have a great deal of knowledge, who are very old, and if they're not in one of the little hippie websites I went to said if one of these medicine men dies, then it's like burning down a library. Unless they pass on their knowledge, then it just dies with them, just like some native languages do. It's really sad. And that's why the movie Medicine man was said in the Amazon because people think if there is a cure for cancer and AIDS, it lies in the jungles, so okay, that's one thing I believe by the way. Well, they called rainforest the pharmacy of the world. Yes, but I just have a personal theory that there is no disease where and there is not a cure here on earth. Yeah, I think it's pretty biblical of you. No, it's nothing to do with that. You don't think so? No, I just think it's the yin and yang of Mother Nature. Like there cannot be one without the other. I got you. Does that make sense? It's pretty interesting. I don't have anything to back that up, just my personal thought. Well, just stick around. Yeah, sure. So apparently 25%, a quarter of all the medicines we use today have their origins from plants in the rainforest. That's a pretty significant backing for what you're saying. Well yeah, which always cracks me up when we get crap for talking about like Eastern and Western medicine people like you should just call it real medicine or not real medicine. I don't think a lot of these people realize how much of their pharmaceuticals are based on plants that some shaman discovered. We have a lot of angry listeners, don't we? Sometimes. But just 1% of the plants in the Amazon rainforest has been analyzed by Western chemists. I guess. Yes. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Remember we did an Ethnobotany episode that was pretty good. Oh yeah, that's right. But even still, even with just that 1% 25% of our Western medicine from that 1% 25% of all of our medicines came from that 1% analysis. Yeah. 121 prescription drugs are plant derived. Yeah. That's amazing. We get a lot of food. Apparently there's something like 2000 types of usable fruit. 30 00 30 00 total indigenous tribes throughout the rainforests use about 2000 estimated. And then we in the west have used like 200. Isn't that nuts? There are like literally 1800 types of fruit that we just don't eat over here. And you go to these farmers markets and you see something like wow, I've never seen this, whatever it is, imagine 1800 different things that you've never seen before. Right? Yeah. And that's like a farmer's market. I'm still like blown away by Jackfruit. Which one is that? They're huge and they have like spine, you know what I mean? Yeah, my dad would end of that stuff now. Exotic fruits. He goes to the Beeford highway farmer. Okay. Speaking of good eating amazon. Well, not the Amazon, I always want to see the Amazon but the tropical rainforests of the world are home to one quarter of the bird population. Parrots. Two cans. Yeah. Yum. You can't eat a two cans. You need Fruit Loops. A lot of the things that we take for granted over here came from the rainforest. Like potatoes, rice, black pepper, my favorite spice, cinnamon, cloves, avocado, pineapples, corn, chocolate, coffee, tomatoes, like everything you love. Almost 80% of the food we eat, I don't think potatoes were from the rainforest. I think they were from the mountains of the Andes. Why did it say that in here then is wrong? It's possible. Well, roughly 80% of the food we eat originally came from tropical reinforce. So that's a pretty amazing stat, too. Yeah. We're just tearing them down, Willynilly. Yeah, that's kind of a problem. So we're losing the pharmacy. We're losing tons of delicious fruit and delicious birds. Losing people, a lot of people. 10 million to 200,000. 10 million. That's from pre Colombian. Yeah, it's been a while, but still, that's a drastic reduction. You also hear that we're losing the world's lungs, but apparently that's not necessarily true. Yeah, they used to call it's funny. They go by the lungs of the world. Is the Amazon the pharmacy of the world? And then someone else in here calls it the air conditioner of the world. Right. Why can't it just be the jungle? Well, I think we're trying to drive at home to, like, fat, lazy Westerners who are like, I need that stuff, right. I don't want to be hot. Yes. They used to think that the rainforest was super important for providing oxygen, but apparently recent evidence shows that it doesn't have that much of an effect on oxygen supply. Not a net effect. Not a net effect. It does. It still produces like, 20% of the world's oxygen. Yeah. Which was the stat that was bandied about for a long time. But it requires about that much to decompose everything on the floor. Got you. Yeah. But it is the air conditioner of the world, in a way. How so? Well, the dark depths of the rainforest are going to absorb a lot of heat, and if you mow these things down, there's going to be a lot more sun reflected back up in the atmosphere, which is going to increase the overall temperature of the planet. So let's talk about why would anybody mow this down? If these things are like the nature's pharmacy or the world's pharmacy, the world's air conditioner, the world's longs, the world's the world's strip club. Yeah. Everything. Right. So why would anybody cut this stuff down? Short sidedness of huge corporations is my answer. Even more directly, like, what are they after, though? Clearing land for, like, lumber, paper products, making pastures for cows? Which is not a very smart way to go about things. No, it really isn't. Like, let's cut down old growth rainforests for these cows. Yeah. So they can have a barren landscape. Well, that's part of the problem, is because these soils are so nutrient poor, apparently when you clear cut the rainforest checkers, you have usable land, arable land for a year or two. Yeah. So part of it is because this nutrient turnover from all the rainfall, but also all of a sudden, the soil that's used. To almost no sunlight whatsoever is suddenly subject to light and heat of immense proportions. We're at the equator, and so it bakes and cracks and loses its nutrients even faster through runoff, so causes flooding. It's really a terrible use of this land, using it for crops and livestock. Yeah, I got a stat for you too. I mean, it doesn't pay off either in the long run. This one statistic is that land converted to cattle operation yields the land owner $60 per acre. If they harvest it for timber, it's going to be worth $400 per acre. But if you use renewable and sustainable practices when you're harvesting, your land is going to yield $2,400 per acre in the long run. Wow. So it's short sighted. And it's not these indigenous people that we need crops. So we're going to cut down the rainforest. It's Mitsubishi and who else? Texaco, Georgia, Pacific. Oh. What's? The huge unicorn like these huge corporations are going to Unicow. Okay. What do you think? I said unico. I know what that is. It's this clothing company out of Japan. Oh, really? Well, they hate the rainforest, right? They don't even have any stake in it. They just go and cut it down for fun. Yeah, we're laughing, but that's really sad. Well, also, indigenous tribes who are protected are frequently murdered by mercenaries who are hired by these mega corporations that want this land and drive these people off of their protected land. I believe there was like a little girl who was found dead, an indigenous tribe member who has found dead, like chained to a tree and just killed by loggers who wanted that land. It's really bad down there. That was Brazil, I think. Wow. Well, plus the mudslides and flooding and everything else that happens when you disrupt an ecosystem drastically. Yes. It's like the hunting whale sharks. Yeah, that's what I was reminded of when you were saying, like, the economic impact of preserving it is way better than just using it up right then. Yeah. Short sightedness. Short sightedness. It's very sad that companies still like that. There's not a body that can say, we got to stop this now. There's tons of people like Joanna doing this great work. Don Henley, Sting, these people that have been on it for years, but it just keeps happening. Well, why don't you plug them? Are we done? I don't have anything else. Panic search bar? Well, no, we should tell everybody about something very special and dear to our hearts. New York City. That's right. We are going to Comic Con and we will be doing a live podcast on Friday, October 12 at Comic Con in Java 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 ComicCon, you should come by and see that. But after Comic Con, we have one of our famous that's famous to us all Star Trivia Night. 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 Flat Iron, 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. It's just fun. So what is that? That'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. Tribute starts at 830, doors at 730. Be there, be square. You're good at this. Thank you. Okay. If you want to learn more about rainforest, type that word in R-A-I-N-F-O-R-E-S-T-S into the handycearchhouseofirst.com, and it will bring this up. And it's a handy search bar. So it's time for plugging. The Amazon Institute. That's right. They're making some headway over there, but she basically points out that the bounty that Amazon is great provides a lot of fish, fruits, vegetables, medicinal plants, plenty of fresh, clean water. I saw a stat, I can't remember it, but we didn't mention something about a percentage of the world's fresh water is in the rainforests. Like, a lot. Yes. I can't remember how much it was. We've got the Ice caffeine melting. However, due to a lack of nutritional education, they hunt monkeys and sloths to eat there. I'm telling you, these animals do not provide any nutritional value, though they are bones and tendons, and they don't taste good either. Weird. They just fill space in a hungry stomach. So you can participate in the Adopt a Sloth program. Your money buys food and protection. Basically. Two kilos each of beans, rice, coffee, sugar and flour, soap, milk and eggs are given in exchange for a sloth. Or a monkey that was scheduled to be skinned and grilled, is how they put it. Well, so if you donate $75, you can adopt a sloth. You get a certificate of ownership with the name you've chosen for your sloth. You own that sloth, and you get a CD of Rainforest sounds. And students can actually adopt the sloth for a class, and they have curriculum that they provide teachers k through twelve, they provide teachers with an educator's packet of lesson plans. If you email with your class size and curricular structure, they will give you customized material for your classroom. So it's kind of cool. So you can read all about this@amazoninstitute.com, and they are well worth supporting. That's good going, Chuck. Yeah, good going, Joanna. Yeah. Thank you very much for everything, for nominating us for an emmy. Grammy. Grammy. What is wrong with us today? Well, we're heading to TV. We're like emmys. Yes. If you have a really good non profit that's helping things, people let you adopt something. We're always down for that. Especially if you're willing to nominate us for an award too. That definitely increases the wheels. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstepyshedo or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com." | ||
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1222347540067hsw-sysk-graceland.mp3 | How Graceland Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-graceland-works | Graceland attracts millions of visitors every year. Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more about Elvis and Graceland, which Elvis bought when he was only 22 years old. | Graceland attracts millions of visitors every year. Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more about Elvis and Graceland, which Elvis bought when he was only 22 years old. | Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:10:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=13, tm_min=10, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=269, tm_isdst=0) | 15708230 | 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. Here's. Chuck Bryant. I'm here. Okay, Chuck, do your best. Elvis impressions. Man. I don't do that kind of thing. That was actually pretty good, Chuck. That's the last time I did that through this podcast. Okay, that's fine. That's fine. I'm really obnoxious. This podcast, by the way, is how great plan works, which makes sense. Right? Right. Can you do Elvis? No, not at all. I'm not even going to try. And I'll tell you somebody else who can't do Elvis is a guy named Matt Hale. Have you heard of this guy? It rings a bell. He's a British radio producer who just happens to really like Elvis. And one day he was going through some second hand store, I guess in London, and found a white jumpsuit, and his next thought was, well, gee, I guess I'll go spend the next year touring the world dresses Elvis. And he did right. The problem. And he's been everywhere. He's been to like, Brazil, he was there for Carnival. He's been to Ireland, Holland, the US. I'm not entirely certain what cities he visited in the US. As an impersonator. Yeah. Did he? Not necessarily as an impersonator dressed as Elvis. It's a tribute to the King. He just travels as Elvis. Yeah. And so I guess the reason I hesitate to call him an impersonator is because he visited Australia, and I guess that's where they have like the biggest Elvis festival, elvis fan fest in the world. And he placed dead last out of God knows how many others impersonators for look alike and sound alike contests. So I think you may have beaten Matt Hale had you been there. Right? I don't even have a jump to it, but you know anymore? No. Okay. So I don't know that much about it. So I've never been that big of a fan. I know it's kind of sacrilege to say that in certain quarters, but hey, this is me. Take me as I am. Right. So you know much more about Graceland Elvis than I do. I did. Well, I wrote the article and I've been to Graceland. You've been there? Were you able to finagle a free trip to Graceland for research throughout the article? No. I'd been there before, though, so that helped a lot, actually. My mom's family is from Memphis. Okay. Probably camp there as a Boy Scout in the front lawn, right? No. All right. So, Chuck, tell the readers who haven't been to Graceland like me, what is it like when you walk in that front door? Is the spirit, is the stank still there? Well, the stink is still there. Yeah. It's unlike any other house that you've ever been to. Probably. It might smack. Those of us that are probably in our 30s or older have fond memories of their houses in the shag carb and stuff like that. So it kind of smacks of that, but to degrees that you can't even imagine, because, of course, it's Elvis. And he was loaded for the time. He had a lot of money. He could afford gold plated everything and shag carpet on the ceiling, on the walls. And his taste is well documented. Right. Well, I mean, the jumpsuits alone kind of do it right. How much money do that men spend on sequence? I don't have that. I've got a lot of statistics, but I don't have that one. Throw one out at me. What's the best one you got? Well, if we're talking Graceland, he bought the house for a total of $102,500. Yeah. And originally it was already purchased by the YMCA. And he drilled that number just to get the house. He edged them out, didn't he? Yeah, big time. I wonder what the YMCA thinks of Elvis, at least the Memphis chapter. Yeah. I don't know, because he just kind of stepped in and said, no, I'm taking it. Right. He's their favorite son, though, so I imagine they were pretty cool with it. They're cool with it. The house was already named Graceland when he bought it, wasn't it? Yeah, it was. I think a lot of people probably think he named it Graceland, like, after his mother, Grace. That's what I thought. Yeah. That's not even his mom's name as well. No, it's Gladys, right? Yeah. It was the original owners, doctor and Mrs. Thomas Moore. I think it was the great aunt Gracetof, toof, is who it was named after. I got you on the 14 acres there, just south of downtown Memphis. So take us on a little mini tour. I know just from pictures I've seen, really, the only extravagance that I know from an outdoor view are the gates, but if you look at the house, it looks like you'd expect to see an old retired farming couple living inside there. Yeah, it's a classic revival is the official architectural style, is what they call it. Yeah. And from the outside, it doesn't look like much, but at the time this is late 50s. It was the nicest house in Memphis at the time. Yeah. I mean, there may be some debate there, but he always told his parents he would buy them the nicest house in Memphis once he made it big. And he was saying this as a little kid. Yeah. He knew he was due for starter. I did not realize that. I always had the impression that he kind of stumbled bottom backwards into it. No, he knew he was destined for stardom, and he actually bought the house when he was 22, which is just crazy when you think about it. He was just a kid. Yeah. And he bought the best house in Memphis. Very impressive. So you walk in, there's a foyer. Yeah, you walk in in the foyer, and when you're in the foyer, you're actually directly beneath the bathroom where he passed away. And they don't tell you that on the tour because kind of a macabre way to begin the tour. Exactly. Look up, right? That's where Elvis so you walk in, and right in front of you are the steps that lead upstairs. And that's blocked off and has always been blocked off. Yeah. Why? I mean, is there like some sort of secret love child that's changed a radiator upstairs? Why would they keep it locked off? Well, when Elvis lived there, it was pretty much private area, too. He always had grayson was always really busy and always had tons of guests. And his Memphis Mafia was what his entourage was called. Hey, you love those guys, don't you? Yeah, man, they're awesome. I was going to say something else. They're very cool. And there was always just a lot of activity. People coming and going, guests in and out, people working there, obviously his staff. And so his upstairs was his retreat. That's where he went to chill out and do his private Elvis things. And so he didn't let people up there back then either. It was just kind of understood. No one went up there. Right. So close off. Yeah. Keeping with those wishes. It's still closed off today. And apparently this is really creepy. I didn't know this until I study this untouched since he passed away. Apparently in his bathroom, there's, like, his toothbrush and the squeezed toothpaste and stick of deodorant that he was using that day, and they didn't touch anything. Do you know what he was reading when he died, even? Sorry. Including sweat stains on his pillow. What he was reading when he died? There's actually a little speculation. I can't remember, but there are two different books in the bathroom, and they don't know which one he was reading, but you can find out on the Internet. I just didn't have that. I included them in my art. I'm going to guess 1001 Arabian nights. That's a real good guess. Thank you. I think one of them was actually a book on religion and spirituality, if that matters. Okay, so you go into the foyer. To your right is one of the living rooms, the famous one with the 14 foot couch, the ten foot coffee. Ten foot coffee table. That's a lot of coffee. It's a lot of coffee. And then beyond that is the upstairs music room with his piano and stuff, which we can entertain people. Right. And you had also said that you made a point that he may have inadvertently created the man cave, and he had, like, a couple of them. And these are the ones that I was familiar with, like the Jungle room, the TV room, and I think these are just totally beyond cool. Start with the jungle room. This sounds just super awesome. Well, yeah, super awesome. Or super tacky, depending on which way you want to look at it? Yeah, I think it was the original man room. It was originally a screened in porch, and he had it converted when he and Priscilla got divorced. So she wasn't a part of this. She always makes a note to say she was no part of the jungle room. And it's got, like, an African motif. It's got shag carpet on the walls and ceilings and floors. He had a working water fountain that leaked everywhere all the time that he had disconnected because of the leaks, and it was actually provided soundproofing. So we ended up recording some music there in the jungle room. Yeah. You said he recorded one album and half of another one there. Yeah. Half of Moody Blues and I think live from Elvis Presley Boulevard in Memphis, Tennessee. Yeah, that's pretty cool. What about the TV room? Chuck Three TVs at once? Where do you get that idea? Yeah, that's downstairs. He got that idea from President Lyndon Johnson. He heard that he used to watch three newscasts at the same time to keep up with things. So Elvis, he had to have the best so he had three TVs built into the wall and watched football. Apparently not newscasts. I got you. And he had some pretty cool toys. Like, I understand he had two jets. Yeah, he had two jets. He had one smaller private jet, and then he had a big honking 747, I think, called the Lisa Marie. I actually know a story about that involves the Lisa Marie. Oh, boy. Yeah. So basically, I think it was 76, elvis was sitting around with a couple of his buddies in the Memphis mafia. Right. And a couple of years earlier, they've been playing a show in Denver and they went to eat at this restaurant called the Colorado gold mine company. Right. And they had this sandwich called the fool's gold sandwich. Have you ever had one of these? No. One of my friends threw a birthday party for her husband and she called it a very partially hydrogenated birthday. And there was all this wonderful food, like ham, dogs, that kind of burger that you serve on a krispy kreme doughnut is a bun. Oh, yeah. She also made the fool's gold sandwich. So it's like heavily buttered bread, peanut butter, jelly and bacon. And then you kind of grill it. It's the greatest thing you'll ever have in your life. So Elvis got his hands on one of these things, and the reason they were called fools gold sandwiches was because they were on an entire loaf of Italian bread. And they were meant for, like, 20 people. Right. Exactly. Elvis ate them, apparently by himself. Right, right. So there's no telling how many pounds of bacon they do. Like a cartoon daily. Shove it all in his head, I think, like a duck. Yeah, he just swallowed. No biting whatsoever. I believe it. But they call it full's goal because only a fool would pay for it. They're like $50 sandwiches. And this is in the mid 70s. Right. So anyway, they're sitting around one night in February, 76, and one of the guys in his entourage says, hey, I wish I had one of those sandwiches right now. So Elvis calls up the restaurant in Denver, tells him that he wants, I think, like 30 of them, and he says that they'll be there in a couple of hours. 80ft of sandwich. Yeah, well, they fire up the Lisa Marie, get in the jet, go to the restaurant. Actually, I don't think they made to the restaurant for this special order, the restaurant tour. And his wife showed up with the sandwiches, a case of champagne and some other stuff, and I think they ate them in the hangar. Wow. And just for the tab for the food was like three grand. But when you factor in all of the added expense, there's one late night trip this is at one in the morning for the sandwiches, came to like 16 grand or something like that. Yeah. In today's alley, that's probably like 18 grand. At least. More than that. At least. Well, you know, if he hadn't done things like that, he may have ended up living instead of dying in his bathroom. Yeah, but would he have lived as interesting a life as he did? Well, maybe not, but one of the reasons that it was well documented that he was on all these pills to keep them going all the time. And one of the reasons was he said he couldn't slow down because he had so many people he had to pay for. He had a huge staff, and he felt very beholden to them and didn't want to let them down, and he didn't want to lay people off. So he just had this killer, brutal schedule later in life when he was really badly out of shape and on uppers and downers to do whatever he needed. And maybe if he had been a little more wise with his money early on, he wouldn't have felt the need to tour incessantly like that. But he was never at any point poor once he made it. No, he wasn't poor, but he definitely had a decline later in his career on the Vegas circuit, his album sales dropped, and basically the only way to make money was by playing just show after show after show. Got you. Well, speaking of pills, since you brought it up I wasn't going to bring it up, but yeah, it's kind of tough to talk about older Elvis without the pills. Right, right. Did you know that he had that famous meeting with Richard Nixon? Yeah, I've seen the picture. You have? I got a hold of some letters right. That he wrote to Nixon basically saying, I've gotten in with, I think, the hippies and the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers, they trust me. So why don't you make me an undercover Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent, and I can start busting some hippie heads. And apparently Nixon was like, that's okay, thanks. I appreciate the gesture. And finally, Elvis starts just hounding him until Nixon finally agrees to meet with him. Like a hound dog. Exactly. I was kind of hoping you let that one trapeze by. And so they meet in Elvis, apparently gets very emotional, starts blaming the Beatles for an anti American sentiment. Right. He's just not very happy with the state of affairs in America. Breaks down, weeps a little bit, hugs Nixon, and Nixon gives him an honorary badge. And Elvis gives Nixon a commemorative Colt 45 pistol. Right. That was the famous photo. Is that when that was taken? Yeah. That famous. Mean, he was wearing a cape, too. Yeah, he wore those capes a lot, didn't he? Well, he's sort of a crimefighter, I guess. I guess so. Yeah. It worked well. Yeah. A lot of people might think there's some irony there and that he was on massive amounts of prescription drugs. He actually looks like he was on something while he was meeting Nixon to become an undercover. It was, I think. But the Memphis Mafia guys, in some candid interviews years later, said that Elvis very much drew a line between the illegal drugs and prescription drugs. He thought, I'm getting them from my doctor, so that makes it okay. Right. And he hated drug pushers, didn't he? Yeah. He was a man doctor, though, I'll bet. Who wouldn't? So, Chuck, you got anything else on Graceland? No, I just encourage people to go visit. It's a sight to be seen. The tour is well worth it. It's a lot of fun. And Elvis is buried in the back in the meditation garden, right? Yeah, right in the side yard there. He and his mother and father and grandmother are all buried there. He and his mother were originally buried somewhere else, but there was a lot of security issues, so his father, before he passed away, hasn't moved over. Well, I would strongly recommend first reading Mr. Chuck Bryant how Graceland Works on howstuffworkscom for making the pilgrimage. And stick around to find out which article reminds Chuck of his college years right after this. So, thanks for sticking around. Chuck, which article reminds you of your college year? Well, Josh article is called are There Really Hallucinogenic Frogs? By Kristen Connor, staff writer. So you were doing what exactly, in college? Well, I had a frog collection, yeah. That is not what I was expecting you to say, Chuck. Well, I don't know what you're thinking of, buddy, but I had an extensive frog collection, and so this article just takes me back to the old days at UGA. Well, I think I can hardly be blamed. You've got the goatee. It makes you look kind of shifty, like you might engage in criminal acts here. Yeah, well, you can check that article out and plenty of other odd, frog and hallucinogen related articles on house. For more on this and that's 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?" | |
02fcadf4-3b0e-11eb-947e-a7a4338ad2b2 | The Sad Story of William James Sidis | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-sad-story-of-william-james-sidis | Are geniuses made or born? Listen in today to the story of child prodigy William James Sidis. | Are geniuses made or born? Listen in today to the story of child prodigy William James Sidis. | Tue, 06 Jul 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=187, tm_isdst=0) | 44956195 | 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. 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 a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's charles W. Chuck Bryant over there. And it's just us today, and that's fine because it's a Thursday. We get a little crazy on Thursdays. We have a potluck. Yeah. Today I brought gavelta fish, and Chuck doesn't like it. But we're just moving forward, and this is stuff you should know. I think it's good. I brought my deviled eggs. Yes, they're good. Thank you. You took my advice and used the secret ingredient, coleman's mustard. Oh, I have a couple of other friends who are way into Coleman's, by the way. It's really great. And deviled eggs. I'm not kidding. Believe it. I'm sure if you're a mustard fan, it's the one to go, too. Yes. You hate mustard, don't you? I forgot. That's right. Remember the narrative. I hate mustard, and you refuse to accept that. Yes. It's just so bonkers that I can't wrap my head around it, I guess, is the problem. Speaking of narrative, this story today is a bit of a cautionary tale on narratives, I think. Oh, well put. Yes. Agreed. And we'll get into it here in a second. But it's the story of a young genius prodigy, and in researching this, there are a lot of conflicting accounts about how his home life was and how his parents treated him. And it's a story of media sensationalism, and it's a story of parents who were ahead of the curve in a lot of ways for the time, but also I don't know about victims, but also just sort of fell into the usual state of parenthood at the time, which is end of the sort of beginning of the 20th century. So it's not like parenting, then? Once at its peak. Yes. And you can also say that his parents conceivably and him went against the grain of normalcy and status quo and that the American public and media kind of bristled at that and that they were treated poorly for that. How much do we need to question of what is said about them from journalism at the time? It's a big morass, basically, I think, to paraphrase what you're saying, it's a cautionary tale about making cautionary tales out of anything, right? Yeah. Although I do think this is a cautionary tale. We'll get to the end. In the end, we'll reveal what you think it's a cautionary tale about yeah, let's get into it. Let's talk about William James. Is it Citizens? Is it Sidis? I don't think so. That's what you keep in your pocket for when you've got some lukewarm soda. Well, just like everything else with this guy, I heard a couple of different pronunciations on YouTube, so I saw it spelled out a couple of different places that seem to know what they were talking about. Cydesidus. Yeah, with the emphasis on the side. But I had not heard of him before, had you? Yeah, I mean, we did a chapter in our book on prodigies, and he wasn't in the book, but I remember reading a little bit about him at the time, and I think just the whole idea of child prodigies really is super fascinating to me. So I would like to do one on prodigies, maybe tackle that would be maybe one of the first book chapters we retrofit as a podcast. Okay, cool. But yeah, they just have always fascinated me. And Billy was interesting in that a lot of times prodigies are prodigies in, like, a single discipline. Not necessarily necessarily saying they're big dumb dumbs everywhere else, but there's like, one major focus. But young Billy was a language prodigy, a math and science prodigy. He was just a well rounded, kind of know a lot kid. Yeah, he really was. And he's very frequently lifted up as the prodigy, perhaps the most gifted child that has ever lived, certainly at least in the recorded history in the west and maybe the smartest human. Yeah, it's entirely possible to quantify. Yeah, it is. Which I think is another thing that will really come up in that prodigies episode, is exactly how do you say who's the smartest and who's not IQ test reliable? Which I think in addition to prodigies, we need to do one just on IQ tests, too. Okay. Yeah. And I also want to go ahead and correct myself when I said he was well rounded. He was academically well rounded because as we will see, he was not very well rounded as a young child. And that was one of the major mistakes that his parents made. Yeah, for sure. And one of the other things that he's also often kind of held out as an example of is this burning question that we still have today is our gifted children the products of their environment? Can you just take basically any child and make them a gifted prodigy? Or is it genetics? Is that we're gifted apt? You're kind of born with this. You didn't do anything to earn it or deserve it. It's just who you are. You're a gifted, intelligent person from a very early age, and we still haven't gotten to the bottom of that. He kind of muddies the answer to that question more than answers it at all. Yeah, because I definitely believe that you were born gifted, but then from the moment you're born on, everything else plays in. So he comes one of the reason I think he muddies the answer to that question is he comes from very intelligent stock. Both his mother and his father were extremely intelligent people, but they also were the kind of people who tried to educate him starting around age two, maybe even a little earlier. So he's an amalgamation of those two things. Parents who were incredibly intelligent, who would have ostensibly passed along some pretty smart genes, and parents who produced an environment for him that made him into a prodigious learner. Yeah. So let's start with his folks. His dad, Boris, they were both Russian immigrants, and his dad was put in jail in Russia before he managed to get out of there, apparently in a prison that was so small he couldn't even recline himself fully in sleep and sleep in a little fetal position, I think. And he was jailed for teaching, and he was teaching peasants. He didn't have permission. They didn't like that in Russia. He was let out after a couple of years on the condition that he didn't teach other people how to read anymore and supposedly didn't read himself was under surveillance, but then got the heck out of there. Yeah. He was like, I see the writing on the wall. It's time for me to get out of here. I'm going to go to America. Because at the time, America was this shining beacon for immigrants saying, Come, we're a land of opportunity. We turn the lights on in the Statue of Liberty. Tom Brokaw did it himself. And just like a Motel Six, and the doors are open, basically. So he and Sarah, Billy's mom, both took America up on that, although separately, they actually met in America. Although they're both from the Ukraine, I believe. Yeah. And Boris, he sort of bucked a lot of trends back then, and this is in the late 1800s. He was an atheist, which was not in fashion at the time. He later got into, like, made a big name for himself in the early days of psychology and psychoanalysis. And he was an opponent of Freud, which was certainly Rock the Boat at the time. And then he really despised traditional education and kind of all its forms. And the way it was back then, particularly Rope memorization, he just hated it so much he saw zero value in it whatsoever. And so that's kind of the basis of his concept of educating not just children, but anybody. It's figure out what the basics are, learn the basics, the fundamentals, and then use those to reason your way to answer basically any question that you possibly could have. And that idea applies to everything from philosophy to math to literature to history to language that you can figure anything out if you understand just a few fundamentals of it. And so that's what his big focus was on that. Yeah. Sarah, his mother. She worked her way through college, paid for it herself. She worked as a nurse at night, went to medical school during the day, I believe was the first woman admitted to Boston Medical College. And she never became a doctor, though. She instead chose to parent. And they both worked their way to the I mean, by the time they came to the East Coast in the 1880s, they both worked their way to the top of as high as you could get in academic achievement in the United States. I think Boris had his bachelor's and master's from Harvard in three years, and, yeah, Sarah went to Boston U. And they were both overachievers and obviously had a kid. They had a daughter named Helena, but I didn't see how much she achieved. I don't know either, although I saw that she and her brother shared a lot of similar interests. So they were close throughout his whole life. I'm sure she was pretty smart too. Yeah, I would guess so too. It's no dumb dumb. No, certainly not. But one of the things about Boris and Sarah is both of them, everything you just described that they achieved in America, they did within ten years of arriving. And when they both arrived, neither one of them spoke a word of English. It's amazing. They went from speaking no English to things like MDS and PhDs within ten years, so they made quite a splash. And Boris himself enjoys kind of a separate fame from his son as well. He's a really well respected pioneer in psychology. I believe he was instructed under William James, who was considered one of the two founders of psychology, who basically believed that human behavior was a way that humans adapt to our environment. And so if you could just kind of study the environment, study behavior, you could just kind of understand the world that much better, and that was his kind of foundation for psychology. And Borocitis was one of his proteges. Sounds like a disease. Yeah, it does. But, man, you really threw me off with Boris. It is, because now I can't stop thinking about what Borisitis is. Enlarged foot. Sure. There you go, Boris. It is like a big cartoony, like keep on truck and guy foot, but just one of them. And then now we can put it to bed. Thank you. Because I think it would have thrown off the whole rest of the episode if we hadn't just addressed it on space. So Boris looked up to William James so much, he named his son after him. It was William James Sidus. So he was respected in his own right as well. But it was Billy who became, like, far and away the most famous sights, and it was largely because his parents really welcomed the spotlight and then realized far too late in Billy's life that that was not a good thing for a kid. Yeah. Should we go over the you took up these from seracitis. Another condition. You put citizens on anything. Yeah. I guess you have to have two syllables like Josh citizens. Doesn't sound like it. No, you're absolutely right. You got Chuck citis. I guess it's like it's something that ground beef can come down with. Or Jerry situs. Yeah, sure. That has something to do with miso. It's miso overload. Like the blue man who took too much copper. Right. You just start smelling like miso. It comes out of your ears. I think before our break, maybe, let's run over what you dug up from Sarah Sidus. I don't know if it's from her book that she wrote later, but she kind of outlined her and their parenting sort of checklist, which, when you read it, it does not seem like a parenting checklist from the early 1900s. No. It's super progressive, isn't it? It is in a lot of ways. Then I'll get to the part that they kind of really forget at the end, but avoid punishment in all ways possible. Not bad. Why? Because it's the first cause of fear. Pretty sensible. Sensible. Try not to say don't to your children. Instead, explain why what you say is so. That's awesome. That's a good one. A lot of these are still very valid. Awakening curiosity, for sure. Never fail to answer. And never put off your child's questions. Probably the hardest thing to do as a parent. But valid. Right? Because they come hard and fast. Never force your child to learn, nor judge their ability to learn by adult standards. Now that's a big one for them that I wonder if they really abide to buy. Either that or they did abide by it and they were misinterpreted and mislabeled later on. There's a few more here. Implant ideas at bedtime just before sleep. I don't know about the science behind that, but it sounds reasonable. Sure. Like when your child is going off to slumberland, you can introduce them to the concept that they'll die eventually, one day. And the problem before they go to sleep, it really sticks in their head. Never lie to your child or use evasions, if that's impossible. But sure. Refrain from showing him off. I think that's where they really dropped the ball. Yeah. That's almost revisionist to add that because there's just no way that they knew that from the get go. They just didn't follow it. They didn't even seem to consider following it. And I think they really grossly overestimated the warmth of the response the public would greet young William with. Yeah. And then the big one that I think it just wasn't a thing back then, so I'm going to give them a pass. But we now know so much about social, what they call social emotional development and teaching and parenting and it just didn't really exist back then. And young Billy certainly didn't get any of that. So he suffered for that reason. So they released this and American parents responded by saying, we're tired just reading this list. Right. So should we take that break? Yeah. So we can get some rest? Sure. All right, I got to go put up this bigfoot let it relax for a little bit. We'll be right back. You have borisitis, what if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively, complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate covered goodness with real time, data driven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting. All mothers love their kids equally, right? Well, so does at and T. They treat all their customers like family, all of them. Everyone gets the same deals on every smartphone with a choice of plans, only At, at, and T. It's pretty easy not to play favorites, and that's just what at and T does best. They give you their best deal. Doesn't matter if you're a new customer or if you signed up when a flip phone was still the future. Who doesn't want a deal? At and T won't make you feel like a middle child. They love all their customers the same. Join at and T for their best deals on every smartphone and with choice of plans. And after you're signed up, give your mother a call. She misses you. Eligible plan required. Offers vary by device. Restrictions may apply. See at and t comdealsfordtails. So we kind of went over Boris and Sarah's list on how to raise a child. And it kind of underscores this premise that was basically the entire premise of Boris's approach to childhood education. Was that if you do this with a kid. If you say. Okay. If you create curiosity and interest in a child. And then nurture it with lots of books and lectures and whatever you can find to keep the kids curiosity going. And just feed it 24/7 if they have a question or something like that. You just sit down with them and you talk it out. That if you do this and you start a young enough age, by the time your kid is 8910, they should be at least as intelligent, if not more intelligent than an average adult. And his premise was that you could do this with any kid and that you kind of should do this with any kid. And their proof of concept was their son Billy, who had a really impressive list of accomplishments to his credit by the time he was, like, eight, nine, or ten, right? Yeah. We'll go through some of these. I think some of these may be taken with a grain of salt, because records from the early one nine hundreds are what they are. And his story has been sort of I don't know the best word to use? Convoluted. Exaggerated in places. May be exaggerated in places, but I don't want to take anything away from them because a lot of it checks out, too. But let's just go through them. Supposedly at 18 months was reading the New York Times by three new Latin, by six new Russian, French, German, Hebrew, Armenian and Turkish. Was typing letters at three to Macy's about Christmas toys. Very cute. Right. I also saw that he taught himself to eat with a spoon by eight months old through trial and error. All right. I've seen babies do that. An eight month old baby? Yes. It's hard to remember. Okay. All right, what else? Maybe not. I don't know. It just seems like something the baby would be like I don't know what this it would be more likely to go in their eye or their ear than in their mouth. I'm trying to remember. It's all a blur. Let me see. He apparently graduated. I mean, he went through grade school in, like, no time. He entered the first grade and graduated through primary school entirely in seven months. It was basically like Billy Madison. Yes. Which I've never seen, but I didn't know the story. Okay. Between six and eight, he wrote at least four books, and at eight, he passed the Harvard Medical School anatomy exam and then the entrance exam to MIT. And also at eight invented his own language in a book called the book was called Book of Vendor Good. And the language was vendor Good. Yeah, not like just some gibberish or whatever. He took from Latin and Greek and some of the Romance languages and figured out different ways to conjugate words based on this language. And he created his own language. It wasn't just some lame thing where words were replaced with words. Yeah. I think they were like eight cases learned or something. Grammatical cases. Yeah. It was really impressive stuff. And it was the kind of thing I saw somebody put it like a linguistics professor would have been well received for having written a book where they debuted their own language. And this kid was doing it before he was ten. Yeah. So he's flying through school. This is all going great as far as the plan that his parents had to raise a really, really smart kid. But a very bad thing happened as he was doing this, and the press noticed when you get into Harvard at nine years old, they didn't let him until he was eleven, but that's going to be a news story. And by 19 nine, when he entered Harvard as an eleven year old, it was the full court press from the media. Apparently he would and this is before he went to Harvard he would come home from elementary and high school, and there would be like two photographers waiting outside his place, and one of them would hold him while the other one would take his picture, like physically hold him. Yeah. Like he had no say in this. He'd be accosted. Yeah. So I hear this and I think that's awful. The media is terrible, but I also think, like, where was his mom? Where was his dad? All these photographers are holding him out on the street. Well, he's a free range kid, I guess, in that respect. I guess so. And that's pretty bad. That's definitely a very unpleasant thing from childhood and even worse, that would basically lay the groundwork for his relationship with the media from that point on, for sure. And they would just keep going after, even after he'd been out of the limelight for decades. They'd be like, whatever happened to that weirdo Billy Cytos? Right? And they'd look him up and write an article on them. And as we'll see, he became a very private person. It was a huge invasion of his privacy, but that's where the whole thing started. But one of the other reasons, I think also that he was such a private person and that the media spotlight was even worse to him than it would have been for any other child his age, of course, is that you touched on it. I think earlier that his father issued play. Like there was no play involved, there was no socialization with his peers, there was no encouragement whatsoever for him to make friends. And I get the impression there is actually a bit of a prohibition on him going out and making friends because his friends couldn't have possibly kept up with him. So how could he possibly be enriched by hanging out with other eight year olds? And I think his family kind of acknowledged that later on. That was a huge misstep and if they didn't, the rest of the world has admitted it for them. And they've been vilified in a lot of ways for doing that and I think rightfully so. If they've been vilified, not all of it can be justified. But there's a couple of things that you can be like, yes, that was a really bad thing to do with Billy and it messed him up. And that was a big one of them, for sure. When he got to Harvard, he started showing his massive capacity for math and mathematical courses. He was designing his own logarithmic tables. He gave his first lecture, including to faculty when he was eleven years old, to the Harvard Mathematical Club, about four dimensional bodies. He sort of had apparently he had his little act down with the press. He would introduce himself and he would try and I think he was described as precocious a lot, but it came across precocious is sort of a nice way of saying that he was rude to a lot of adults who he thought he was smarter than. And I don't think he was ever really taught any different by his parents. The thing is though, is like, that's a really good anecdote, and it does illustrate what he was like at age eleven. Granted. But the problem is because you have so few anecdotes about him, that it gives you the impression that he was a jerk. And I saw after he died, a friend of his rode into a newspaper or magazine and said, a lot of these editorials about William Sidis are really misguided. One of the things that you should know about him is he looked down on no one. He was a kind, gentle person who looked down on no one else. And I really think that you got to take that along with the anecdote about him, like, kind of talking down to some of the professors at Harvard during that lecture when he was eleven. Okay. That's a much more succinct way of putting what I was trying to get out. I guess there's a lot of eleven year old jerks you age out of it, hopefully. Sure. But that lecture, Chuck, is a really pivotal moment in his life. For one, it basically said, hey, world, I am maybe the smartest person on the planet or whoever lived. Check it out. And then that brought all that media attention, but it also showed to the people who were paying attention and who knew what he was talking about, that this is a legit dude. This guy was going to contribute to who knows how many different fields in his lifetime. And in fact, Norbert Weiner, who became the father of cybernetics, was a child prodigy himself. He's like 14, I think, at the time. He went to Harvard starting the same year as William sightIs. Did he set that lecture? Yeah. There were some interesting stories about those two being there at the same time. Yeah, because they were definitely not the same person, even though everybody lumped them together. Both being at Harvard is like an eleven year old and a 14 year old. But Norbert Wiener was at that lecture, and he noted that this lecture is based on this guy's original thinking. This is not just a summation of a bunch of different work. Other people's work on bodies in the fourth dimension. This is what this guy came up with about the fourth dimension, and it all checks out. That's impressive stuff. Yeah. There was a MIT physics professor named Daniel Comstock who said that he has a real intellect. He said it is not automatic. He does not cram his head with facts. He reasons, and there's a difference. That's a different kind of intelligence and just memorizing a lot of stuff. So you can be on Jeopardy. Which is another kind of shape. Sure, I would love to go on Jeopardy. And perform well intent, but comstock, I would not do well. So I don't want to go, but I think I would freeze. You think you'd freeze? I'm not jeopardy. Material. Okay. I'm Jeopardy. From the couch material. Yeah, you could shout it out occasionally. Only when you're 100% certain you're right. Yeah, but I'm not good enough to be on that show. I know. Comstock went on to say, I believe he'll be a great mathematician, the leader in science in the future, the leader in that science in the future. And a lot of hay has been made about IQ, not just for him, but certainly for him, but just period, like you said, we should totally do one on IQ tests and whether it's even valid or not. But retroactively, they have basically said that they think he had an IQ of about 250 to 300. Above 130 is considered very advanced. They have retroactively said that Einstein had about a 160, DA Vinci had about a 180, newton may have been about a 190. So take it for what it's worth. All this is just to say that Billy Sidus was super smart by kind of any measure. That Harvard lecture definitely brought the spotlight on him, not necessarily to an adoring spotlight. And then also at the same time, his father delivered a lecture that became a book, really kind of 45 page essay called Philistine Ingenius. And it was basically where he lays out this idea that any kid can be a prodigy. And then ultimately we're doing our children in disservice by being lazy and just living with the status quo and not producing geniuses because we're just not up to the task. And that was not very well received either. So everybody started to hate Boris because he was an outsider. He's a recent immigrant from Russia, and he was Jewish, and he was basically telling America that its parenting skills sucked. And then at the same time, his son steps out or steps into the spotlight as like the super brainiac who's a proof of concept of all this. And so the attention that was lavished on both of them and on William for the rest of his life was, you're a weirdo, we need to tear you down. Because if your father is correct, then we're all doing our kids a disservice. So there has to be something wrong with you, or else we're the ones who are wrong. And so the media and the American public basically started to delight in tearing William down every chance they got. And he really just tried to run from the spotlight as best he could. All right, so let's take a break and we'll come back and kind of pick up at Harvard where this eleven year old was still studying right after this. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolatecovered goodness with realtime datadriven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM let's Create learn More@ibmcom Consulting Smartphones. Are getting smarter, faster, and that might freak some of you out. It's hard to keep up. Trust me, I'm lying when I say I know what LTE means. So let's simplify wireless together. Just fast, reliable, secure at and T. That's more surprising than making the league at 5ft. To reach new heights, you need the type of network that can keep up with you with no hoops to jump through. Just fast 5G speeds for downloading and reduce lag, plus 24/7 network protection with automatic fraud call blocking with at and T active armor. So join at and T and discover the power of 5G through our 5G compatible devices. At and T download of apps required. Five G may not be available in your area. For coverage details, see att. Comfivegforyou visit www. Dot att. Comcallprotect for details. All right, so little Billy's at Harvard, he was commuting with his parents, and then they decided that they were going to leave and go to New Hampshire and go into business, the mental health business, basically. Boris opened a sanatorium in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and they said, Basically, try out the dorm. Let's see how it works. He moved into the dorm. It did not go well at all. He was bullied. He was the butt of jokes and pranks. He did not have interest in girls. They teased him a lot about that. He eventually moved into a rooming house instead of the dorm, and even still, he graduated magna cum laude at 16 years old in 1914 and told reporters after he graduated, I want to live the perfect life. The only way to live the perfect life is to live it in seclusion. I've always hated crowds. He vowed to remain celibate, and that was kind of his life. I don't think he necessarily was that way by nature. By nature. I think he was sort of forced into retreatment because of what happened to him with the press and having those social skills, because he was not socialized, because of his parents. A lot of factors going into it, for sure. And on that celibate thing, like, a lot of people made a lot of hay about that at the time because he revealed it publicly somehow. He had taken a vow underneath the tree that he would remain celibate throughout his lifetime, which a lot of great thinkers have, I think DA Vinci did and Newton did and a bunch of others, and he followed in their footsteps, but he kept a picture of the tree that he carry around with them to remind them, like, oh, yeah, I'm a celibate. But the media, again, they're like, oh, this is a great opportunity to tear this guy down. He's a total weirdo. He's not interested in girls. He's not even interested in guys. He's interested in nobody. Let's use that as evidence that this guy is out of his mind. If he did, very sad. So he leaves Harvard, and with that degree, and for a little while, he teaches math at William Marsh Rice Institute for Advancement of Letters, Science and Art. Eventually they just said, can we just call it Rice University? It would be much easier. He arrived in December 1915. He was 17 years old, taught Euclidean geometry, non Euclidean geometry, and freshman math, and didn't last long there either, because he was younger than the people he was teaching. And it was just really tough. Eventually went back to Harvard Law and left after three years without a degree, but with good standing, apparently. Yeah. So he got back, I guess, when he was at Harvard Law. It must have been that he became interested in socialism. Fervently interested. He was described, I think Chuck is a libertarian pacifist by a friend after he died, and that his whole thing. He was really passionate about trolley car transfers, about Northeastern Native American history, about a lot of varied stuff. But his great passion was the idea that every single person should be free to live their life as they see fit, and that the role of government, and you needed a strong government, was to protect those individuals rights from encroachment. In that sense, that is what he cared about. And for a little while, it was directed towards socialism and communism. And he was actually arrested and considered unpatriotic and unamerican at this 1 May Day rally and almost went to jail, supposedly for assaulting an officer, although everybody says that didn't actually happen. Yeah, it was for two charges, riding and assaulting a cop. And it was all over the newspapers because of who he is. I think 114 people were arrested, including a young lady named Martha Foley, who he actually fell in love with. So he tested his celibacy with Martha, even though I think it never grew beyond a close friendship. Isn't that right? Well, yeah. And I don't really understand what her feelings were about. If she was just like, we're just friends. He was always in the friend zone with her, or she was like, you're actually not interested in me. We'll be friends. Who knows? But she went on to marry another man, and I get the impression that Bill was left to kind of just pine for her while looking at the picture of the tree that he took, the valuable tree. So back to the arrest, he was released on $500 bail under the condition that he be released under his father's care or both of his parents, I guess, at the sanitarium. So he gets shipped off to New Hampshire. He said, in his own words, he was kidnapped by his parents by arrangement with the DA, and was taken to the sanitarium, operated by them and kept there a full year under various kinds of mental torture consisting of being scolded and nagged at for an average of six to 8 hours a day. They said they pumped him full of sleeping medicine, threatened to send them to just sort of a standard insane asylum is what they called them at the time. And it just sounds like things went really bad between he and his parents at that point. Yeah, I don't really know what the relationship was like, but it seems to have finally, fully deteriorated during that year. I don't think they ever spoke after that. Well, his parents wanted to. They used to try to track him down, and they would find whoever his friends were and try to get them to turn him over to them because they're like, it's for his own good. He's crazy or whatever. That just estranged him even further from them. But if it wasn't deteriorating before, it was after that year at the family sanitarium, or sanatorium that he had to spend. Yeah. So he eventually is released after that year. I think he goes to California for about a year, then makes his way back east. And basically from this point forward, he did I mean, they called them uninspired jobs, kind of mostly, where I saw I don't think he was doing the goodwill hunting thing. Been doing, like, custodial work. Mostly what I found is that he was doing work. They call them adding machines, like accounting work. What they really were were sort of the first calculators, the comp to meters. And even then, apparently, he would work on two of them at once, one with his left hand, one with his right hand, and would do his eight hour workday in about an hour, but would sort of move from job to job, it says here, whenever people would recognize who he was. I think it was probably a little more nuanced than that, I would guess. Like when the press got a hold of it. I don't think it's like if someone in his office realized who he was, he was like, I'm out of here. But he would kind of go from job to job. He said that the very side of a mathematical formula makes me physically ill. But here's the thing. I think a lot of publications make it seem like he was shunning, smarts, and doing anything worthwhile. But the entire time, he was just pumping out books, most of them not published, many of them under pseudonyms, but just writing about all kinds of stuff. He wrote that book on transfer tickets. Yeah, he did 300 pages on collecting transfer tickets. But he wrote a lot. Eventually, he did write one book that became fairly well known called The Animate and the Inanimate In. Yes, which is a super daring premise in that it talks about the origin of the universe. It describes things like dark matter. It predicts black holes, which a lot of people are like, this is years before black holes were discovered. Well, I think Einstein had predicted black holes in his theory of relativity, like, a full ten years before, five years before he was writing this. But it's still super impressive. But the reason it's daring is because he is one of the few people to suggest and back up mathematically or attempt to, that the second law of thermodynamics that matter in the universe tends toward chaos and disorder, and there will eventually be a total loss of energy because of that, that it can be reversed. And his premise was that life itself is an example of reverse entropy, where disordered atoms are put into very orderly, very efficient machines called organisms or life, which is pretty awesome, and that was just part of it. But that's what really made him kind of a pioneer, and that was his big contribution. And I get the impression that this book that was published in 1925 is one of those things where I could see people going back in 50 years and somebody rediscovering his ideas and saying, oh, my God, like, you just advanced quantum physics by light years. It's just been kind of languishing until then. Or, here's the cure for cancer. Yeah, maybe it's in his foot locker. This is all really sad, though, because I think the narrative at the time was that boy genius goes bust because he's working these jobs, and by all accounts, he lived the life he wanted to live. And he had, I don't think, like, tons and tons of great friends, but he did have some very close friends who, like you said, described him as a good guy and kind of could be kind of a fun dude. And he wasn't completely maladjusted because of his childhood, and I think just wanted to be left alone. Yeah. So that's why in 1937, that New Yorker article on him was just so devastating, was because he'd been trying so hard to be left alone. His one and only publicly received book had been published a full twelve years before he totally dropped out. And The New Yorker sent a woman reporter to basically become his friend under the guise of just being his friend, and to gather information and then publish an article about him. Yeah, he said it was humiliating and made him sound crazy. He sued. Now, this is where I got really confused, and I don't know if he got to the bottom of it. He did sue them for invasion of privacy and malicious libel. And I saw all kinds of things from really good sources that the case was dismissed, and it's used in privacy law as saying, if you're a public figure, you're always a public figure. But I also saw that he did win some kind of settlement from them. I think there were just multiple suits, maybe. Yeah, I think that the invasion of privacy suit he lost, and it was upheld on appeal, too. Like you said, once you're a public figure, always a public figure. But I think that libel was what he might have gotten a settlement for, because there was misreporting. He reported that he got to Tufts. And I think that was Norbert Wiener who gone to Tufts. Just a couple of technical things. Nothing really big time, but he hated this article so much that I get the impression he wasn't about to drop it. And The New Yorker settled out of court to settle it. Yeah. So this was 1937. Lawsuits followed. And then, very sadly, that the sad end to this story, is that in 1944, at the age of 46, he was found dead by his landlady, died of cerebral hemorrhage. The same thing that killed his father in 1923. Yes. You can get a really good impression of how he was treated by the media with just the title of the obituary they ran about him in Time magazine. It was called prodigious failure. That was the title of his obituary in Time back in 1944. Or a smart guy who lived his own life is in the middle of the title. Yes, exactly. Why did he have to perform for you? And then over time, the idea that he was this great example of what happens if you just give your kid too much attention and try to turn them into like, a genius too young. This is what happens to them. They burn out and they end up running, adding machines rather than doing anything useful. That became that narrative that you have to look out for. Yeah. Really interesting story. Yeah. So you got anything else about William Sidis? No. Look forward to a full sort of more robust episode on Prodigies. For sure. When you mentioned goodwill hunting, did you see Too that he in part inspired that movie? Oh, really? Yeah. Did not. That's interesting. You're that parallel. And then I want to give one shout out, so he gave that talk on four dimensional bodies at Harvard when he was eleven. Yes. I was like, I have no idea what that is. And I looked around and I found finally a really comprehensive, really understandable explainer on four dimensional space. It's called? What is four dimensional space like? It's by JD. Norton. And if you are all interested in figuring that out, I would strongly advise going to check that out. I wasn't talking to you. Yes. Since Chuck said, yeah. It's time for listener mail, everybody. How about them apples? All right, I'm going to call this sort of a double metal email quickly. We got one from a gentleman named Kirk Bratfold in White Rock, BC. Nice. Who challenged me on saying Bruce Dickinson was the metal god. The god of metal. On the Damascus Steel episode, he said, I think you'll find that Judas Priests, rob Halford is widely acknowledged to hold the title of metal God. Okay. And I wrote Kirk back, and I said, well, it's subjective. And I like Iron Maiden more than I like Judas Priest. Yeah, I do, too. Yeah. Do you do? Yeah. I like Judas Priest, but I think Iron Maiden, I just like him more. Yeah, me, too. I like their songs more. Yeah, I think I could see where he's coming from. It's much more melodic and maybe in that sense, a little less metal than Judas Priest. Yeah, maybe so. And then someone we got a shout out, gunner, who took your side in the AC DC debate recently, listen to two unrelated episodes, and in both episodes, Josh said he didn't like AC DC. So to you, Josh, I just want to say you're right, finally, someone else thinks AC DC is overrated. They're just not that good. Although some of their early songs are written by the Flash and the Pan, and I love Flash and the PANC DC just doesn't do it for me. And that's from Gunner. And Gunner, I'm here to say that you were wrong. I thought it was subjective. Well, that's my whole point, is I'm making fun of them saying right and wrong. Oh, I see. You turned it all over on it. Yeah, it confused me in the bargain, man. Check this out. We're talking about metal. We're talking about hard rock, and we're getting emails from dudes named Kirk and Gunner. I mean, how perfect is that? We should start that band that we always have, gunner and Flash in the Pan. Yeah. Have you heard of Flash in the Pan? I never have before. I hadn't, but I had to look that up, too. They were an aussie duo who produced some of the early AC DC stuff, apparently, and then were abandoned their own. Right. So I got to check them out, too. Now the AC DC and they want to produce the Spice Girls. They're two big successes. That's right. And we're going to get that banned with those guys. But I get to be Flash this time. I'm not going to be paying anymore. I'll be paying. Then can I be paying? Sure. But I'm going to really play up that, like, super light pan flute kind of thing. That's my jam. And I'm going to dress like what's the half goat, half man god dionysus? Oh, no, gosh, I can't think of it. I guess it wouldn't be Dionysus. It'd be Pan. Anyway. I'm going to be like the Greek God Pan. Okay. Yeah, that's my jam. And I'm Flash. So I'll just go out there and open my overcoat and no one will notice. Somebody will feel it. Yeah, I'm just leaving that one alone. If you want to get in touch with Chuck and I like Gunner and Kirk did our new pals, you can email us at stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, 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." | |
c75b9242-557b-4962-af08-ae62012a6206 | Selects: How No-fly Zones Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-how-no-fly-zones-work | They have become such a ubiquitous tool used by the UN and NATO to intervene in international crises, that it seems like no-fly zones have been around forever. But it was only the 1990s that the first one was enacted and they've only be used twice more since then. Learn about this peculiar military tool with Chuck and Josh in this classic episode.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | They have become such a ubiquitous tool used by the UN and NATO to intervene in international crises, that it seems like no-fly zones have been around forever. But it was only the 1990s that the first one was enacted and they've only be used twice more since then. Learn about this peculiar military tool with Chuck and Josh in this classic episode.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Sat, 02 Apr 2022 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=92, tm_isdst=0) | 26333182 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. Chuck here on a hopefully lovely Saturday afternoon, wherever you are. And this week, everybody, we are going to rerelease the episode on no fly zones. I think for obvious reasons, what's going on in Ukraine with Russia's invasion and the idea of a no fly zone being requested by Ukraine, america saying we can't really do that. The international community debating whether or not no fly zone is a good idea. In this case, it's a very complicated situation. Hopefully this episode that we recorded and shed some light on that, although it is from quite a few years ago, it's basically still the same thing. It's not super complicated. And you can decide for yourself whether or not you think we should, as Americans wade into those waters right now. So here we go with how no fly zones work. 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. He's mad as heck and he's not going to take it anymore. I said heck. I revised the classic movie quote into heck. Yeah. Network, man. Have you seen that recently? I've never seen it. It was on Netflix streaming and I had it in my instinct and passed it up. Well, you should watch it again because you'll watch it now and go, man, when was this made? So far ahead of its time. Oh, really? As far as how things are in the media, like coma? Yeah, but when you watch Network, back then, people said things like how ridiculous stuff like this could never happen. Oh, I see. It's prescient, right? Very much so, yeah. I'll have to watch it then. Yeah, it's a good one. What's that? Aaron Sorkin show. I don't like Aaron Sorkin. NewsHour. Yeah, that show stinks. Is that what it's called? NewsHour. Newsroom. Newsroom. Yeah. I didn't care for it other than the fact guest starred Mr. Paul Schneider, who's one of my boys. So sometimes people accuse us of being preachy. What do you think? I'm not a sorkin guy. He's a little wordy for me. I liked West Twink. I didn't watch it. You never watched West Wing? Not one episode. Guarantee you would like it. You think? I hate to say this, but it was like his masterpiece from the beginning. I'm not kidding, Chuck. I'm telling you, this is somebody who didn't like Studio 60, who doesn't like Newsroom. West Wing from beginning to end was just really great. I'll try it, but I swear, the way that guy writes, I'm always just like nobody talks. I'm with you. I'm totally with you. But this cast of characters, the characters that he wrote, the actors, they pulled it off. I've never seen a given shot. I do. Paul Schneider is not on it. I'm coming to your house this afternoon and we're going to watch them. So I guess that's the segue for no fly zones. Not a bad set up because this is political and presidential. I have something actually, I have a bit of an intro. Okay, well, let's hear. You've heard of the Wright Brothers? Dayton's Pride Orville and Wilbur Wright? Oh, yeah. Conjoined twins. Yes. No, they weren't. No. Okay. But they did fly they did build the first airplane yes, that flew. And they flew it out at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. And after they had that flight actually, I think before they undertook that flight, while they were still in the development stage, they went to the United States government and said, hey, War Department, you want in on this action? Not once, not twice, but thrice did the War Department turn the Wright Brothers down? What good are planes in the warfare? Exactly. Luckily, there was a very smart person heading the post office department who said, okay, maybe you shouldn't drop bricks out of airplanes on people's heads, but we could use this to deliver the mail. Martin Van Austrian right. To heck with the auto gyro. We're going to start using this Wright Brothers plane to deliver mail. And for three years, the only aircraft that we're in service under the United States government was for delivering mail and then a postal carrier and as a pilot, accidentally dropped the mail bomb, and they went, wow, that's a good idea. That works very well. Yeah. It didn't take very long for the War Department to be like, oh, okay, maybe we should use this. By 1914, the aviation section of the Signal Court was set up, and all of a sudden, plains were militarized. Within just years of their invention, they were being used to murder people. Yeah. And this article points out, in 1937, Spanish Fastest dropped a bunch of bombs on the town of Guadalaqua. \u00a3100,000 of explosives killed 1600 people. Yeah. Well, not only was it the explosives, people were running out of town, and they were gunning them down for millions. Yeah. So that's what fascists do. As outrageous and horrible as that is, it was definitely the beginning of what would be a long romance in warfare with the plane. Yeah. You had the Red Baron, eddie Rickenbacher. Yeah. They're a very long bloody history associated with planes and war. When the Fastest in Spain used planes to take out a lot of civilians, the world was appropriately disgusted. Sure it wasn't a whole lot that could be done. No, it actually wasn't until the very early 1990s that people figured out a way to use planes to thwart planes from being used against civilian populations by their own government. Yes. I thought no Fly Zones had been around long before that, so this was very eye opening. I had no idea that it was in the 1990s when they first did this. Right. No fly zones are new. They've only been used three times. Yes. I didn't know that either. Like, it just seems like there's something that they just commonly do. Yeah. But it's kind of a big deal of the issue in no fly zone. And the reason why is because what you're doing is intervening in a sovereign nation undermining the power of the ruler of that nation, two and sides in a way. You're saying, at the very least, I'm not going to let you just slaughter these civilians. I'm not going to cast my lot one way or the other, really, but I'm going to protect the civilians, and it takes a United Nations mandate to even get started. That's right. So you want to talk about the first one? Yes. Let's hearken back to the spring of 1991. I'm in college drinking a lot of beer. That's where I first discovered beer. I was drinking a lot of beer, too, and I wasn't in college. Well, I'm just kidding. I was talking about beer. I remember sitting around and watching this stuff on CNN for the first time, like being interested in politics. Really? For the first time? Oh, yeah. That's kind of when I got into stuff like that. Well, that was the first war that was really televised. I mean, Vietnam was, but this is the first one that had, like, 24 hours coverage was the first Gulf War, and it was spectacular to watch. It was pretty enthralling, especially when you're 20 years old and you're sitting around with your friends drinking beer. Yeah. Look at that. Safe in Athens, Georgia. Yes. So what happened? There was a guy named Saddam Hussein. He was not doing very nice things to the people in Kuwait. Well put. And the Kurdish minority in northern Iraq was encouraged by American radio broadcast to revolt, like, take a stand. And so they did, and Saddam Hussein sent gunships with napalm and chemical weapons and helicopters because that's what you do. That's what he does when you have a civilian population that's unhappy with your rule. Yeah. And so they fled, basically hundreds of thousands of them. Kurdish civilians fled and sort of got wedged there at the Turkish border. Yes. Because the Turks were like, yeah, we feel for you, but stay there. Yeah. Don't cross over here. They didn't have food and water. And HW. Bush, president George HW. Bush and allies in Europe said, you know what? Oh, boy, I don't know what to do here, because we kind of encouraged these people to do this, and now they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. But we really don't think we should invade and remove Saddam Hussein, like, with all of our might. Yeah, let's give it another 1012 years. Exactly. Or we could go to the UN in 91 and say, hey, how about passing a resolution against this guy? Right. Which they did. They said, okay, we're going to deliver humanitarian aid to these Kurds who are trapped along the Turkish border. And Hussein, if you do anything to interfere, we're going to bomb you. We're going to take on your guys that you send to interfere at the very least. Right. And not only that, we're establishing a safe zone for these people. It's above the 36th parallel, and if you send any planes over there, we're going to take them on. So this is what we're going to call a no fly zone. It was the first one, and Saddam Hussein went, no fly zone? I've never heard of such a thing. That's stupid. And the UN. Said that's because it's brand new, jerk. Right? And he's like, oh, I'm the first one. He went, first, firsties. So they did this and then in no fly zone, south of the 32nd parallel was established to protect the Shiite Muslims who also rose up under the encouragement of the United States. If you're interested in this kind of thing, check out Three Kings. Great, man. There was a lot to do about that. It was after the uprisings had started and also after the time the United States didn't support them. Remember the one scene where when the guy made Marky Mark drink the oil? Yeah, that was hardcore, man. I thought it was a little over the ham fisted of David O'rusty. Yeah, you don't like that guy? You got problems with him? Yeah, I like Three Kings a lot. Okay, what else has he done that I've seen? Silver Lining's Playbook he didn't like. I thought it was okay. Yeah, see, you don't love him, but I like Three Kings a lot. I thought that was a good movie. Yeah, me too. So no fly zone is going on. Saddam Hussein violates said no fly zone. He's like, yeah, well, what's going to happen? Let me send some jets up there. And we responded by, or the coalition, I should say responded by shooting down these aircraft or destroying just military targets on the ground, because that's, as we found out, one of the parts of a no fly zone to be effective is to also bomb like radar equipment on the ground that can get jets up in the air and guide them. Yeah, disabled force can also find your jets. So you want to disable their force, like you said, but you also want to protect your own force. The thing was, this is very new. The UN. Was a little squeamish at the idea of undermining, again, a sovereign ruler, a jerk, everyone agreed, but still a sovereign ruler and kind of one of the stabilizing forces of the Middle East, whether the US. Liked it or not. So they just kind of said, yeah, protect these people, but just really, you got to take it all on a case by case basis. Can't be the least bit aggressive. You have to be completely reactive. And even then, maybe we should just kind of chase them out of the no flies rather than shoot them down right over time. After Sordi. After Sordy after sorility they started just by attrition wearing down Hussein's defenses and his air force. Yeah. Just because he kept sending them in, we kept shooting them down until 2003, when we went in in full force and took out Saddam Hussein. Right. The northern part and the southern part of Iraq was off limits to Saddam Hussein for twelve years. His own country. There was a wide swath in the middle that he could move around in, but anything else, he wasn't allowed. Okay, so that's the first use of the no fly zone ever. Right. In the early 1990s, when Yugoslavia broke up, NATO forces said, all right, how about another no fly zone? We're going to authorize this one. It's over the breakaway region of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was called Operation Denied Flight, which is terrible. Little on the nose. I want to talk about on the nose. David or Russell named Said mission, and it was going to block Bosnian Serbs who controlled all the military aircraft in that region right. And who were using it against all of their neighbors that they were going to war against. Specifically the Muslims. Serbian Muslims. Right. Yeah. In a big way. Yeah. So I guess NATO undertook that no fly zone. Yes. That was number two. Yeah. And that was a little more aggressive. I believe they went after they learned from about eight years of the Iraqi no fly zone that you really kind of have to go after military installations and anything that can be used to violate the no fly zone, and maybe even go a little step further as punishment. Like, not only are we going to shoot down your plane, we're going to maybe blow up your base and pants you right in front of everyone. Right. So that was the second no fly zone. Yeah. The third was even more aggressive against Gaddafi just a couple of years ago, in 2011. That's right. And it lasted about six months, I believe. Oh, yeah. It was extremely effective. Yeah. Well, that's because they authorized, quote, all necessary measures to protect the Libyan civilians. And that meant a lot of bombs being dropped, a lot of cruise missiles taking out bases on land. This one was named by Angli. It was called Operation Odyssey. Dawn. It was the result of UN Security Council Resolution 1973, which is confusing because it was carried out in 2011. That's right. But basically it said, you guys, we think Qaddafi is totally nuts and he's going to kill a lot of his own people. Go in there and declare all of Libya no fly zone. And NATO said, okay, let's do it. Right. So US and British led NATO coalition kind of took the reins that's right. And turn this 680,000 square mile country, which is about 1.7 million km\u00b2, into a no fly zone. All of Libya was a no fly zone. All right. So since this is a new thing, as this article says, playbook, there's not like an exact way that these go into effect. It sort of depends on what you're dealing with, what countries you're dealing with. But the first thing that you have to do, according to chapter seven, article 42 of the UN Charter is get the 15 member UN Security Council on board. Right. Which sounds easy, but it's not necessarily, because you have five permanent members. The UK, France, the US. China and Russia. And China and Russia love to veto anything that the US, the UK and France are all about, which is good. It's called a balance of power. Yeah. But specifically with Libya, Russia and China, they were against it, but they were persuaded to abstain from the vote because all it takes is one permanent member nation on the Security Council of veto and it's done. Yes. I wonder what that persuasion entails. I don't know. Looking the other way on human rights violations? Maybe? I have no idea. But I'm sure it wasn't just as easy as hey, do you mind sitting this one out? Sure, no problem. Right? I'm drunk anyway. So, the UN resolution for the Libyan no fly zone, it's a pretty good example of how this kind of thing can work. So no flights in Libyan airspace, bans all flying. Unless it's a humanitarian mission, carrying food or water or getting out foreign nationals who are in bad places. Yeah, you're allowed to do that. Other than that, no fly. No fly. And you don't just shoot down any plane on site? No. When you're patrolling the no fly zone, if a plane is flying in Libyan airspace, you want to first figure out if it was there accidentally or if it's hostile. And if it's hostile, you go back to the ground and say, hey, man, can I shoot this thing down? Yeah, well, first you got to figure out who's doing the shooting. You got to set it all up. Who's going to be enforcing all this? I was just jumping ahead. Okay. Yeah. You got to figure out who's in charge of the operation. Basically, in the case of Libya, it was NATO. And then you establish the rules of engagement, which partially has to do with, hey, do we shoot first and ask questions later? Do we check passports? How's this going to work? Right, and like you said in Libya, it was pretty aggressive. The first thing that happened on day one was the US. And I believe the UK sailed warships off the coast of Libya and started shooting missiles into Libya's interior, knocking out military installations, radar installations, as much as the Libyan military, or at least air Force could be destroyed. 112 Tomahawk cruise missiles. Boom. Yeah. Each one precisely shot. That's right. And I love the article says the goal is to shape the battle space in quotes. That's a Euphemism. Yeah, big time. So after this, they send in the drone surveillance aircraft to check things out, see what's going on. Did you get the impression the US is kind of showing off a little bit. We've got some missiles we can use, and then afterwards we'll send in our unmanned drones and make sure everything's bombed. And then after that, we're going to send in radar jamming equipment, just in case you have anything left on the ground. Right. We'll take care of that, too. Yeah. That was the first, like, two days. Yeah. And Gaddafi, his Air Force was they called them vintage jets in this article. And in that case, vintage is not a good thing. It's from the it's old gear, basically. It's vintage, not retro. That's right. It was effective. It worked. Even beyond the fact that the jets were vintage and we crippled his radar system, his Air Force military installations, there was still a lot of shoulder launched rockets in Libya. An estimated 600 to 1500, I believe, during this time, Gaddafi was handing out to people who were on his side. Yes. And Saddam Hussein famously offered a bounty on any aircraft shut down of, like, 14 grand, which I thought, why not 15, you know? Yeah, that was a weird number. I wonder if that makes, like, a significant round number in Iraqi money. Maybe. So. You know a lot of daenerys. Yes. Thank you. You shouldn't invest in those, by the way. That's a big scam. Invest in Danari? Yes. Have you heard of people doing that? No. It's a thing where people buy an Iraqi dinari and thinking they're going to hit it big one day. You shouldn't do that. Why? You do a lot research and it's sort of one of the scams. Yeah. So, like, if you bought Denari from a legitimate currency broker, it's still not a good investment. No. I know someone who did it. Oh, no. Yes. Is it possible it's going to come back in ten years? I doubt it is. They're going to go euro. I don't know. But yeah, that's just a sidebar. Okay. That was a nice one. Save your money, folks. So we were talking about the possibility that a NATO jet or any jet patrolling a no fly zone could get shot down by some dude on the ground. Yeah. It hasn't happened. No, but it could. It had to be one lucky shot. It raises one of the concerns, actually. It has happened. It hasn't happened from somebody on the ground, but it raises a concern, a risk that we're sending in people again into a sovereign nation sure. That maybe has to deal with his own problems, and we're putting our people in danger for that. Most people, I think, myself included, side on the idea of going in and protecting civilians from certain slaughter. Sure. But I do agree that there is a risk as well. And Scott McGrady. Remember him? Yeah. Owen Wilson. Yeah. During the Balkan war, during that no fly zone, he was shot down, I guess, by a Serbian plane. It was a surface to air missile, but okay, so somebody has shot down somebody from the ground? Well, I don't know if it was a person. Okay, well, he was shot down patrolling a no fly zone, and he was in very big trouble for a little while. Had he not been quite the survivalist, who knows what would have happened? Because the Serbs were hot on his trail and he spent six days evading them. Yeah, he did a really good job and merged the hero. He ate ants and lived on collected rainwater and avoided the bad guys and eventually got through a radio signal to Gene Hackman picked up, and Gene Hackman was like, we're going to get you out of there. Yeah, uncommon Valor, man. I was referencing. Gene Hackman was in the Owen Wilson movie, too. Was he really? I'm pretty sure he was the one that was in charge of saving him. Oh, man. Well, he's always going in and saving. Sure. In oncoming valor. It was his son who was Vietnam POW, right? Yeah. Randall Texcov. Yeah. What was his name in it? I don't remember. That movie came out at a great time for me. That's the perfect age. He wore, like, a live grenade around his head. Yeah. That's the second time we talked about uncommon Valor in, like, two months. When was the other one? I remember. I don't remember. I do remember talking about it probably what happens if the earth stops spinning. Yes, probably. So you got anything else? I guess we had the opportunity to really invade Libya, and President Obama said, you know what, let's not do that. Let's not do the regime change game. Well, a lot of people are like, we shouldn't be there in the first place. Right. A lot of other people are like, this is a half measure. If you're going to go do that and just wipe out somebody's military, you might as well do a ground invasion and take over and top all the regime. Like you said, Obama was like, no, let's give it a shot. And he was proven right in Libya, at least. Yeah. Because even if you take out their air defenses and their offenses, I guess they still have way better weaponry and stuff on the ground than these uprising forces do. Right. And it worked in Libya. It didn't necessarily work in the Balkans. A lot of people point to the slaughter at Srebrenicaa. 7000 Muslim boys and men were killed by the Bosnians who are being tried for war crimes because of it. But the no fly zone didn't do anything to prevent it. That's right. So, I mean, is it effective? It can be. I say that we don't have a large enough body of work to study from here. We need to get some more going. Get some more no fly zones. Yeah. I remember how creepy it was after 911 when all the planes were shut down. Remember that? Oh, yeah. It's just so odd. It was you don't realize how used to the sounds and the chemtrails. We did an episode on that on.com trails. Chemtrails. We did chemtrails. You know what I mean? Okay, I guess that's about it, right? Yeah. If you want to learn more about Nofly Zones, you can type Nofly Zone into the search bar. Howstepworks.com. And before we get the listener mail, let's do a word from our sponsor. All right. Listener mail? Yeah. Okay, Josh, I'm going to call this pushy. Kid gets his way. Okay. Which I try not to do, but everybody loves it when pushing kids get their way. This is a shout out for a teacher. This is Jack. And Jack and I had been emailing each other, and he says, by the way, Chuck, I think I told you in the past about my civics teacher that listens to the show. This week we have a special project in this class. It's to make a podcast about one of the Supreme Court cases we've been studying for. Some hints. We listen to tidbits of your show. And my teacher and I just grinned from ear to ear at each other like a really funny inside joke, because they're, like, the only two in the class that listen. Got you. I plan for my pseudonym to be either Chuck or even Chuckers. If you would allow. I give you permission, sir. Okay. He says he sees himself as a younger version of me, which is frightening. That's nice. Although the actual content of the show is more like this American Life, because we are required to have Collins. This American life doesn't have Collins, do they? I don't know. I don't think so, either. I will always think to myself that I'm sitting there in your little studio, if you can give my spectacular teacher, Mr Christoph, a shout out, that would be mind boggling, stupendously incredible, but I understand if you can't mr Christoph. Yes. Mr Kristoff civics teacher. And I said, sure, Jack, I'll do that. And then he emailed again from Washington, DC, and said, I hate to seem demanding, Chuck, but if you could also mention Mrs Christophe, because I have her for math, and I don't want to make her feel left out. So if it's too late, I get it. I can't complain. This might be the best day of my life after all. Have a nice long weekend. And that is Jack outside Washington, DC. And Mr and Mrs Kristoff, good job listening to the show, and we thank you for using it in your classroom. Yes, thank you to the Christophe. Thank you for shaping young minds. We appreciate that. Yes. Shout out and way to go, Jack. You're a cool dude. If you have a shout out you want us to give, chuck gets in on those pretty frequently sometimes you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstuffyshenko, or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more Podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio App Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2009/1234968837740hsw-sysk-go-over-niagra.mp3 | How Going Over Niagara Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-going-over-niagara-works | Since 1901, about 16 adventurous souls have gone over the falls in search of fame, usually in a barrel or sphere. Tune in as our resident experts take a look at the history of Niagara Falls in this podcast from HowStuffWorks. | Since 1901, about 16 adventurous souls have gone over the falls in search of fame, usually in a barrel or sphere. Tune in as our resident experts take a look at the history of Niagara Falls in this podcast from HowStuffWorks. | Thu, 19 Feb 2009 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=50, tm_isdst=0) | 23074352 | 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 is Chuck Brown riot. I'm doing sign language. Josh, are you doing finger fumblers? No, but since you brought it up, we have a finger fumbler, good Blood, Bad Blood, not to jump the gun. That has nothing to do with this podcast. Can you sign that out for me? No. Okay. Well, to anyone who knows sign language, give Good Blood, Bad Blood a shot. And that also reminds me, Chuck, one of our listeners sent in, I guess, a mind melt exercise. Make a clockwise circle on the floor with your right foot while writing the number six on a pad of paper. I tried it. It is really tough. It made me crazy. Yeah. Things like that really get to Chuck. Right. So, Chuck, that's a good thing that we had this little bit of banter because I had, like, no introduction whatsoever for this one. How convenient. How about this? Have you ever been to Niagara Falls? I have not. Nor have I. Really? Yeah. No, I haven't. And I even lived in the north. Not the north, the Midwest, but the northern Midwest. Oh, it's not too far from Ohio. No, it's not that far. Especially Toledo, but yeah, never made it up there. And actually, the only time I've ever really seen Niagara Falls was on what, superman. Two were Clark Kent and Lois Lane honeymoon, if I remember correctly. That's the only time you've seen Niagara Falls? Yeah, that's the most I've seen of it. It's not the only time. Got you. I don't live in a cave, Chuck. Right. So I do know a few things about Niagara Falls. Let's hear it. You want me to lay it on? You late. I will tell you this, Chuck. Every year, Niagara Falls attracts about 12 million visitors. Right. It's a huge tourist attraction. And from research, I've also found that if you stand there long enough, somebody is going to go in. What do you mean? They're going to go on the Niagara River and they're going to go over the Falls. If you stand there long enough. Long enough. Now, we may be talking like, months, years, sure. Who knows? But they do pull about 20 bodies out of the bottom of the falls every year. Yeah. Sadly, it's a suicide destination for some folks. Yeah. And that was just suicides. Right, right. Yeah. But there are a subgroup of humans running around over the last 100 or so years who actually go over the falls on purpose. Right. Daredevils. That old cliche going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Right. There's actually a lot of people who have done that, and it's usually a barrel. Yeah. Especially the old timing people. They went over in barrels. Yes. All of them modified. And then as we progressed further into the 20th century, the barrels became a little better, a little stronger, but, yeah, pretty much all barrels or balls spheres, if I'm not mistaken. 16 people have done so from 19 one to 2003. Right. And as far as I could find, the guy who did it in 2003 was the last one. I couldn't find anybody who's tried it more recently. Right. His is the most amazing but we should probably save that so people don't turn it off a little bit. Yeah, we want to pay it out slowly. So, Chuck, let's talk about the falls a little bit. How's your geography? Terrible. Do you want me to handle it? Well, no. I mean, I can give you a few facts here and there, but geography as a whole is not my strong suit. All right, well, give us a few facts here. Geographically speaking, if you've never been to Niagara Falls, you might think that it's one set of falls. And if you've seen the famous photos but it's actually three sets of falls, which I'm sure you know. Horseshoe Falls. Yeah. That's the Canadian one. Right? Yes, the American falls. That's the American one. And the lesser known and smaller Bridal Veil Falls. Right. And I know you have some good numbers on these. Well, I can tell you that this three fall set up that we see in Niagara Falls today, or people unlike me who go to Niagara Falls today, it's actually only about 500 years old. The falls actually erode these days because they've hit some serious bedrock. They erode backward about four to 5ft a year. Yeah, that's a lot. It is a lot, but they've eroded much more quickly than that over time. And also, I should say that the entirety of Niagara Falls is only about 15,000 years old. It was the result of the last ice age, or the end of the last ice age. It's eroding backward 5ft a year, and eventually it hit a point and the river went down enough, the water flow went lowered enough that it hit this island, which split it into two. That'd be the Niagara River. Correct. The Niagara River was split into two. And actually there's a second smaller island, Luna Island, that split it into three and created Bridal Veil Falls. Right. But this island called Goat Island is actually named after a herd of hapless goats that froze to death on the island in 1780. They belong to a goat herder named John Steadman. And that's why Goat Island is called Goat Island. They weren't fainting goats, were they? No, they were freezing goats. Okay. Yeah. So that's a little bit about Niagara Falls. Oh, I should probably give some stats here because I know everybody loves stats. Do you have any stats? No, I'm usually statman. Can I take your role today? Please do. Okay, so Horseshoe Falls is by far the biggest one. It's 167 foot drop, then it hits the Made of the Miss pool and actually goes down about another 180ft. So if you plunged right down to the mate of the missed pool, what is that? It's like almost 400ft. Right. It's quite a bit. That's a significant drop. There's a 2600 ft. Brink, and the water goes over that brink at about 600,000 gallons per second. Right. It's a lot of water. Yeah. So if you went over the falls and survived, you still got this water beating down on you at that kind of rate, which you could easily die. And even though Horseshoe Falls is much bigger and the water volume is much greater, that's the one that people go over when they go over Niagara Falls, because American Falls, it puts water at about 150,000 gallons a second. But the 176 foot drop to the bottom, about 106ft of that is rock. Right. He dropped 70ft right. On this huge tumble of rock. It's not a good idea to go over that one. It's nice to look at. It is very pretty. Especially if Bridal veil falls just falling in the background. Superman flying around. Yes. Saving people. Okay. There are people who go over the falls. Chuck. And do you know much about daredevils, I think is a pretty fair description of these people. Well, I wrote an article on daredevils. Was that your article? It was. That was a great article. I actually went back and referenced that. Thanks. And I saw that there's a picture of the first person to go over the falls in your article right. Who was a woman. Yeah. And Edison Taylor. But backtracking again. We're saving our anecdotes of the people who went over. Yeah. We're talking about Daredevils, right? Right. What about that one study? Which one? The one with the testosterone. All right. Yeah. Daredevils have a what is it? A higher level of testosterone, but a lower level of satisfaction. I looked it up. Serotonin. Right. And it's serotonin. One of the things it does is a neurotransmitter and it acts to curve impulsiveness. Well, apparently high levels of testosterone and low levels of a neurotransmitter that curves impulsiveness equals daredevil. Right. So that's one explanation. Another explanation is found actually in some poor lab mice who had the Staphman gene bred out of them. The infamous Staphman gene. Yeah, it's about to be infamous. This gene produces a protein that allows nerve cells to communicate with one another in the amygdala. And the amygdala is known to allow us to form fear memories. Memories from fear aversion. Sure. Like put your hand on a hot oven, your amygdala is going to be like, we can't do that again. I think a hot stove is what they generally say. But a hot oven is bad too. Quiet. Okay. Hot oven. Hot stove. I know what you mean. They were actually called, in this article, rather sensationally daredevil mice. They showed no signs of traditional mice fear. They explored open spaces they really didn't have much of an aversion to receiving electric shocks, basically. These mice are leading a pretty hard life, I think, up at Cornell or Ruckers. Right. And I know that daredevils often say that they don't fear things like most people do, so it's not like they're just overcoming this thing and they just have to jump off out of the plane. They really it just doesn't affect them. Right. Which is I can't even begin to conceive of that. I have a little bit of that to me. I used to repel and stuff like that. There was a little bit of fear involved, but I was one of those that was overcoming the fear. As opposed to yeah. You're a self actualized person. I was. All right. Well, Chuck, let's meet some of the idiots who've gone over in Niagara Falls, shall we? Yes. And at this point, as our attorneys would be so pleased, I will say that you should certainly never, ever try to do this, because it's very easy to die trying this as a stunt, conscientious and self actual. I think the fact that 16 people have gone over, eleven of which have survived in 100 years. Two people went over and survived twice. Correct. But five people died. Yeah. And horribly, too. We'll get to some of those guys. Right. So why don't we start at the beginning? The first person to go over Niagara Falls on purpose, as you said, was a woman, annie Edson Taylor one. Right. Yeah. It's pretty funny to think about way back then, but yeah. She did this actually on purpose as a stunt to try and make money. Yeah. Fame and fortune is pretty much the dominant reason people have for going over the falls. Right, right. And she was 63 at the time, I imagine. Yeah. Didn't use Listerine. Yeah. She claimed she was 43 and got away with that, so she must have been in pretty decent shape. But she packed a pickle barrel with made an airtight and packed it with pillows and stuffed herself in there and made it over. Survived and did not make a lot of money off of it. She was smart enough to compress air to make it buoyant. And she also took her cat with her. Yeah. And they both lived. Yes. A guy took his turtle later on, too. Someone else. Oh, we'll get to him. Okay. Sony, boy. 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. But, yeah, she went over. She and the Cat made it. But, yeah, the fortune and fame that she thought was elusive, she found and died penniless, which is just sad. Yes. I don't like the term, though. No one died penniless. I'm sure someone does, but did she really not have a penny? Come on. I don't know. I mean, a penny in one was they should just say she died poor. Okay, that's just a personal piece. Or broke. Yeah. Busted. Well, her barrel busted. Okay, so who's up next? Let's see. How about well, the first man was, ten years later, Bobby Leach. Yeah, he was kind of a stuntman, right? Yeah, he's a circus guy. And July 25, 1911, he got into a steel barrel and floated 18 minutes downstream and went over and survived. He broke both his jaw and both of his knee caps. Yes. He spent six months in the hospital. Not fun. No. But the horrible ironic twist to Mr. Leech's life is that 15 years later, he slipped on an orange peel, broke his leg, it became infected, it was amputated, and two months later, he was dead of complications, ultimately, from slipping on an orange peel. Right. And if that had been a banana peel, it would be a Three Stooges episode. It would have been just painful to read. Right? It was. So he lived, but perished in an odd accident, which is interesting. Do you know me, Chuck? I have some fairly grizzly tastes. All right, so I think the guy with the coolest death of the Niagara Falls tragedies was Charles Stevens. He went over in 1020. I actually haven't heard this guy. Oh, you haven't? All laid on you. He went over in an oak barrel. Right. And it wasn't modified or reinforced in any way, but he modified the interior. He had an anvil at the bottom surface ballast so it would stay upright, and he had his feet strapped to the anvil for some reason, and he had arm straps inside the barrel, so his arms were in there. He went over, apparently, when he hit the bottom, the envelope broke through the bottom of the barrel and dragged him down with it. And all they ever found of Mr. Stevens was his arm still in the arm strap inside of the oak barrel. Wow. I kid you not. Poor planning. Yeah. His whole stunt was racked with poor planning. Other people who had already gone over and who lived around the river and were kind of old sea dogs, were begging the guy to test it out, give it a try, reinforce it, just take all these extra precautions and you just wouldn't do it. Right. As soon as you said he had an anvil in the bottom, I kind of foresaw that coming. Yeah. Josh, another one that I thought was really sad, that parish was George Staffecas in 1930. He is what Peter Tosh would call a mystic man. Yes. He was a chef in New York. He went over with his pet turtle, Sunny Boy, like Sony talked about. Yes. 100 year old turtle named Sonny Boy. Supposedly. Yeah. And this one's really sad because he actually went over, perhaps successfully, and was stuck behind the curtain of water. Yes. 18 hours and no one could get to them. And they don't know for sure whether he survived the fall. But if he did, that means he spent three to 8 hours is all the air he had, and he actually perhaps suffocated. Suffocated? What I took from it was that they examined him and found that he most likely had suffocated. Yes. That's terrible. But the turtle made it. Yeah. Sunny Boy made it. And the whole reason Mr. Stefacus took Sunny Boy was so that if he died, sunny Boy could tell the tale. And Sonny boy never really said anything. Talking turtle. I think that says it all. Mystic man. Do you want me to do another one? Yes, you're right. Okay. I love this guy. Nathan Boya. He's the first African American to go over. And he was also he kind of bucked the trend of fame and fortune. The reason Mr. Boyer went over was because it was something he just had to do. He felt he had to do. Really? That's what he said. Yeah. So he goes over in 61, and this guy was pretty sharp. He took an oxygen tank with him filled with 30 hours of air. I believe he had a rebreather. And he went over in I think it was a metal ball he dubbed the Plunge of Fear. Right. He did have a rebreather which removes carbon dioxide. Yeah. It's like scuba. Exactly. Yeah. So he went over in the falls. He went over the falls. He was successful. I think he got a little banged up, but not too much. And he was also the first person to be fined for breaking a law that was enacted a couple of years earlier after another guy died that made it illegal to go over Niagara Falls on purpose. So he paid $100, which in $2,008 I looked up, was 710. $45 in today's dollars. Yes. As a fine. But here's the first one to ever be fined for doing it because I believe the fine today is ten grand or more. Yeah, or more. And it's performing a stunt without a license. Is that what it is? Yeah. And they've never given a license to anybody to do it, which it just seems like a bad idea. Sure. Because that's a lawsuit right there. Do you want to skip ahead to the most recent and most amazing or did you have another one? We can go backwards. Do we have to do it chronologically? No, we don't. I want to talk about the most recent in 2003. Well, let's do it because this guy went over without anything, and he's the only person known to go in on purpose, without any kind of flotation. No barrel, no nothing. Just to close on his back. Close on his back. And there's been speculation over the years whether or not he was suicidal or wanted fame and fortune. He apparently said that he was, in fact, depressed for years. And his friends came out later and said, yeah, he talked about trying to commit suicide. And so when he went to Niagara, he literally stood on the other side of the rail and was contemplating it. And a woman behind him who he did not know, sarcastically said, so what are you going to do? Jump in that voice? No. And he said, yes, ma'am, I think I will. And he did so, and he jumped in and just a few moments later plunged over a horseshoe falls and said that it felt like I was being swallowed by living organism. Cool. I was flying straight down at a tremendous speed, and the force was so great, I thought it would rip my head off. Then it became dark, my ears popped, and I was trapped under 40ft of water. It was beating the living heck out of me. Did he say heck? No, he didn't. And I couldn't even get to the surface. And I remember thinking well, Niagara, I think you've beaten me. And he said then he was pushed forward and felt the sun on his face. Crazy. I know. What's the guy's name? Kirk Johns. Cool. So Kirk survived. He told the story to Outside magazine, among others. And apparently he said it filled him with the will to live. I would imagine so. Good for him. Kind of like surviving a plane crash, right? Yeah, exactly. Except not quite. Well, yes. Maybe the same part of the brain. I don't think so. Okay, can we go back one? Because there is one other one. Sure. Okay. So can we go back and can I do one more venture back in time? Yeah, sure. We'll go back to 1988, the heady days at the end of the Reagan era. My junior year in high school, when still wow. Really? Yeah, I know. You're always marveled at my five years older than you. Get over. Okay. All right. Sorry. It was the end of the Reagan era, but Nancy Reagan's influence was still very clearly imprinted upon the national psyche, in particular, two guys named Peter Devonardi and Jeffrey Pekkovich. Right. And they decided that they were going to go over the falls in a barrel. And they did, and I think a ten foot long metal barrel that was completely enclosed. And the reason that they wanted to do this was because they wanted to make a statement against drugs. And if you look at their barrel, there's a picture of it in the article. It says, drugs kill. Right? Right. So what they're saying, clearly, is that it's smarter to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel than it is to do drugs. The problem is that's just wholly untrue, which is why there's 200 million illicit drug users worldwide, and only 16 people who have ever gone over Niagara Falls on purpose. And we're certainly endorsing anything, but, yeah, going over the falls in a barrel is virtual suicide. It is struck me that remind me, actually, the other guy that was trying to raise awareness for the homeless yes. What was that? Yes, he went over in a jet ski, and the plan was to leap off the jet ski, and he had a rocket parachute that was going to open, but there was some kind of malfunction and he died. I'd say the worst of all was Jesse Sharp in 1990. He didn't even have a parachute, and he didn't wear a helmet, and he didn't wear a life preserver, and he went over in a kayak on purpose. We wanted a job in the stunt industry, so I feel very badly for Jesse's family. Yeah. He perished. Oh, yeah. As well. Yeah. I think they found his kayak and that was it. Right. So I think the lesson, the takeaway, Josh, is daredevil legitimate business. Going over the falls in a barrel, not a good idea. No. Stay off drugs, kids. So, Chuck, auto.com time. Yeah. Our sponsor. And then maybe a little listener mail. Can we look forward to that? Very special listener mail that I am looking forward to. 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 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 homepage and enter code stuff. And that means it's time for listener mail. Not only Listener mail. Josh this is Haiku Theater. Can we get a special Haiku Theater? Sound effective? Well, see, I bet it's in there by the time we listen. Yeah. Okay. I have seven haiku's, and they're short. Because they're haiku's. Yeah. And we get them from our listeners. Sometimes they're in the form of corrections. Sometimes they're just pulling haiku's. Okay. This one was related to the airplane airplane crash from Sarah and Loan, which I liked. Hello. That's my seat. Sorry. Can I squeeze by you? Wow, this is awkward. Okay, nice. Which is do you show on the front of your body or the rear of your body when you select again? It comes back to Fight Club a lot. That's right. Workplace boredom. I will file this under that one. Finger on keyboard. Carpal tunnel sets in slow. My cubicle life is from a board worker, brianna J. O'Sullivan. It's depressing. Brianna. Maggie Savage of Dover, New Hampshire, sent us one about the Hypoallergenic Cats episode. Cats and dogs are swell to darn their fur and odd cell. But, hey, what the heck has been like? Our friend Marianne teaching English in Thailand. Says, this village in Thailand nothing but rice and noodles. I crave cheddar cheese. Nice. Yeah, I've read that one, too. Have you checked out her blog? It's pretty good. It is very good. Aaron Wynn sent his podcast. Routine control. Alt delete. Fresh cup of coffee in hand. Together we start. Great. That's very hopeful. This is my favorite. This is from a 16 year old Timothy Sinclair of Albany, California. Haiku can be strange and unexpectedly. Refrigerator. That is my favorite. We have a winner. Can we get what's the haiku writer's name? The last one? That was Timothy Sinclair, and I think he deserves a T shirt. I agree. Timothy, send us your address and T shirt size to our email, please. But that's not all. Oh, keep them coming. I don't only have one more. And this was actually sent today by Eric Jones of Maryland. And Eric just hiked the entirety of the Appalachian Trail. And we actually conversed a bit today via email. Sent pictures. I'm a hiker myself, so we kind of wrapped back and forth about his experience, and he seems like a very cool guy. So he wrote us a little haiku story about hiking the 18th. So here it is. 2008, I took a long walk on the Appalachian Trail. Started in Georgia. Seven months later, finished on, mountedton thank you. Came home, bought iPhone, found you guys, then downloaded every show since March. Played sequentially in two weeks. I learned so much, and I'm still learning. Thank you for your time and for your excellent work. Mention me on air. I like the haiku that end with question mark. Yeah, me, too. Or refrigerator. That's pretty good. That's the best one. Timothy, did you find out if Eric hiked naked, as I hear, as a trend to do on the at. Judging from the photos he sent, he did not. Okay, but they were really gorgeous pictures. You should look great. Well, thank you. You hate nature. Thanks to except that hate nature. I'm just kind of a slug. Right? So thank you to everybody who sent us haiku or any kind of mail. If you want to send us a haiku or a high guise, you can send that to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? 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." | |
42fdb88a-53a3-11e8-bdec-af2a3eb0a7b9 | How AI Facial Recognition Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-ai-facial-recognition-works | With the development of increasingly smart artificial intelligence and lots more cameras spread around than ever before, we have reached a critical point in the US and other countries where governments can easily track everyone, everywhere, all the time. | With the development of increasingly smart artificial intelligence and lots more cameras spread around than ever before, we have reached a critical point in the US and other countries where governments can easily track everyone, everywhere, all the time. | Tue, 04 Feb 2020 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=35, tm_isdst=0) | 52813823 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, it's me, Josh, and I'm here to tell you it's official. We're going to be in Vancouver, BC and Portland, Oregon this March. On March 29 will be at the chan center in vancouver. And on March 30, we'll be at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland. So come see us. Tickets go on sale this Friday. Go to Sysklive.com for ticket links and info and everything you need. We'll see you guys in March. 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 Scooter, Computer Bryant and Jerry matthew Broderick in WarGames. Roland that's good. Thanks. What's your name? Josh. Okay, Josh. Alice in More Games. Okay. Clark I know Erin Cooper is doing right now. Man, how cute was she in that movie? I think they designed that movie for every 13 year old boy in America to fall in love with. Alice SHeidi wrong. I think you're talking about short circuit. I never saw that. Believe that. What with Johnny Five? I mean, I know the movie. You got to see it. Really? It's pretty awful. Okay. Especially with what's his name, who is the sleaze ball from Fast Times at Ridgemont High? Who is the ticket scalper demone? Yes. He plays an Indian Asian Indian character. Like full on brown face and everything. It's really bad. The movie is bad enough, but then now when you go back and see that, too, you're like, I can't believe this. I can't believe it. I think he's Italian. Oh, easily. Maybe Jewish. Or maybe just a straight up white guy. He's definitely not Asian Indian. No, he's not. But anyway, go see Short Circuit. Okay. See what you think. Alishidi just keeps looking at the camera going, I'm so sorry. That was a big hit, though. She didn't even be sorry about so I guess War Games is kind of in your wheelhouse. Yeah, it was a little old for me. Yeah, because I saw that when I was, like, twelve ish. And you would have been I don't know, how much younger are you? I would have been seven. Yeah. That's a little young for war games, I would think. I mean, I still watched wherever, but I was like, yeah, that's hilarious. The computer is called whopper? Yeah. I mean, it was right in my wheelhouse. Right. I remember at the end of War Games, they lock in, they're decoding the code one number and letter at a time. Very suspenseful. Yeah, very suspenseful. And it finally locks in, and me and my friends memorized it so we could go home and plug it into an apple, too, to see what happened. What happened? Nothing. Okay. How do you plug in a number anyway? What does that even mean? Oh, yeah, that's true. Yeah. I remember a very rudimentary program you could run where you could type in like four lines of whatever. I don't even know if you call it code with a phrase, and it would run the phrase, like, a thousand times all over your screen and a big scroll. And I just thought that was the coolest thing ever. I feel like I remember what you're talking about. Just, like, five lines. The only part I remember is 20. Go to ten. And ten was the phrase, I think. Ready, set, something like that. I don't remember. Then I was like, man, let's just play Castle wolfenstein that was a good one. Yeah. I never did. Oregon Trail. I never did as well. I was Castle Wolfenstein. But like Wolfenstein on the PC. Oh, yeah, like, move, left arrow, right arrow, shoot dash, which is some sort of a bullet. That was fun. And I thought it was just, like, the height of technological gaming. It was at the time, but now, Chuck, we've reached the height of technology, which is being tracked everywhere you go. Look at you all the time by whoever wants to do that. I'm going to change your name to Josh Smooth Operator Clark for that transition. Very nice. I like Alice Clark. Josh, alice and WarGames clark yeah. This is a good one. Did you put this together, or was this you? And this is Dave Rug. Dave Rouge. Yeah. Good stuff. Yeah. And hi, Dave. We finally got to meet Dave and his family. Lovely family that we cursed awfully in front of in Seattle. Felt terrible. Thanks for adding yourself to the mix. And he was like, whatever. He was fine. His kids were adorable. They were great. They couldn't look at me, though. Really? Yeah. They were probably just intimidated by your presence. No, it was because I cursed so badly. So this is good stuff, though. Facial recognition technology that they've been kind of at since the 1950s, which they rolled out as a test in 2002 at the Super Bowl in New Orleans, did not go that well. No, it was a little clunky back then, but it's gotten a lot better since then. Let me explain why, for anyone who's listening to The End of the World with Josh Clark, the AI episode in particular, everything associated with artificial intelligence got way better starting around 2007, when neural nets became a viable form of machine learning. Because you don't have to train a computer, what constitutes a human face and what to look for. You just feed it a bunch of pictures of faces and say, these are human faces. Learn what a human face is, and they train themselves. And so around about 20 07 20 08 20 09, everything that had to do with machine learning got way smarter because we started using neural nets, and facial recognition software is no exception. Yeah, and there were a few things that kind of converged all at the same time or around the same time. Social media kind of coming on the scene right in that wheelhouse was a big deal. Facebook this is staggering. Facebook, just by itself, processes 350,000,000 new photos through its facial recognition software every day. A day. And every time one comes through, Mark Zuckerberg goes, whoa. Like, you think it's neat when you put a picture up and it says, would you like to tag Emily your wife? Because that's her. And you think, oh, well, that's super easy. Thanks, Facebook. But then you don't think like, wait a minute, all right, how do they know that's my wife? Oh, yeah. It's like with everything else, there's privacy, people that were like, whoa, do you guys realize what's going on? And then the 99% of the sheep, they're like, huh? No. They're like, no, it's great. I don't have to go in and click two links or two buttons to talk to somebody. Way easier. So that was one thing. There's way more photos out there for those machines to learn on. Yeah, like good, high quality photos. Right. 350,000,000 a day just on Facebook alone. Which means the machines were getting smarter. They were getting better and better at training themselves. And then lastly, that has led to a Ubiquity in facial recognition. The better the machines have gotten, the easier it has been to put together data sets for them to train on, which is lots and lots of pictures of people. The cheaper the technology has gotten, which means the more people that are now using facial recognition than ever. Yeah. Amazon has a service called Recognition with a K, which is not a good look. No, it looks very German. There's something about stoppoing replacing a C with a K. Shoot. Stop. Ole. It just looks creepy. Like when you spell America with a K? Yeah. It means something. It means, like, bad America ice cube. Yeah, they went right at full steam ahead and called it recognition. You have to say it like that. You do, I think. And you have to be like squeezing the air out of a syringe while you're saying it, too. I didn't even know about this, but it's ubiquitous and it's not super expensive. Right. And that means that the law enforcement agencies, agencies, they don't have to create their own. They can just say, let's just sign up for recognition. Right, exactly. Because it's there. And because it's relatively cheap, you can just get a subscription. Not just law enforcement agencies. If you have a photo sharing app or whatever and you want some facial recognition technology, you just contract with Amazon and Amazon goes, Here you go. Here's our data and our code, and you can put it onto your platform. Anybody can use it. So it is kind of everywhere. And that makes a lot of people, including me, very nervous, because as this guy Woodrow Herzog, if he's not Werner Herzog's brother, I'll be disappointed. There's a lot of Herzogs. But a woodrow and a werner. Come on. Maybe. Anyway, Woodrow Herzog is a professor of computer science, and I believe privacy, civil liberty. He basically says, look, there is no way we're going to reap the benefits of facial recognition without ultimately sliding Irreversibly into a Dystopian surveillance state where it's happening right now. And if we don't do something about it, it's never going to change back. We're about to fully give up our privacy because it's one thing to have your phone tracked. You can give up your phone, give yourself a burner phone, like your Jesse Pinkman or something like that, and then you just throw that phone away. You can't be tracked anymore. You can't get a burner face. And if that does become a thing down the line, it'll be very expensive. So the average person can't get a burner face. We'll be tracked by our face everywhere we go. And as we add more and more cameras and this technology becomes cheaper and cheaper, we will be living in a world where there will be zero privacy and will be monitored and tracked because it will be so easy. And it will be sold to us like it's being sold to us now that it's a law enforcement tool to get the bad guys. That's right. But it's eventually going to extend to include everybody. But what do you have to worry about? You're an upstanding citizen. It doesn't matter if you're tracked. That's not true. That's just not the case. Everybody. It's not the case. All right, we're going to call that soapbox soliloquy number one of what I guarantee will be probably three or four. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about how it works. It is biometric authentication. It's like a fingerprint or a retina scan. And basically what it does is it is precise measurements of a face to calculate every person's very unique visual geometry, like how far apart your eyes are. Sure. How far apart your pupils are from your nostrils. Yeah. Your facial geometry, how your face is all set up, I think. Yeah. It's even gotten into things like facial hair, skin tone, skin texture. Yeah. I'm sure it'll get just more and more specific. Yeah. Because the machines are getting better and better and easier and easier to train on this stuff. You can just add more and more data to it and the recognition will just become increasingly good. Yeah. And if you want to throw off facial recognition software and freak out every human you meet, just shave your eyebrows. Oh, yeah. That would be a little freaky. Have you ever seen that? You've seen it before, I'm sure, in movies and stuff. It's an interesting thing. I remember a kid in industrial arts class did that one year. He was like a little kind of a 9th grade burnout. He just showed up one day with no eyebrows. I think not having a nose would be more easily accepted. Sure. There's something just uncanny when someone shaves their eyebrows. Like, one day they have them, the next day they don't. Was it like, immediately recognizable what the thing was? Or was it like no, that's the thing off today. Okay. Whereas if you came in the next day without a nose, the first thing you would say is, what happened to your nose? What happened to your nose, todd. Yes. And Todd would be like, I can't rent a bit. It fell off. So those measurements we were talking about, what happens then is they compare that just like a fingerprint with a database of images. And depending on what this is for, it could be like, just within your company, or it could be the FBI's database of mugshots, or it could be the DMV's database of driver's license photos, which we'll get into. Yeah. What's interesting is each stage of the way, there's a different algorithm that does each increasingly sophisticated step until you finally have basically, like, all of the different data points for what makes up that facial geometry. And then you can compare it to all the other data points we think of, like a computer running like a picture. You've got your input picture and then running all the pictures next to it. That's not what it's doing. It's running the numbers, basically. It's doing computer stuff. Yeah. I love that first step, which is you have to teach the computer what a face is. Yeah. It seems silly, but of course that's what it is. Well, yeah. Because if you showed a picture of a person standing next to a fire hydrant yes. Assuming on the fire hydrant and say, hello, handsome. So this is what a human face looks like, huh? Yeah. Or no, that's a butt. Yeah. And then it starts closer and closer. All right. Now that's a face. You know what a face is, right. And now move on to step two, which is stop screwing around. Yeah. So now you know what it faces. You've got to normalize it for the photo, which means there are not that many. Well, that's something you have to put it in the dockers. That normalizes it. You isolate that face, and then you have to make sure that it's normalized as far as looking at the camera. So if it's you get a photo of someone from a CCTV, let's say, and it's sort of a three quarter, they have the ability to make it as if it is looking straight at you. Yeah. The computer can pretty accurately predict what the rest of the face looks like. Face head on, I guess. Face on, maybe. And when it normalizes it like that, it makes it much easier to compare to other pictures because as we'll see, most of the pictures or most of the data points that it's comparing it to are taken from databases of pictures that have been taking of people face on. Right. So that's why it wants to go like, mugshots or driver's license. Yeah. Well, just spoiled it, but yes, we already said that. Oh, we did? Yeah, I did. Okay. I missed it. I know. Sorry. So from there, you have more algorithms still that isolate parts of the face. And this is where my old theory that there are only so many sort of facial combinations. So that's why you have Doppelgangers. We got to do an episode on doppelganger? Yeah. There's only so many things you can do with two eyes, two eyebrows, a nose and a mouth. And cheekbones. Right. And a chin. Okay. What else? I mean, there's not a whole lot. There's lips. Sure. What about that's about it. These are called eleven, the ridges between your eyebrows. Well, if you want to get super specific but that's what I'm saying. I think they're getting more and more specific. Oh, yeah. But my whole point is and we'll learn and hear in facial recognition, they do use Doppelgangers, but put a pin in that so they recognize all these features, and then each feature becomes what's called a nodal point, or no dial point, I think nodal, I think. And this is where you're going to get your super exact angles and distances between all these parts as a flat, two dimensional thing. Right. Which my question was, because below here, it talks about Apple and their iPhone have a 3D facial recognition. Is two dimensional superior to don't know? Or is it just because that's what all the pictures are in the database, so that's what they do? I don't know. All I know is my phone usually unlocks when I look at it. You know what I hate is having to take off my sunglasses, so I've got some wayfarers that I don't have to take off. Really? But my Aviators, I do have to take off. Interesting. Do they keep trying to make you into MAV when you have on The Aviators? Yeah, I go, what is that? That was Tom Cruise laughing and chewing gum. Okay. Wow. Thanks. I feel like, okay, we got to keep going because I was about to take a break. Unnecessarily. So when the computer is running through the pictures, it just sits there and goes like, no. Millions and millions of times. And then finally it goes, yes. But when it says yes and it spits out another picture, it's not like this is that person. No, you want it to be. Because we all watch NCIS, we all watch CSI, we all watch Law and Order. I don't. We all watch. Party down. I do. Andy Griffith. Like all that matlock. No, the whole shebang. So we want it to just spit out and be like, here's your person of interest. Right. But what it's really doing is it's producing a similarity score that is probabilistic. It's saying there's this percent chance that this is the same person as the picture of the person in the picture that you uploaded. Yeah, it's a bit of a guess. It is a sophisticated guess. It is. And the better computers get at this the likelier it is that if they say there's a 99% chance it's the same person, that it's the same person. Right. But as we'll see, it's up to the human user to determine what is an acceptable threshold of confidence. Is it 50%? No. Is it 75%? No. Frankly, it really should be about 99% or higher. Should be the confidence setting. The setting for the confidence level. Isn't that what Amazon recognition says the threshold should be? I'm glad you said that. Man. Because it really is creepy. And I couldn't put my finger on it. And it's exactly I mean. I knew the cave looked weird or whatever. But it hadn't hit me just how creepy it is and just how off the mark or potentially on the mark. That name is like if my name was spelled C-H-U-K. I'm sinister a little bit. You'd be more sinister. I don't think you could ever be truly sinister. I appreciate that. All right, let's take a break. I'm going to go work on sinistering up a bit, and we'll talk a little bit more about some of the uses of fr right after this. So as with all technology, it has to be abbreviated into two letters, the second of which is R. Do they call it fr? I've seen it. Okay. Yes, I have. I was just being silly, but it doesn't surprise me. No. So in fr facial recognition technology, there are some beneficial uses for it. Yeah. Like we said, you got to tag people. That is cool. Chief among them, for people like you and me, that's the pinnacle. As it stands, you don't have to tag people yourself. Facebook does it for you. Yes. That's what we're trading everything for. I got to calm down. Okay. There are some other genuinely beneficial uses too. There's a nonprofit company called Thorn that scans missing persons pictures against pictures of children in child porn videos or suspected human trafficking to get matches, and apparently they've rescued 100 kids. So far from using that technology, there's a pretty beneficial use of facial recognition software, dating apps, let's say. You can get pretty specific on what kind of face you find attractive, which is interesting, but you can say, I really think I like guys with high cheekbones. But no, you would go find small lips. It would be more like somebody could be like, oh, I really find Christian Bale attractive, and they get a picture of Christian Bale into this dating app, and I would come up, but I wouldn't, because I wouldn't be in the dating app because I'm happily married. Do you think you look like Christian Bale? I'm told that a lot. Really? Yeah. That's weird. I don't think you look anything like that. I don't either, but people say, Interesting. I don't know what I would do if I was dating now. I guess I would just go to a service and say, an ali shitty type sure for more games era, but they'd be like, okay, sir, you would just upload the picture. You don't have to come into the office, which is really not even open to the public, and just tell us you're interested in an alley, shitty type, like a weirdo. You mean dating apps don't have offices where they just field complaints and interested parties? You sit down and they video tape you with a VHS camera, put you on with some other guys on the tape. That's how they used to do it. Oh, yeah. That was one of the subplots of singles, the camera and crow movie. Oh, yeah, it was. Expect the Best was the name of the dating service. And you would make a video tape and, like, watch video tapes of people saying who they are. How do you remember that? I was a big singles fan. That's not a bunch I got you. Yeah. Expect the best. You, me, pack of cigarettes and some coffee. We don't need anything else. Kazoon tight. So what else here? This was Taylor Swift and her security team on tour used it to scan the audience to see if any of the creeps who have harassed and stalked her were in the audience. That's super beneficial. Sure. No one should have to go through that. Also, cops use it in myriad ways, but in particular, especially beneficial when they use facial recognition to identify people who can't identify themselves. Yeah, it's interesting. Somebody in the midst of a psychotic break. Perhaps somebody wasted on trooms. Somebody, sorry, you're not Jesus Christ who has amnesia. Our friend Benjamin Kyle, who apparently knows who he is now, but he's decided not to disclose it publicly. Remember the guy? He was found behind a Burger King near a dumpster, had zero recollection of who he was or how he got there? I can't remember that. And there was this international publicity publicizing, like who he was and that he couldn't remember who he was, and somebody finally came forward and identified him. So now he knows who he was, but he went, like, a decade without knowing. Wow. By the way, when I said, sorry, you're not Jesus Christ, I was making fun of the guy on mushrooms, not someone in the midst of a psychotic break. Oh, I see. I just want to be very specific. I think that was very clear. All right. I want to make sure everybody knows that. So those are some of the good ways that it can be used. Now let's talk about all the bad ways. Yeah. I mean, when you're talking about the government, you're talking about law enforcement. When you're talking about things like what's going on, allegedly in China with CCTVs everywhere, trained to single out ethnic minorities and religious groups just walking down the street going about their day right. Being tracking them. It gets into much different territory than tagging people and dating apps. Yeah, it's pretty difficult to attend your religious service if you're not allowed to attend your religious service and you're being tracked everywhere you go. Yeah, that's why places like and this is the most predictable thing in the world san Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley, and then Somerville, Maine. I knew the Mainers would be in there. So they're not into this. Live Free or die. That's right. They have banned law enforcement from using facial recognition altogether in California as a state and has put a three year moratorium on the use of it on Body cams, which is a big one. And the ACLU is basically I know this is jumping ahead, but they're at the point where they're like, we need to tap the brakes here for a few years because there's no legislation about this yet, and it's just going full steam ahead. Yeah, I don't want to run past that. Aside from Berkeley, san Francisco. Who is the other one? Oakland and Somerville, Maine, there are no laws, state, local, or federal, governing the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement. It's just happening very fast. Whatever they want to do, they can do. And in some cases, they do all sorts of stuff with it. They will use it. Like, NYPD very famously used what you were talking about with Doppelgangers. There was a guy who was caught stealing beer at a CVS. This is amazing. Not even a Dwayne. Reed. A CVS? And they said, but this guy looks a lot like Woody Harrelson. We don't have a good shot of him to use in official recognition software. We do have is lots of great picks of Woody Harrelson. So they went and got a pick of Woody Harrelson, and they came up with a match, and they think it was the guy on video and CVS. And so the Georgetown School of Law produced a study called Garbage In, Garbage Out, and they were basically like, that's not okay. You really shouldn't be doing that. But that's the level of legality as it stands right now. It's just open season. It's basically, whatever you want to do, you can do. As far as facial recognition is concerned in that story in particular, it's like, some people are like, awesome. The system works. Sure. Other people are like, what about poor Woody Harrelson? He was really in danger right then of being implicated in this beer stealing scheme from CVS and what. He said, what? Dude. I love that guy. I do too, man. True detective. The first season. Yeah, first four episodes. Just amazing. That's called using a probe photo. When you say, hey, that looks like someone. They also did the same with one of the New York Knicks, apparently. I could not for life for me to find out who. Yeah, like he's being protected or something. No one said who it was. A couple of numbers for you, though. The FBI receives about 500 facial recognition search submissions a month for their database. So that's the other thing. If you don't have even the money for a subscription to Amazon recognition, or you don't have an It person who's capable of assembling it and putting it using it, you can just submit these requests to the FBI. So there's a lot of different avenues you could take as law enforcement to use facial recognition technology to catch suspected criminals. Yeah, I was about to say bad guys, but who knows? We'll see. It's not always the case. So here's some more numbers, though, because it needs to be regulated, but when it works, it really works. Yeah, it really does, though, is the thing. Yeah. There was one department where they said it lowered the average time required for an officer to identify a subject from an image from 30 days to three minutes, which kind of brings home the point there's another number in here that's interesting, but 17. It brings home the point that this is something that human policemen were doing, officers were doing with their eyeballs by flipping through books for 30 days straight saying, like, it doesn't look like this person. This is like a chance to really speed up that process and to spend more time, in theory, catching bad guys. Yes. I'm not arguing for it. I'm just saying they were doing this anyway just through manpower. Right. I think the thing is, any time you add artificial intelligence, it automatically makes the user of the artificial intelligence side unfairly advantaged. It's not like the criminals are able to use AI to steal beer from CVS more effectively, but the cops are using AI to catch them stealing beer more effectively. And it's kind of like, yes, it makes sense to catch, like, child pornographers and human traffickers and rapists and murderers and violent criminals with this stuff. But using that kind of technology to catch somebody who stole beer from a CVS, that's when it starts to feel like, what kind of society are we moving toward? Well, I think someone hold on. Let me keep going here for a second because I don't want people to be like, what? Are you in favor of the guy stealing beer from CVS? No, I'm not. I think you're a scumbag if you steal beer from CVS. But I also think that it's overkill to use facial recognition technology to catch that person, use old fashioned police tactics or don't catch them. Yes. That's just kind of the fairness of the old west in New York City. I think I might be on the other side because I don't think we need to set a fair playing ground between criminals and cops and saying, like, it's unfair that cops can use this stuff and criminals are just out there not able to use these same techniques. Okay, so the fairness thing doesn't just end at the law and order things. Right. It's not just with cops using it. They have this huge advantage. I totally get how people. Would be like, no, give the cops a huge advantage. I don't have an issue with that in and of itself. I think my issue comes a step or two down the road sure. Where the government or the cops acting on behalf of the government use that against everyday citizens who have no recourse whatsoever. Right. That lopsidedness that's so evident when you're using AI to catch somebody stealing beer from the CVS, it's really easy to kind of follow that a little further across to the horizon and see just how unfair life could be and how oppressive that could be using that technology. I think that's ultimately what I'm saying. All right? I hopefully dug myself out of that hole by now. And this gets into some of the controversies and the arguments. If you're scanning mugshots for rapists and arsonists and murderers and violent criminals and you're catching people, you're not going to find a lot of people that say, well, that's not fair. Go back and use take a month to look through a mugshot book instead and waste a bunch of time and don't be efficient. So I think most people would say if you're looking at mug shots, although we should point out that a mug shot doesn't mean it just means you're arrested. That doesn't mean you're guilty of anything. Right. So there are plenty of opportunities for false positives and people being put in jail that shouldn't be. Right. But there's not a lot of people who are like, no, don't use mugshot databases. Right, exactly. If you're scanning driver's license databases or other just general public databases, that's when it gets super tricky because we can't avoid the fact that what that means is in the center on Privacy and Technology, kind of stated very plainly, what that means is everyone is in a perpetual lineup, essentially. Right. If you have a driver's license, you're part of a police lineup. Yeah. Whether you like it or not. Whether you know it or not. And if that computer says, here's the guy, it's Chuck Bryant, they will say, he doesn't strike me as very sinister. And the computer will be like, Trust me, this is the guy with, like, an 80 something percent confidence interval. Chuck, suddenly you're going to get visited by the cops and maybe you'll even get arrested because you were a little cagey when they talk to you and you set off their cop radar or whatever. Right. And then the next thing you know, you're in court being charged with a crime that you didn't commit because a computer implicated you and the cops thought that you were acting Kg. And let's say that you were a very poor person and you don't have any money to mount a decent defense. The best you can afford is a free public defender who has 50 other cases is and not really paying very much attention to you, and you're in jail now because you got convicted wrongly. Because you were putting a line up just because you had a driver's license. Yes. I think for me, and this is total my privilege coming through as well, okay. I'd want to see some numbers. And if one of every 10,000 arrest and conviction of a real criminal or rapist and a murder, and there's three people that get falsely identified and have to go through the system and may or may not be acquitted, I'd want to see those numbers. But again, that's coming from a privileged position as someone who could afford a legal defense. White. Yeah, exactly. That's another one, too, is that people of color bear inordinate burden, a disproportionate burden when it comes to facial recognition technologies. We'll see well as well go ahead and talk about that. I think from the beginning, even with social media, there were certain facial recognition, early facial recognition technologies that admitted, like, we're not as good as seeing or recognizing faces with darker skin. It's just not that good. Yeah, I think something like darker skin men and women were recognized. 12% and 35% were misidentified compared to 1% and 7% of light skinned men and women. And they say it's because of the data sets that these machines have been trained on, which is not crazy, it's not purposefully, but it makes sense if you live in a generally, like the white people are in power and it's like whiteness is the most celebrated part of the society or whatever, that's what you're going to have more pictures of. And when you feed just a bunch of pictures from your society into a machine and say, learn what faces are, it's going to go, oh, white men, I got you. Well, there just are more white people numbers wise. Sure. That probably has something to do with it, right? Yes, that is an excellent point as well, for sure. But the fact of the matter is the data sets that the machines are learning on are largely white and largely male. And so they're just not as good at recognizing the differences in faces among people who aren't white male. Yeah. Let's read these quotes. There's a couple of good quotes here. The first one is from Woodrow heartsog. I was going to read it as burner. I don't know if I can. I should get Nolan here. He does a good burner. Oh, yeah. The most uniquely dangerous surveillance mechanism ever intended. It's an irresistible tool for oppression that's perfectly suited for governments to display unprecedented authoritarian I'm sorry, authoritarian control and an all out privacy eviscerating machine that was dead on. I just realized it's hertzog, so it's spelled differently. It's H-A-R-T herzog is just H-E-R-Z-O-G. I'm glad that we didn't figure that out beforehand, though. You want to take the other one? Also, I have to say I detected a hint of Michael Cain in there, too. There might have been a little bit. It's hard to get Michael Caine out of my system. What's the other one? Oh, from Microsoft president Brad Smith. Yeah. So Brad Smith says that when combined with ubiquitous cameras and massive computing power and storage in the cloud, a government could use facial recognition technology to enable continuous surveillance of specific individuals like they're supposedly doing in China. As an aside, it could follow anyone anywhere, or for that matter, everyone everywhere at any time or even all the time. And this wasn't a sales pitch. He was speaking out against this to Congress, saying, like, guys, we have to do something about this because this is the path we're heading down. And that's why Seth Abramowitz changed his name to Brad Smith. It sounds like a total I just want to blend in. So you've got scanning against mugshots, scanning against drivers licenses, and then there's a new one that just came out. The New York Times just released this expose on January 18, just a few days ago, on a company called Clearview AI. And apparently even among Silicon Valley, there has been this longstanding kind of unspoken thing where let's steer clear of this facial recognition technology because it's such a tool of oppression, potentially. And clearview. AI said, hey, we're not from Silicon Valley. We're just going to do our own thing. So now there's from Sacramento, there's this tool that's available to law enforcement agencies that they're using. Remember that one guy who had a quote saying that it went from 30 days to three minutes? Yeah. They were almost certainly using clearview AI. Oh, really? And the reason Clearview AI has such an advantage is because they've gone to this place where everyone else said was off limits, which is scraping social media. So rather than the 41 million driver's license and mug shot pictures that is available in the FBI's database, clearview AI is this app that you can subscribe to for a year for like $2000 to $10,000. And they have 3 billion pictures, including links to the social accounts of the people whose pictures come up so that you can not only see who it is, you can find out where they're at right then. Right. And it's a hugely invasive thing, and there's no legislation on this whatsoever. And it's only just recently come out that this company even exists or that this app exists and that law enforcement is using this stuff because, again, there's basically no laws saying, you can do this, you can't do that. Right. And again, Woodrow Herzog has basically said there's no way we're going to realize the benefits of this without the incredibly disproportionate drawback. Right. And he just calls for an all out band of the technology. He's basically saying it's not worth it. All right, let's take another break. Oh, my gosh. We haven't taken our second break yet. No. Okay. And we'll be right back to talk about the rest of this stuff right after this. I think we should talk a little bit like we've talked about the false positives, and I think within Amazon, their contention is that what you're talking about with these studies out of MIT that said that there are too many false positives. They're saying, Wait a minute, you're talking about facial analysis, not facial recognition. And those are two different things. I did not understand this at all. I went and looked it up. I didn't fully get it either. It sounds like some tap dancing to me. I looked it up and there's not a distinction between those two, aside from this quote. Oh, really? Yeah, it's basically the same thing. And also, it doesn't even make sense as a defense. So basically what they're saying is that they were being called out by MIT's Media Lab. They did a 2018 study that's the one that found that there's like a twelve and 35% misidentification among darker skinned men and women. Especially women, I think. Yeah. And Amazon said, no, you guys are using facial analysis, not facial recognition. It's like, no, that's not the case at all. They're doing facial recognition. All right. I'm glad it wasn't just me, because, you see, I wrote I don't get it next to this. It was a bad jam, I guess. But I think their point was, well, you're trying to tell the gender of somebody, and if you're doing binary gender stuff, like you're trying to say this is male or female. Right. You can't really use facial recognition for that, especially among darker skinned people. Got it. And they said that you shouldn't use that, especially in cases of people's civil liberties or whatever. But it still remains the case that if you are a darker skinned person and you're being looked at by a police department that has their threshold for confidence level set low yeah. There's a chance that a false positive is going to be put out there. Right. And that can be trouble for you if you don't have the money to mount a defense. And even if you do have the money, you shouldn't have to mount a defense to spend money on that, to be acquitted of a crime just because the computer is not so good at distinguishing black people as it is among white people. Yeah. And when it comes to where this is going to end up legally, you might want to look at the Fourth Amendment. It gets really dicey on how you interpret the Constitution when you talk about illegal search and seizure. Is this a search or a seizure? Probably not, because it depends on what we're talking about. With the Supreme Court, you've probably been stopped at a DUI checkpoint, and that's stopping everybody. That's the same thing. It's like if you're in a car, we're going to stop you and check you out because the public the public has said that's, okay, it's reasonable, it's not super invasive. And if you're stopping drunk drivers, it's just putting someone out for a few minutes. Yeah. The Court said if it's minimally invasive and the public good or the potential for public good, which is in this case, getting drunk drivers off the road is high enough, then it's okay to basically search everybody without probable cause. Yeah. Same with TSA checkpoints. When it comes to official rulings, obviously, we don't have one in facial recognition yet. But if you look at Carpenter v. United States, the court ruled five four that police violated Fourth Amendment rights of a man when they asked for his cell phone location data without a warrant from T Mobile. Right. So hopefully this nuance will prevail. And it looks like it probably won't be some blanket ruling that just says, yes, you can use it for whatever you want. Right. If it even gets to that point. And if the Court hears it, you probably would. So the other thing that has become worrisome for people, though, is our society is becoming increasingly surveilled. Right. Like the ring doorbell. Sure. They market to law enforcement, basically saying, these people will pay to have video cameras put on their house, and you can go get these videos on neighborhood pages all the time. People like, My car got broken into. Who can help me out with their camera? Right. So it's being marketed to law enforcement. Your TV has a camera in it. Your smart speaker has a microphone in it. So the more that we are surveilled and the more ubiquitous facial recognition technology gets, the easier it will be to not just scan a picture of somebody stealing beer or a CVS against the mug shot database or driveway harrelson. But to say, this person right here that you're looking at, that the camera is following, that's Chuck Bryant right there. And everywhere you walk, there's a little icon next to your head, chuck Bryant. If you click it, it'll show you your Facebook page or a map to your house or whatever. They want to know your police record. It doesn't matter. And that this is what we're increasingly getting closer to. And some people say this is what they're already doing in China. Yeah. And London. They were one of the first on the CCTV train. Yes. But they use humans. Right. Which is fair. Right, for recognizing faces. Yeah. They have people, like, actually looking at individual monitors, looking for crime. This is the idea of this is just tracking people who are just doing nothing wrong. Yeah. But there are plenty of people on the other side we should point out that are like, you know what? If you're catching bad guys, that's great. If you're a good guy, you got nothing to hide, so you shouldn't sweat it. Yeah. I can never remember the name of the article. I'll try to find it, but there's a man I wish I could remember off the top of my head. But there's this amazing article from a few years back that basically says, that's a terrible argument, that even if you have nothing to hide, you still are a human being. But if somebody wanted to put together, like, a dossier on your embarrassing things that you've done or said or thought or whatever and put it all together and condensed it, you can make anybody look bad. No one should want to live in a situation where, like, that could conceivably happen. The police state. Yeah. Police state. Yeah. Good stuff. I guess we'll see how it pans out. I'm not saying as far as good stuff. Police state is good stuff. Yeah. We'll see what happens right in Woodrow Herzog and let us know what to do. If you want to know more about facial recognition technology, you can go on to the Internet and start reading stuff about it. Definitely read the New York Times expose about Clearview AI. Came out January 18. Yes. Okay. Since I said that, it's time for a listener map. All right. No, it's not. You know what it's time for? Oh, yeah, I know what it's time for. Are you ready? Yeah, you say it. It's time for administrative detail. All right. This is part two. This is where we thank people on the show that have sent us kindnesses via snail mail. Siggi. S-I-G-G-I sent me some hand knitted socks. Not you. For some reason. I don't know why. I got some socks, too. Oh, really? Yeah. I didn't know who they were from. They may be from Siggy. I think probably what it was is you left them with my desk. Okay. And I thank you for it. Chuck. All right. Do another one while I'm pulling up my list. My computer is acting up. Julie Schube made us T shirts. This is good stuff. Faux band name tour shirts. Super fun. Thanks a lot, Julie. Very cool. You are still working, so I'm going to keep going. Thalia daws ZAR pal from Australia sent my daughter a couple of books. She's a very lovely lady who has a very adorable and whipsmart daughter about the same age who listens to our show. And I was just like, Man, I wish she lived here. We could go on a play date. Yeah. They both seem like lovely humans. There's such things as planes. Yeah. Go to Australia for a play date. So at our Portland main show, Chuck, we got a lot of neat gifts. Jim Diphenbacher made us amazing cross hatch portraits, prints of them. Yeah. Those are great of us. Of a photo we took, I think, on our West Coast tour from 2015. Yeah. It brought back some memories on that. It's just really great stuff. And you can see Jim'swork at Jimdefenbachercom. Jimdieffenbacher.com. And they were framed and everything. Yeah. Very sweet stuff. Jim. We got some home tapped maple syrup from Andy Huntsberger from Elgin, IA. Okay. Is that Iowa? Yeah. Okay. I was about to say the wrong state. What are you going to say? I think I went to say Illinois. Do you ever see Gary Goldman's bid on abbreviating the States? No. Dude, just look it up. One of the great comedy bits I've ever seen. Okay. It's hysterical. Okay, let's see another. At the Portland show. We got a letter from Tog Braun from Down East Dayboat from Lloyd Bronze. Bronze. And Down East Dayboat's mission is to bring sustainable, delicious scallops from Maine to the world. And she said that scallops have varietals like oysters, and that Main has the best. So check out Downeastdayboat.com and Scallops coke brawn. Feel free to send us some scallops as long as they've been appropriately refrigerated the entire time. Yes. I got another children's book. Are you a good egg? And that was from Peter Deutschel, along with some stuff you should know. Coasters. Yeah. Thanks again, Peter. I think we thanked him last episode for the Coasters, too. Oh, really? Didn't know about the children's book. Sarah Law. Who is S-Y-S-K. Army member. She came to the Toronto show and she brought us a bunch of Canadian goodies. Everything from Japanese cheesecakes and tarts from Uncle Tatsu. Tatsu is so good. So good. And I think some other stuff, too, like Coffee Crisps, which are my favorite. Yeah. So thanks a lot, Sarah, as always. Why is everything from Japan awesome? It's really good. They don't necessarily invent much. They just take other people's inventions and perfect them. Yeah. And it seems like they take a lot of pride in doing things right. Yeah, I think you could say that, probably. Yes. Because we got from Matt an assortment of food things from Japan that came in today, including our beloved Cutie Mayonnaise. I love that stuff. It's been too long. Thanks a lot, man. God bless you. Let's see, Leah Harrison gave us some amazing goodies, too, including Coffee Crisp and Canadian Smarties, which are way better than American smarties because they involve chocolate. Super smarties. A student named Maria Styling wrote us a letter for an Honors English project because she had to write someone who inspired her. And she asked this. I told her we'd answer. How do we choose a topic, Maria? We choose a topic. It's pretty low phi. We just send each other one each week on whatever happens to grab our fancy. We're always looking around our world and thinking, wonder about that. That's as easy as it gets. And we'll just send each other an email, and 99 times out of 100 we'll say, Great, let's do it. Yeah. Boring. Let's see. Oh. Michael C. Lerner, who is an attorney at Law in Reno, sent us a letter about getting the word out about the National Consumer Law Center, for which Lerner does a lot of pro bono work for people who are poor and getting screwed over because of debt, as he put it. So he pointed to the National Consumer Law Center and the Practicing Law Institute's Consumer Financial Services answer book. So if you are in debt and you're getting pushed around, go check those things out, says Michael steve Lerner. Good stuff. Van, Austria. And we got to thank him again. Our buddy from Washington sent us a book by his friend Andy Robbins called Field Guide to the North American Jackal Oats. Pretty awesome. Yeah, it's very fun. Paul sBeth from Mars Community Brewing Company in Chicago gets a bunch of beer at the Chicago show. Thank you for that. I got one more. Okay. I'll go and finish up and then you can round us out. Man, I have a whole page left. All right. Robert Highland from WAMO. This just came in today. Okay. He works for WAMO. He sent us each their 70th anniversary super book. Oh, wow. Thank you. Zikina has talked a lot about WAMO products. Does it bounce? I have not dropped it on the floor yet. Let's find out. Give it a try. I'm going to do a couple more and then maybe we'll split this up because they're for both of us for another episode. It's up to you. He can blaze through them, too. Now there's too many. Okay, so let's see the Crown Royal people again for hooking us up. Very sweet. They've hooked us up many times and they gave us a nice congratulations because we got the Best Curiosity Award from the Iheart Podcast Awards last year. Yeah, that's how old this one is. MC. Sullivan gave us a copy of his book, The Meat Shower, which is amazingly illustrated. You can check it out on thepassanda Curiouscom Meat shower. Yeah, that sounds really good. It really does. Let's see. And over round everything out with Danielle Dixon, who is a real life marine biologist. Chuck at the University of Delaware. And she sent us a couple of copies of her kids books. These stories, children's books based on real science. You can check it out at seastory books.com. All right. You're going to save the rest. I'm going to save the rest. We'll slow them up. All right. Thanks everybody who sent us stuff. And thank you also just for saying hi to anyone who does. You can say hi to us by sending us an email. Wrap it up. Spank it on the bottom. Send it off to Stuff podcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, apple podcasts, 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 podcast. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
SYSK Selects: How Breast Implants Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-breast-implants-work | In this week's SYSK Select episode, the first attempt at breast augmentation surgery was on a dog. The second on a woman who went in for tattoo removal. From those weird origins hundreds of thousands of breast implant procedures are now carried out each y | In this week's SYSK Select episode, the first attempt at breast augmentation surgery was on a dog. The second on a woman who went in for tattoo removal. From those weird origins hundreds of thousands of breast implant procedures are now carried out each y | Sat, 22 Apr 2017 22:28:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=22, tm_min=28, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=112, tm_isdst=0) | 55034447 | audio/mpeg | "Hey there. It's your old pal Josh, this week's curator of SYSK Selects. And this week I've selected how breast implants work. It's a pretty great vintage episode. It has it all science, pop culture, history, surgery, all sorts of weird stuff. And this episode is the origin of when I realized that Chuck says the word tattoo really oddly. So enjoy it. Take care, tattoo. 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. So you got the three mutations together. Muchaccia was, well, mu chchos and muchaca. Is that right? Is Mucchae a girl? It makes sense to be mu chachaca, probably. That's generally how it works, right? Yeah. But I also just made up a word in Spanish. It could be a snack food. That is the saltiest. Anyway, this is stuff you should know. And we want to extend an extra hearty welcome to all the additional twelve year old boys who are listening to this one. We want to apologize in advance for disappointing you because you're going to be sorely disappointed. Yeah. And I would like to insert a quick COA. Okay. For myself, we're going to be talking about breast implants, and I'm going to try not to pepper the show with my own opinions because we have to. Each his own decree here. For sure. And I'm just going to go ahead and say up front, I'm not into it. I wish people would just learn to love themselves. But I get it. And if someone feels better to do something like this, then that's fine. No judgment here. Who are we to judge? Yeah, it's going to be tough in the parts about, like the string what was that one called? The string implant. It's dead and gone. Yeah, but still we got to cover it. You might hear some derision in my voice, but again, if a string implant is what those women wanted to feel better than, you have to go to an underground doctor to get it now. Well, you do now. Yeah. And of course it's not just like just augmentation, like mastectomies and men can get breast implants. So we're going to cover the whole gamut. Yes. You're giving a lot of weight here. People know the whole farm. People know people. They're not going to want to buy the cow because you just gave them all the milk. Hey, this milk and the cow are both free anyway. Yeah. So let's do it. That's my little COA. That was good, Chuck. Thanks. We are talking breast implants and we are going to explain everything there is to know about breast plants. Breast implants? Not breast plants. That's a subtropical species of carnivorous plant that looks like a breast. Oh, is that where it gets his name? Anyway, I have a little intro. Okay, so have you ever heard that in France the perfect breast fits into a champagne glass. I have not heard that. So Yummy told me this and I was like, what are you talking about? I thought that at first, too. And she's like, no, not a flute, you dummy, a coupe. Okay. Because was I thinking that? Exactly. Very odd banana. It's a weird shape. Yes, it would be a little weird if that were the case, but a champagne coupe? Okay. So she looked it up and was showing it to me, and while we were looking at that, we found another axiom that was possibly even more true in America. Somebody commented underneath this in America, the perfect breast clogs, the toilet doesn't fit into a champagne coupe. It clogs a toilet. That's an axiom. It is, according to this commenter. Who made it up? I did not know that. I think the commenter made it up as a joke. Okay. And it was a pretty funny joke, if you ask me. I thought I was going to get a bigger response from you, but no, that was good. I'll live with what I got. The point is, if in America that is the standard breasts so big that they clog toilets, that's a pretty high bar to set, especially naturally. Which is probably why some women turn to breast implants. Yeah. And speaking of America, this seems like a good place for that. They top the list in the total number of breast implant operations. But if you want to go per capita, they're number five. And the first four are Brazil, Greece, Italy and Colombia. Per capita. Okay. Which is to me what matters. Per capita. Sure. Okay. Obviously we have the most because we have more people right. Than in those other countries. I am surprised that we're number five. I would think we'd be higher than that. You know, it's number ten per capita. Of course. What Canada is that right? Yeah. They're like comfortably in the middle. Exactly. Although no, that's still pretty high towards the top. Although I guess it'd be about in the middle if you just did industrialized countries. Yeah, true. So anyway, there's my stat. That's a great stat. I've got another one for you, Chuck. Breast implants was the number one elective surgery in 2012 in the United States. In 2011 it was lipo. But breast implants, breast augmentation beat it out in 2012 by nose. I don't know how many, probably by a nose, because in 2011 it was 300,000 and change liposuctions. And in 2012, there were 330,681 breast augmentation surgeries in 2012. Right. According to the Wall Street Journal, if that was a rhinoplasty set, that would have been a great joke. By a nose. Yes. I bet that's on top five. I would guess so, sure. In fact, I bet that's number three. There are several ways to find out. Should we? No, man, this thing is all to a rocky start. I'm just guessing. Okay, so, Wagering, let's talk breast implants. OK. Before we talk implants, chuck, we should probably talk about well, you want to talk about the history of them? Yeah. That's a good place to start. Yeah. Apparently, a doctor named two doctors named Frank Gerald and Thomas Cronan came up with the idea, and Gerald specifically squeezed a plastic blood bag one day and remarked how much it felt like abreast. Right. And that was 1960 ish circuit 60. Yeah. And so he had that apparently, was the quote unquote AHA moment. Like, hey, we should do this. So they tried it out on a dog named Esmeralda, and not obviously they were just inserting it into a body. They weren't like, hey, let's give this dog boobs. Right. I've always wanted to see what boobs look like on a dog. So they wanted to just see if it worked. And apparently it took enough to where they were like, hey, I think we can try this on a person. Yeah. As Mariela chewed at her stitches, so they had to remove it after a couple of weeks. But other than that, it was definitely an improvement on what had been an innovation among Japanese prostitutes during World War II. Yeah, because American GIS, again, boobs that clogged the toilet. Apparently, the Japanese prostitute said, hey, these guys like big boobs. Let's give them big boobs. Let's steal some medical grade silicone from the docks of Yokohama. I thought it was sponges. That was something. They also silicone. They self injected silicone directly into their breasts, which apparently worked, but it also gave them things like gangrene, thanks to silicone rot at the site of injection. There was a lot of hematomas, very bad news stuff. But it showed this desire to increase breast size. Right. And these guys in the early 60s came in to deliver that's. Right. And they did it in a sort of a weird way. There was this woman named Timmy Jean Lindsay in 1962, a mother of six in Houston, Texas, and she had a tattoo of a Rosevine on her breasts that her boyfriend talked her into. Broke up with a boyfriend and was like, I kind of really don't want this anymore. Went in to get the tattoo removed, and she had to change to wino forever. Exactly. And why are you saying tattoo? I've always said that. It's tattoo. Tattoo. No. Okay. If you say it like that again to each his own. If you want breast implants, fine. If you want to say tati, fine. Right. But I couldn't just sit here and pretend like I didn't notice that you were saying tattoo. I've said that plenty of times, and you ignored me. Are you sure? Yeah. All right. So anyway, she went in to get the tattoo removed. No, go back to tattoo. I feel too guilty when you say tattoo to get it removed. When did she get removed? That's the two okay. And she said that they said, hey, we got this new thing called breast implants. Would you like to try it. And she said, well, my ears stick out too much. If you pin my ears back some, I'll let you use me as a guinea pig. Basically, she knows how to bargain. Yeah. And that's what happened that's the first breast implants were sort of a bargain like that. She went from a B cup to a sea cup. That is correct. And this is at a time when women wore pointy cone bras and stuff like that. There was a big emphasis on big boobs. Maryland was big. Yeah. They had falsies even, like, the padded bras. Yeah. So there was this desire to increase your bus size. Sure. And to do it permanently. It was there, and it just kind of took off like a rocket. Ever since then, ever since the first procedures. The problem is, there were all sorts of lawsuits associated with it, too, especially because they were using medical grade silicone that's derived from silicon, which is a mineral that apparently makes up about 14% of Earth's crust mixed with oxygen to create silicone, which was originally a trade name of this medical grade silicon gel created by GE. And the early implants would rupture, and there were a lot of lawsuits against some of the manufacturers, specifically Dow, who shell out, like, 3 billion in payouts in just, like, over the course of a decade. Yeah. Well, I guess we might as well go ahead and let the cat out of the bag. In 1992, they finally FDA said, actually, they put a voluntary moratorium. They were, like, basically asked, can you stop making them? And doctors, can you stop using them? Right. Except in certain cases. Yeah. They were doing inconclusive studies, basically. They never found, like, hard proof that it could cause illness. But it was enough, I guess, in conclusion, to say, maybe we shouldn't push on with this. Yeah. Because when the implant ruptures in its silicone, the body absorbs the silicone, and they're like it's just there. Well, what happens to the body after it absorbs the silicone will happen. Right. So since no one knew, they created that moratorium. In 2006, the FDA finally said, there's no evidence that this is bad. Right. So you can go back to silicone, and now silicone implants make up 72% of the impact. You can get them without any special cases now, even. Yeah. In 2006, they lifted the moratorium. Oh, got you. Because for a while, it was just like if you had a mastectomy or if you were willing to if you're willing to be part of a study going on five to ten years. And the reason why silicone was so popular and the reason actually they looked at the ban, ultimately, aside from the fact that they never found any real provable medical problems from it, is that it's apparently far superior to the alternative, which is saline filled bags. Yeah. They say, apparently the silicone feels better, looks better. It's more natural looking. Apparently it moves. Oh, my God, I can't believe I just did that. In the saline is just kind of like a water filled implant. Should we tell everybody Josh is talking with his hands? Yeah. So this is not a video podcast, so that's okay. Yeah. All right. So back I don't think I knew that back in a big way. 72%, man. Wow. That's a significant amount of 330,681. So let's talk about before we get into, like, how breast implants work and how they're inserted and all that kind of stuff, let's talk about the breast itself. Okay. The anatomy of the breast is a well, apparently you can break a breast down into two different and by the way, only women have breasts. Men don't have breasts. Right. But you can break a breast down into two separate parts. There's the structural component and then there's the epithelial component that's right. That produces the milk structural component is ligaments, fatty tissue. There is muscle, but not actually as a part of the breast. It's behind the breast. Exactly. Yeah. And there's a ligament that kind of works to keep the breast suspended, supported, called the Cooper's ligament. Yeah. I looked into that guy, by the way. What is he like? He was just very big on describing anatomy in the mid eighteen hundred s. And he's got a lot of stuff named after him. Oh, really? A lot of diseases, a lot of body parts. Cooper's ankle. Cooper's ligament is one of them. It's just an ankle, but he pointed it out first. Exactly. But yeah, that is they kind of call these muscles and the ligaments sort of like a natural brazier to help keep the breast up. Right. And then there's the milk producing and delivery system. Milk production and delivery system. It's the epithelial component. You've got apparently 15 to 25 lobes are what they're called. And they're arranged kind of like a flower around the center of the breast. Yeah. So if someone says your breasts are like a flower, they're complimenting your lobes. Exactly. And that's anatomically correct. Right. You can still smack them in the face, though, if you want to. Yeah. The lobes can further be broken down into lobules, which are kind of like clusters of grapes. And there's a lot of these per lobe. Yeah. Right. And then at the end of the lobules, there's dozens. Each lobule has dozens of bulbs. And that's where milk is produced. That's right. They're connected to ducts called the lactofersinus. And that carries the milk to the nipple. Of course, the nipple surrounded by the Arola, which is that dark tissue around the nipple at the front of the breast. And there you have it, breast 101. That's the breast. And then behind it, you've got the pectoral muscles, the major and the minor pectoralis. And then the ribcage behind that. So that's the anatomy of abreast. That's right. Got it. Yeah. Since we're talking size, obviously, with augmentation. It is not a scientific thing, but you generally go by bra size. How they're manufactured is by diameter and inches around the rib cage under the breast and then the old letter indicating the cup size. So in other words, like a A or double A all the way up to it says in the article, double D and beyond, like some fantastical realm. All right, so now I understand the breast and bra size. Yeah. And by the way, it's hereditary, probably. If you look at your mom and your grandma, it's probably what you're heading towards later in life. Right. There are things that you can do to impact your breast size positively or negatively, depending on your opinion. Sure. Weight. Yeah. Some things that you can control, like menstruation, menopause, pregnancy, all affect breast size. Yeah. And guys hear a lot about and actually girls to hear a lot about this if you have a girlfriend or wife yeah. But just becomes a common topic of conversation when you live with somebody for long enough. Oppressed. Yeah. I mean, they're a thing. They're there. They are there. That's a T shirt. It's a movie. So check. Now that we have the anatomy of the breast yeah. Let's talk about breast implants themselves. Yeah. The actual thing that is implanted. Right. Some people might not know this. I thought everyone knew, has seen them before, but it's not has felt them, has slept with them on their pillow. It's not just like an injection or something. It's not a pill you take. It's an actual physical wait, who thought it was a pill? There's one dude out there that thinks it's a pill. Oh, well, Todd, it's not a pill. It is an actual sack. It is an elastomerchelle, which is an elastic polymer shell. Right. And generally these days they are empty at first and they're not full, although it depends. Well, it depends on what you're after. Well, you have the empty kind that they usually roll up when inserting, which we'll get into. Or you have the prefilled, which are not prefilled to their final destination. Yeah. They're like a certain size. They can get to a certain size. I think those have fallen out of favor somewhat, but I'm sure is that right? Well, yeah, mostly they're not prefilled these days. Well, there's a lot of benefits to not having prefilled again, which we'll get into in a little bit, but okay. The size then would not have to do with what they're already filled with, but what they're finally going to be filled with. And that's usually measured in cubic centiliters, right? Yeah. CCS. CCS. And one cup size for every 175 to 200 CCS. And I guess this is where we should talk about the rice test. Okay. If you want to know what your breasts are going to look like, or if you were a man who always wanted to know what it would look like if you have breasts. You can do something called the rice test. That's right. Apparently this is the best way to tell. You cut a twelve inch length of pantyhose, although they say you can use like baggies or whatever, but pantyhose is probably the most realistic. Sure. Tie not in one end, and then use a chart, which you can find online to basically fill with rice to estimate what you will look and feel like. For instance, about a half a cup is 125 CCS of volume, about zero six is 150 CCS and on up. And you can find the chart online just under three cups. 700 CCS. That's a lot. That's three cups of rice. And remember, it doubles in your stomach so you'll feel full. So they recommend to like, put it in a sports bra, wear that, wear it around, exercise in it, run errands, do whatever you normally might do to get the look and the feel of like, hey, this is what I'm going to look and feel like. And should I continue? Should I not? Right. Are they too big? Are they too small? Ask the grocery store clerk who's checking you out. They're fine, ma'am. All right, everybody. Well, they also say you can use water, instant mashed potatoes and oatmeal instead of rice. I could see instant mashed potatoes being really good because aren't they like flaky? It's flaky potatoes. Yeah. I could see that rice is I mean, that's hard. Yeah, that's true. You call it the instant mashed potato test. I think that's why they didn't so anyway, that's apparently how you and obviously you want to work with your doctor to kind of like singles. Remember that movie when Bridget Fonda goes in for breast implants and Bill Pullman essentially talks her out of it? I forgot that part. Yeah, but you're going to do that. You're going to work with your doctor on appropriate sizing. It's not going to be like Weird Science where you just click on the mouse until they're tremendous and large with some 80s graph yeah, behind it. But you just want an appropriate size for your frame, basically, because not only just for looks, but can you support it with your body frame? Well, yeah, that weight not just like the extra pressure that's going to be put on your back and shoulders and all that, but I mean, your skin itself may have trouble supporting the breast implants, which is definitely something to consider as well. Yeah. And this article says generally they come in three sizes, but that's just not true. There's like 450 sizes. Well, I like this article is written, I think, in 2003 or four. It's definitely breast implant. Breast augmentation surgery has increased by leaps and bounds since then. I've seen up to 450 different varieties, and I think that's combinations of shape, size, that kind of thing. Yeah. But yeah, there's a lot of different sizes. Mainly the sizes again, it has to do it's measured in CCS, the shape, there's still typically just two shapes that I ran across. There's round, and then there's a teardrop, which is also called contoured. Yeah. And basically one the round, I guess it depends on you're talking to they can be more popular and that they're fuller and there's more cleavage and there's more lift, but they don't look as real. The tear drop shape mimic the anatomy of a natural woman's breast more. So some women might favor those if you want to look more natural. Right. But round is the most commonly used, I believe. Well, I don't know if it still is. I take issue with that. Okay. I think that's a 2003 statement. Got you again, though. It has to do with what shape you choose, not just what you want, how you want it to look. But the surgeon needs to have some input here, too. Yeah. And if you get a good surgeon, they're going to guide you in the right direction. That's their part of the job. It's not just to perform the surgery. It's the consultation and advice and all that good stuff. Right. And since they're plastic surgeons, to look good doing it. Yeah. And if they're not doing that, that means it's a bad plastic surgeon. Did you see Rob Lowe in Liberace? Yeah, man. Yeah. There are some real decisions made for his character in his looking. Well, that's what that guy look like. Is that right? Yes. Look him up. He's creepy looking. I will. Is he still alive? Because it's so sorry for what Chuck just said. I don't know. But yeah, that was plastic surgery gone bad, for sure. Yeah. Texture is another decision that you're going to have to make, in addition to shape and size, basically, there's smooth and there's textured, and each has their pros and their cons textured implants, we should say, when you have breast surgery, something that's going to happen is scar tissue is going to develop. Yeah. No matter what. Any time you introduce foreign object into your body, your body basically defends the rest of your body against it by forming scar tissue around it and basically compartmentalizing it. And in the case of breast augmentation surgery, this is called a capsular contracture. Yeah. And it's going to happen. Don't be freaked out if it happens, because it's going to happen. It's just the degree to which it happens could become problematic. Right. In those cases, there's post implant surgeries that can take place to remove some of the excess scar tissue if too much happens or your breasts become too hard as a result. But you're right, it is going to happen. And some implants have been created to, I guess, make the most out of this. Textured implants are designed so that the scar tissue basically grips the implant and holds it in place. Yeah. And I also got the idea, too, that less scar tissue will form because it sticks to the implant I guess the body just thinks, okay, this is working. My job is done. Exactly. There are some drawbacks to textured implants. Apparently, they're not quite as realistic in their movement. Look, feel, that kind of thing. Yeah. And they're more likely to rupture, too. Yes. Which is not good smooth implants. They actually will move around inside the capsuler, contractor the scar tissue stack that develops, which is good for look, feel it's much more natural. The problem is that since they can move around if you have something like if you choose a contour or teardrop shaped breast implant, if that thing flips upside down, your breast looks to form now and you have a problem. Yeah. Or it can cause something called rippling, which we'll get into the problems that can arise later on. And there's this lady in Akron, actually, Ohio. It's probably a good time to mention this. She is trying to develop a breast implant that actually well, it can accomplish a lot of things. She calls it the breast implant of the future. It can emit, basically the drugs that they give people orally. She is trying to build into the implant itself to emit these drugs naturally. Wow. And she thinks one day breast implants can actually detect cancer cells. If her research is if she gets to that point, if I have the funding, she's looking for too many, I got the breast implant in the future, I just need the funding. But yeah, she's working hard to try and reduce things like the inflammatory response and scar tissue by building it into the breast implant itself. Which is pretty cool, I think. Yeah. And then, Chuck, we kind of already talked about it, but another choice is whether you're going to have prefilled or unfilled or also known as expandable. That's right. Implants. Yeah. The spectrum expandable is sort of like a test drive, almost, where you have the implant put in. There is a three part valve system in your armpit where you actually can fill and release and extract some of the saline or, I guess silicone. I don't know if they can do that for silicone. Can gel? I think you can, yes. Well, basically, it's like a test drive. They put it in and they can make them larger or smaller through your armpit until you're satisfied. It's kind of like doing the Rice test, but a couple of steps further, more than a couple, because you're out there walking around saying, what do you think? Yeah. And you've got a port in your armpit. Right. But then after you say, this is it, this is the right size, they remove the port. So obviously there's a bunch of choices and you the patient, the person who is getting the breast implant have a lot of things to decide. But then once you've decided all that, it's up to the surgeon to make another series of decisions and we'll get into the procedure right after this. Message break. All right, so back to it, Chuck. Let's talk surgery. Yes. All right. The most important thing they say with the breast implant is not all the other decisions you've made up until this point. Location, location, location. It really is. It's the skill of your surgeon with the placement of the implant. Yeah. Because that's where things will generally go wrong. And there are three choices sub glandular, subjector and submuscular. And again, like with everything else, there are advantages and disadvantages to all three. Yes. Subglanjal is behind the mammary gland in front of the muscle. It's the least complicated. You're going to get out of there and recover quicker. If you're athletic, it probably has some advantages, but you have an increased chance for that capsule or contractor we are talking about, you might be able to see it sometimes, which is not good. Through the skin. Yeah. And it's more vulnerable because it's just kind of right there behind the skin. Plus, also, there's very little besides the adipose, the fatty tissue holding it in place so it can produce that rippling thing, which is a sagging that produces basically what's it called, like, on your skin when you gain weight and then lose it. I don't know. Stretch marks. Oh, yeah. It looks kind of like that, but I think they're deeper. Okay. Sub pectoral is next. Sub pectoral. So you remember at the back between the adipose and the chest wall, you've got your two pictorial muscles. Yeah. The one in front, the bigger the two. The pictorialis major goes in front of the implant and the pectorialis minor goes behind it. Yeah. So it's sort of sandwiched in the middle there. Yeah. You have to cut the muscle, put the implant in between them, and then lay it back down. Yeah. And it's going to reduce the risk of that capsular contracture and the rippling, which is good. But of course, your recovery time is going to be a little bit longer. It's going to be a little more painful. Anytime they're manipulating muscle, it's going to be pretty painful. There's going to be more swelling and stuff like that. Yes. The implant can also kind of droop. There's still a risk that it's going to pull down because it's held in place more than it is with the subglanular. Yeah, but less than the submuscular. If you want your implant to not SAG, you want to go with the submuscular, the third type yeah. That is fully behind the chest muscle wall, and it has some great advantages. Like, it doesn't get in the way of mammograms, which is a big deal. Yeah. It's a big consideration, for sure. Yeah. Silicone and saline implants placed in front of or between the muscles can mess with mammograms. Yeah. And you need to tell by the way, I'm sure you probably know this if you have breast implants, but you should always tell your doctor if they don't know when you go. To get a mammogram because they have different procedures and techniques that they can work around and stuff. Yes. So those are the three types of three implant locations. Yeah. And the recovery for the last one is even longer, but it has the same complications as the subpectral. Anytime you have to in size, muscle, and manually adjust it, you're going to have a recovery time involved. That's true. Man, that's got to hurt. Should we talk about we've got to talk about the polypropylene real quick, just because even though it's not around anymore, the string implant. Yeah. It was developed by a guy, a doctor named Doctor Gerald W. Johnson. And the quote from this article says it was designed to yield extreme, almost cartoonish breast sizes. And basically the polypropylene absorb fluid, like, constantly over time, and the breasts never stopped growing. And it has been banned since 2001 by the FDA. And although they say it was very popular among adult entertainers for a while yes. And this is where I get a little judgy. It was really weird looking. You saw pictures? Yeah. And I don't get it at all. Is it cartoonish? Yeah, very much so. Yeah. Okay. That's my only judgment, is I don't get that one. Researching this article, I wanted to be like, I'm researching breast implants. I'm not a great people walk by your desk. Yeah. So, Chuck, let's talk procedure. Okay. We're in the operating room. All the decisions have been made. Preop has been done prep, and the surgeon is going to start by making an incision. And there's really basically four types of incisions that are favored among breast augmentation procedures. You've got the Perry aerialar, which is apparently one of the most common ones, but to me, it seems spectacularly, like there's a lot of room for complications. You think? Yeah. What they're doing I looked this up. The article doesn't do this justice. The incision is made at where the areola, which is where it's the brown tissue that surrounds the nipple. Yeah, we talked about that. Okay. So it's where the areola meets the regular colored pigmented skin of the breast, but the whole areola is cut and pulled out. And then using a sterile sleeve wrapped around it, the implant is put in through that hole in the front of the breast and then unrolled, and the sleeve is removed. But you're going around the milk ducts and all of the epithelial system of the breast. It just seems like you're exposing some really important stuff to a lot of potential damage, either mechanical or through infection or whatever. I just don't see much reason aside from the fact that it's very difficult to see the scar because you're doing it where the pigmentation changes, so it's hard to see that difference in the scar. Yeah. Well, it also allows for more precise placement of the implant. I see that. And I think there's surgeons doing this. It's not you. I know it freaks you out, but I think it's the most common for a reason. Okay, that's one. Yeah. But that allows for sub glandular, sub pectoral and submuscular placement. So that's the other advantage, is you have all your options open. Yeah. There's also the information fold incision. This one makes sense. Yeah. That also allows for all three placement types. And that is just under the breast. So the scarring is not as visible, obviously. Yeah. Usually it's where the creases the big disadvantage to this one is if you are going up so much in cup size, if you're going up a lot, the surgeon is going to have to create a new crease for your breast. Yeah. And when making that incision, since you want the incision underneath the breast, you got it by the breast, hidden by the breast. He has to guess where that breast is going to hang now and make the initial incision accordingly. Yeah. That's when it's a lot of guesswork there. Well, not guesswork because that makes it sound like well educated. That looks good. Well, no, it has to be like, where is this going into forecasting? Yeah. Educated guess. Yeah, very educated guess. Then there's transaxillary incision, which is through the armpit. Yeah. There's no breath scarring at all. Obviously it's more of a challenge because placement is pretty difficult. They use an endoscope and that is not the most that's not the strangest place. No strangest place is through the belly button, the tuba incision. You can actually get a breast implant through your belly button. Yeah. And apparently you can get a lot of surgeries through your belly button. I think maybe that's why it's there. Maybe it's the new Port tuba stands for Transmilical breast augmentation. And that's a tuba incision, the belly button incision. And basically they cut into the navel at the top of the ridge and then go they burrow all the way up to each breast. So it makes a V? Yeah. Through your subcutaneous fat. Hey. Like Charles Bronson and the Great Escape. Yes. And then they use an endoscope to basically tunnel their way through and see that they're going the right way and they push the implant up through there and inflate it. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds like guesswork. Yes. But apparently that's the one that has the least complications. Yeah. There are a lot of limitations, though. It requires an inflatable implant, obviously. You can't go through the belly button with one that's already inflated. It can only be used for sub pectoral and submuscular. And if there are complications, and it seems like there are, I don't know if I should say often, but it's not rare to have complications and have to go back and have what they call a revision surgery. You cannot reuse that incision now they're going to have to make transactionary periolar or in from amory fold. Yeah. If they need to go back in again. And apparently it's pretty rare, like not a lot of plastic surgeons even tried this one. I think it takes a lot of skill. And even though the complications, the postop complications are minimal compared to the others because your subcutaneous fat and your abdomen apparently heals very easily. Yeah. Just getting there is kind of a problem. So let's say your doctor is ready. You got the first incision. What's up next? Well, you've got your decision. And so they have to cut a path through that tissue, depending on which one you use, that are either going to work with the muscle or they're not. And they need to separate and create a little pocket for it to sit in. They don't just stuff it in there. They need to create a space, and they have to figure out where that pocket is best going to be. Depending on the size, shape, everything of the breast implant. Yeah. Again, an educated guess. Yes. And you've seen some surgery nightmares with breast augmentation and that's like Dr. Quack. Yeah, dr. Nick looks good to help out there. Sometimes a mastopexi, which is a breast lift, is performed at the same time, or you can just have that on its own if you just want a breast lift. Right. But sometimes it's used with augmentation in order to get everything in the right position, and you want the breasts to be pointing in the right way, and you want the nipples in the aerials to be in the proper place and not looking off to the left and the right, up or down. Some surgeries require that you reposition the nipple depending on how big the implant is going to be. Yeah. And, man, I saw with some mastectomy surgery, sometimes they can completely remove the aeriala and nipple and replace it onto an augmentation. Yeah. I guess with a periola incision and you're taking that whole thing off, I guess you could move it to another place. What they can do sizers can aid in positioning and that's sort of like it's attached to a tube. It's an implant attached to a tube. And that's almost like a live rice test. Like you don't go home with that. They just put it in there mid operation yeah. And see what it looks like. It's not the final implant. It's a temporary one. Yeah. And then they pull that out once they say, all right, that's a good placement for this, so just let me do it for real. Yeah. And then so if you have prefilled implants, you have to make a larger incision, of course. And then you fill those up to their full volume. And I think prefilled textured is even the largest that's the biggest decision you're asking, because you also have to make room for this ridged implant that's already prefilled. And either way, you're going to have to either top off or totally fill up the implant once it's in there. Top it off. That's pretty much what it is. So, Chuck, we're talking augmentation. It's elective surgery, plastic surgery. And a lot of people think, like, plastic surgery is called plastic surgery because of its artificiality. Right. But actually it's derived from the original Greek plastic hose, which means artificiality. It means to mold or shape something's. Plastic. It's pliable. Yeah. And that's what plastic surgeons do. They mold or shape things, including breasts. It's like you said, it's not just making the cut and jamming the thing in there. They have to basically reconfigure the anatomy of the breast to accept this new impulse. And it does take a certain amount of skill. But that just struck me as interesting. Yeah. Why do we call it plastic surgery? And it's not all just augmentation. It doesn't always mean you're making your breasts larger. There's also a reduction, mama plastic, which is breast reduction. If you feel like you're too big and you have back problems or for any other reason, you can get a breast reduction. We already talked about the mastopexy, which is the breast lift, and that's when they actually remove skin and rejoin it to lift it up. It's pretty simple, actually. I wouldn't want to perform it, I'm saying, but in what's the word? Concept, it's pretty simple. Right. And then breast reconstruction. A lot of times, if your breasts have been removed for mastectomy or damaged and because of some accident or something, they can actually reconstruct your breasts in a realistic fashion. Right. And we said women aren't the only humans that have breasts. But there are electric procedures for men who want to bulk up their pecs, called pectoral implants. Did you watch Entourage? No. Johnny Drama, I don't think he got them. But he wanted calf implants at one point. I've heard of those. Yeah. Calf implants. PEC implants. Come on, guys. See, I can't judge. Guys, what are you doing, dudes? So we'll see what we're doing. It's done with an armpit incision. Yeah. It's a lot like the transaxillary breast implant for women. And they go in there and lodge it behind the PEC muscles to just kind of bulk them up, to stick them out further. Yeah. And there you go. All of a sudden you are Charles Atlas. Yes. Or you can have reduction as a man, too, if you're Bob from Fight Club. Yeah, that's right. Cosmastia it's usually hereditary. It can be as a result of your diet. But basically it's when guys end up feeling like they have boobs. Feel like or do. Yes. And it's an embarrassing thing, I'm sure. So you can get that removed. It's basically liposuction just under the nipple. Right. And if it's the result of a glandular disorder, they'll probably just take the glands out while they're there. And usually it takes more than one surgery, but it can be corrected. I wonder if insurance covers that. I don't know. Does insurance cover any kind of plastic surgery? I don't know. I bet you wouldn't cover that because it's still cosmetic, you know? I don't know. You probably have to show that it's your medical problem. Right. But I think if you show that you're suffering from a psychologically, it might fall under it. I don't know. We'll find out. Because I'll bet you an insurance claims adjuster writes in and tells us. That's my prediction. And you know what? I was judging on the PEC implants. Sure. There may be cases I don't know about where guys have sort of like malformed chest or something and they just want to look normal. Yeah, I was talking about the guys who are like, I want bigger pecks judgment. Hit the gym and do some bench press. You want to increase your pecs? Sure. Yeah. Pushups. Let's talk. Yummy. Sit on your back and do push ups one handed, Hershel Walker style. Yeah. Supposedly he never lifted weights. Did you ever know that? No. Yes. He never lifted weights in his life. He had people sit on and do push, like 2000 push ups a day and stuff like that. It was all either isometrics or, like, chinups pushups pull ups. Rolling a tractor tire over. Exactly. Old school. Let's talk risks, man, because first of all, it's surgery, so there's always an attendant risk with any kind of surgery where general anesthesia is used. Right. It sounds like a disclaimer. Well, it's true. Surgery is risky. Anesthesia is risky. There's also infection. Anytime you're cut open, there's a risk of infection. But then breast augmentation surgery comes with its own attendance of risks that are they vary from definitely going to happen, like the capsule contractor, the scar tissue, to extraordinarily rare, like semastia. Yes. Did you see this? I did. I had no idea that it could happen. Semastia is basically where your breasts joined together as a result of an augmentation surgery. And you have one megabreast. Yeah, I have seen some. They make brazieres now, like post surgical brazieres that separate them. Yeah, they try and prevent that, but yeah, I'd never heard of that either. So after surgery, do they just kind of gravitate toward one another? Actually, I'm not sure. It just says it's a mistake. Yeah. So it's not like some just bad fortune. It's actual surgical mistake. You get to own a portion of the doctor's office, that procedure afterwards. But yeah, the implants lift off the sternum and grow together. So I guess the scar tissue grows together in that case. That's my guess. It's kind of like a unibrow made of breasts, but apparently it's fairly hard to correct, is the big problem. Yeah. That's pretty sad. When you go in to try and make yourself look better and you feel bad about yourself already, maybe, and then you end up, like, with something like this. But these are risks you need to know about. And then it's the opposite of the total recall, which is three breasts. Oh, yeah, remember that? I forgot about that, man. That was a great movie. I wonder if they put that in the remake because that was one of the sort of goofy signature moments of that goofy movie. Yeah. You know, it was the Philip K. Dick novel. Yeah. I think I wrote, like, all Sci-Fi, basically. Yeah. Pretty much any sci-fi movie ever was written by Philip K. Dick. Did you know that he believes he was possessed by an angel later on in his life? Really? Yeah, he believed that he was possessed by a benevolent spirit that basically took him from being, like, a complete schlub, drug addict loser who still wrote great novels to just becoming, like, a person with a fairly normal, orderly life. He cleaned himself up. He attributed all of it to this possession that he said, this happened, and that was the rest of his life. Yeah. They should make a movie about that guy. I'm kind of surprised they haven't. I bet someone does eventually. And then I'll sue him because it was my idea. Yeah, you can't just say that every time. Sure, I can. It's got to be like, your idea a good idea. Non obvious memory. Isn't that sharknado is not obvious. I know. Okay. Everyone agrees with Sharknado. Yeah, but that's like saying they should make a modern movie on Charles Darwin. Right. I made that up. Right. You can't do that. I'm not going to support your lawsuit against whoever makes the Philip K. Dick movie because now you're having a depressing effect on innovation. Yeah, you're right. I apologize, everyone. All right, so bottoming out. Let's get back to the risks. Bottoming out is when the implant set too low, the nipple rides too high, and that is a result of another mistake. Basically, they cut out too large of a pocket. Right. So it sits down too low. It is correctable, though, again, with a revision surgery. Yeah. There's a hematoma, which is basically blood collecting and pooling around it. It can be painful. Sure. It requires drainage. Sometimes it can be lumpy. Yeah. We talked about mammography being interfered with by breast implants, which is a problem. But I guess there is technology then that you came across that to get around this. Yeah, as long as they know. But it can hide cancer, growths and X rays, and it's definitely something to consider, especially if that's something that runs in your family. Necrosis, which anytime you hear that word necrosis in anywhere, you're headed for bad times. That is tissue death. That is pretty rare, but is really serious, and it usually results in removal of the implant. And, like, sorry, you can't have breast implants. Large scars, permanent scars. It's bad news. Again, the breast implant can rupture. Apparently most implant manufacturers offer warranties for the implants themselves. You got to fill out your little card. Sure. And you also mentioned, like, what magazines you like. Exactly. But there are a lot of things you can do to void said warranty. Probably like leaning on fences is against the warranty, just things like that. Once you get your warranty from what this article as this article paints it, basically you have breast implants now and you have to be cognizant of that or else they are at risk of rupturing. Yeah. They're not indestructible. Did we talk about seroma? That is just a collection of fluid, pretty minor and they can usually just drain that with a needle. Yeah. And then we covered both semastia and rippling and those are the risks. Yes. And you got to consider all that stuff because it happens and it's probably your worst nightmare if some of that bad stuff happens. Yeah. So I think you kind of hit upon it pretty well earlier. He said if you're going to do this, you need to know all the risks. You should be fully informed if you're going to make a decision like this, but if you make that decision, go for it. Yeah. Your choice. In singles, bill Pullman completely talks her out of it and basically tells her how beautiful she is and how she doesn't need that kind of thing. And it's like the sweet camera and crow moment. He wasn't into Each his own. He was turning down money and a potential client trying to get a date, which he did not get. I imagine Bill Pullman is pretty well off. Yeah, he probably was. What do you think secret Life of Walter Midi, is it going to be good or no, the trailer looks awesome. It does look awesome. It looks really cool. But, I mean, I've been fooled by trailers before. Chuck I know. I've been waiting for this movie for a long time. They were going to make it with Jim Carrey like, 15 years ago. I could see that he would work one of my favorite stories, so I'm a little bit apprehensive, but it looks good. Who wrote it? It's right there, man. Jeez, I can't even think of it. It wasn't O'Henry, was it? No. How did you bring this up? What led you to that? You were talking about singles. Oh, and I thought that Ben Still had directed singles. Yeah, those reality bites. Yes. And it's taking me like, a lot to remind myself you're not talking about swingers. All right, so all those movies, 1990s, what a waste. You got anything else? I don't have anything else. Oh, I have one more thing. Apparently breast implants were linked to suicide and increased risk of suicide after a certain amount of years of having them. Oh, really? But it just popped up in 2007 and it was found in one study and everybody it made the new cycle and then just went away. Yeah. And I didn't get a real accurate stat, but the woman in Akron that's doing the breast implant in the future estimated that about 50,000 out of 400,000 that are performed per year do require like, half complications and require revision surgery. So that's an 8th. That's probably significant, surgically speaking. I want to say also about the suicide think just based on my knowledge of news and journalism and stuff like that, if it just popped up once and you can't find anything else, and all the reports on it or stories on anything are all within a week of one another five years ago, six years ago, and there's no follow up whatsoever. It wasn't a thing. OK, well, let's breast implants. If you want to learn more. There's a really extensive indepth article on the site, including flash animations of the different types of incisions. Yeah, you can type breast implant into the search bar@housetofworks.com and it will bring that up. Since I said search bar, it's time for message break. And Chuck, take us out with some listener mail. All right. James Thurber, by the way. Secret Life. Nice. All right, this is from Todd and O-K-C. And this is about vulture vomit. Hey, guys. And Jerry. I just finished listening to the podcast and vultures. It reminded me of a story. A couple of my buddies were going to college at NMSU go Aggies, that's New Mexico state. They were driving through the desert north of Las Cruces. I've been there myself, actually, when they came across a small wake of vultures eating some roadkill. Two of the vultures flew away as a truck approach, but the third was just a little too slow. The poor bird cannonballed into the windshield, which instantly shattered into tiny glass cubes. Steve. The vulture's head punched through the windshield while the rest of them stayed outside. The vulture instantly puked all over the inside of the truck while my buddy screamed in the truck fishtailed to a halt in the middle of the highway. Wow, that guy painted one heck of a picture just now. When they jumped out of the truck, the vultures wings were covering most of the windshield as it struggled to get free. They ended up having to pry its head out of the windshield, the handle of a shovel, and believe it or not, it managed to fly away. Aside from a leg that was dangling and apparently injured, it appeared to be okay. I don't know about that. Thanks for the ride, lady. Now, I wasn't there, so I can't promise that the story happened exactly as it was told to me, but I can confirm that the interior of the truck smelled like buzzard bark two months later. Keep up the great work. You're one of my favorite shows. Always happy when the episodes pop up on my phone, which is every Tuesday and Thursday. Yeah, he's not good at recognizing patterns. He should not be surprised. Oh, there's another one. Seems like this happens every two days. I'll let my guard down and it's Thursday. Hey. So that's Todd from OC. Thanks, Todd. You were not the Todd that I was talking to earlier about the pill that was a fictional todd? But how crazy would that be if that todd did think that breast augmentation surgery was carried out by pills? Right back and let us know where you todd from. OKC? I agree. We always love to hear follow ups about our episodes. You can tweet them to us on Twitter. Our Twitter handle is at syscast on Facebook. We're at Facebook.com. Stuffychou can always send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. Or, as we say in the beginning of episodes now join us at our home on the web stuffyshodom.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com." | ||
c605a55e-5460-11e8-b38c-f7c83ce059a5 | Selects: The Ins and Outs of Beekeeping | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-the-ins-and-outs-of-beekeeping | Who wants fresh honey? We do! Learn all about the ancient art of beekeeping today in this classic episode. | Who wants fresh honey? We do! Learn all about the ancient art of beekeeping today in this classic episode. | Sat, 12 Feb 2022 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=43, tm_isdst=0) | 61948329 | 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. Picture this, friends. You could be packing a carryon for a trip to Hawaii when you realize you're going to need a bigger bag. But it's cool because you booked your flight with your city Advantage Platinum select card. So you can check a bag for free on domestic travel and still have room for those souvenirs. And surprise, those souvenirs also earned you advantage Miles. Actually, you earned advantage miles and loyalty points with each swipe. So let's start dreaming about your next next adventure. This could be you, and you could be anywhere with the city Advantage Platinum select card. Learn more at citi comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. Hey, everybody, it's me, Josh. And for this week's selects, I've chosen our episode on Beekeeping from October 2019 after relistening to this one. I daresay that it could be my favorite episode, and not just because I've been hoping to use daresay in a sentence lately. Sure, it doesn't have the sexy thrills of the DB. Cooper live episode or the loveability of the elephant episode, but it's got a mellow homeliness that makes me feel like I'm wearing a comfy sweater, sipping tea at the kitchen table on a beautiful morn. I hope it does the same for you. Enjoy. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there. And this is stuff you should know. The Mellow Gold edition. We're talking about Beck. Yeah, sure. But I think Beck was really talking about Am soft rock from the 70s, which I got to say, is, like, right up my alley these days. I know. Love that. I mean, I've always loved it, but I'm really on a streak right now. Yeah, you were championing the yacht rock thing. Yeah. I discovered Kenny Loggins. Like I knew Kenny Loggins only from the Top Gun era. Oh, wow. And then that one Caddy shack song, which I was not crazy about, but then even further back before the Caddyshack thing, it was just beautiful stuff. Yeah. Logan's a Messina. Yeah, I don't know if I've heard any Messina stuff, so I think I'm catching them right after the Messina part. Right before the caddy Shack part. Okay. That's pretty narrow. Kenny Loggins window. That's nice right there. But anyway, I'm talking about mellow Gold, because I think you and I can both agree, Chuck, that even just reading about beekeeping, let alone actually engaging in the act of beekeeping, is about the most mellow, just relaxing thing that you can possibly do on this planet. I think it's just above bird watching and birding because birds don't sting you. Okay, so it's less mellow than bird watching. No, no. Yes, less mellow. I think bird watching is the most mellow thing on the planet. Okay. And I think because there's a threat of stinging, then bees have to be just slightly more stressful. Yeah. We should probably just go ahead and cut to that particular chase. If you are a beekeeper, you're going to get stinged. Like, the bees don't necessarily know you exist, and they certainly don't learn to love you or anything like that. There's just certain tricks and techniques you can do to vastly cut down on the chance you're going to be stung, but you're going to be stung, like, from what I've seen several dozen times a year, from working very closely with bees, handling them, interacting with them. And so if you have a bee allergy, you probably don't want to take up beekeeping. But don't turn this episode off because, as we were just saying, even just reading or hearing about beekeeping is relaxing. Yeah. And it's a great thing to do for the environment now, because bees are super important to the environment and they're dying off because people spray for mosquitoes and use herbicides and things like that in their yard. And that's not cool. No, but it's not just that. Remember there's the Colony Claps Disorder episode that we did. No one ever got to the bottom of what has been the cause of this. There's, like, so many different culprits from, like, roundup to pesticides to cell phone towers. Was the culprit there for a while or suspected culprit? But as far as we know, as far as I know, we don't know exactly what it is that's leading to Colony Collapse Disorder. So, yeah, it is a good thing to say. You know what? I'm going to oversee a colony of bees and make sure that they are just in hog heaven as far as their little lifespans are concerned. That's right. And we did a full episode on bees in January 2013. What else do we do on bees? We did a TV show episode on bees, and I sent you a clip from that episode today, and we both had a good laugh. I thought it was good. I was like, this is actually pretty good compared to how I remember it. Yeah. Oh, wow. I thought it was so bad. Really? That's funny. That's how I used to feel about it. I couldn't watch 10 seconds strung together of that show. It was so cringy to me. I guess enough time has passed where now I look back on like, this is actually not nearly as bad as I remember it being nostalgia kicked in. It's the shaun ana effect, I guess. So that's funny you say Shawn and I, because I was just listening to Shaun and I yesterday. See? Yeah, it's that Buttermine hoff effect. That's what's going down, which is even more astounding because I was listening to Buyer Minehoff this morning. So beekeeping in the United States is becoming more and more popular these days. Here's a stat, and this is an article from the old House Stuff Works website, but it's from Dave Ruse. From Dave Ruse from our very own and that's how I found it, because I'm looking for Ruse specific material now. It's just bona fide good stuff. It is. But he had a stat here from 2017 where there were about 2.67 million honey bee colonies in the US. And of course, a lot of these are from big bee. Big honey. Right. But there's a lot of backyard beekeepers doing their best work and going out there with their mellow gold, smoking up those hives and getting out that sweet, sweet nectar. Yeah. And actually, those are good people to buy it from if you believe in immunotherapy like I do, which apparently is still considered unproven. Who do? But it makes so much sense that you could introduce small amounts of, like, local pollen that you may develop an allergy to to prevent from getting allergies, which means that you want to buy honey that's been produced within 1020 miles maybe, of where you live. So you would want to go find one of those small beekeepers who sells their honey? Yes. If you're on your Facebook neighborhood page or your next door neighborhood page, chances are you will see someone pop up every now and then. It says, I've got honey or eggs or something like that. Or goat's milk. Just go get that stuff and eat it up. Right. Who wants goats milk? Who wants goats milk? The traditional Facebook post group. That's right. You could also go to a street festival in your town or something like that, like a little community festival. You're probably going to find local honey there or a health food store, something like that. Or goat's milk. Yeah. And while beekeeping is for sure fun and this made me want to do it, and I may do it one day me too, bud. You got to have some time. It is not the easiest thing in the world to do. It kind of came across to me as one of those things that like a lot of stuff like this, your first batch may not be the best, but you learn and you learn, and you get better and better at it. Yeah. And I want to shout out to also to some of the great resources in addition to this House of Works article, I actually called a guy from Honey Harvest Farms in Glendon, Maryland. His name is Jeff. And Jeff helped me out with some info that I just couldn't find online. But some of the sites I came across include Carolina Honeybees, Iron Oak Farm and Scientific Beekeeping. And all three of those are great resources. But there's a lot of really good resources on the Internet to help explain how to do this and answer more, like arcane questions. And there's tons of forms, like, people who are really into beekeeping, I found, are called beaks, and they are definitely into this. So there's tons of resources out there to kind of get started and just kind of dive in. But, yeah, I got the impression that there's always more to learn. Sure. And each colony over the years probably has its own personality, I guess, is how you'd put it. Yeah. Should we go back in time now and talk about the history? I think so. Because they found honey that is 5500 years old. Where? In Georgia. Not our georgia. The other georgia. Yeah. And honey is very famous for not going bad. They say if you find old honey like that, you can just heat it up, and it will go back to being just delicious honey. Even if it's crystallized. Right. Because the crystallization is just kind of an unavoidable consequence of aging. But it's easy to reverse. Right. Just with a little bit of heat. Yeah. Honey again, flowing right. So did they taste that honey? I'm not sure if they tasted that honey, but they found other old honey that they've tasted, and it's supposed to be pretty good. It's honey tasted like honey, I think. Right. And it does taste like chicken. And it stores forever, literally, from what we understand, because it's sterile and it stays generally sterile. But the earliest depiction of actually raiding a beehive or beekeeping is not really beekeeping. It's basically just a picture of a guy in a cave in Spain on the cave walls, sticking his hand into a beehive. And it's from something like, I believe, 11,000 years ago. Yeah. 9000 BCE. And, yes, sticking his hand in that honey pot. As far as real beekeeping goes, and on a domesticated level, we all know that they did it in Egypt in about 2500 BCE. But of course, people think China probably beat us or not us. Chuck cast is a lot with Egypt. Everybody, they beat us to it here in Egypt. So in Egypt, though, eventually, they have something, like, in Hieroglyphs, they have, like, bee hives, clearly depicted honey pots. And then they've also found hives that were clearly human built, made of clay and straw from as late as 2900 years ago in Israel. So we have been into honey for a very long time, and at some point, we figured out that you could probably suffer a lot fewer beastings if you kind of what's the word? Insinuated yourself into this bee colony. And that's ultimately what beekeeping is. We'll see it's human saying, okay, I kind of get this lifecycle of the bees and the bee colony. And what's going on here? I'm going to kind of manipulate this or oversee it, supervise, I guess, is how you put it, this natural process in order to basically steal the honey from the bees at the end of the summer. That's right. In a way where they can keep making honey. Because in the early days, the very first beehives that people domesticated were hollowed out stumps and tree logs and things, and they would destroy these. They would get that honey and then be like, all right, let's just destroy it and kill everything that gave us this delicious honey. There was a better way forward later, but it also took the skip skep. If you've ever seen what looks like a turned over basket with a hole in the bottom as sort of the symbol of beekeeping, that's called a skip. And they still use them today here and there. I think, like the most hardcore old school naturalist beekeepers might use a skip read. Hipster. Yeah, hipsters use skips. Or outside the developing world. We rarely use them these days, but they're still around and you can find pictures of them. And if you look at images online and they have pictures of them turned over and you can see the cones stuffed in there, it's kind of cool looking, right? Yeah. And like you said, it's basically like the international kind of home spun symbol of beekeeping and honey raising. That's right. But that was not any better for the bee because you had to destroy the hive with those as well. Right. Which is bad for the bees, but it's also bad for the beekeeper because you have to reestablish a new colony every time you harvest, and you can keep a colony going for a lot longer than just one year. Yeah. And things really kind of took a leap forward in Switzerland in the 18th century with a man named Francois Huber, who had the first movable hive, the leaf hive, which was sort of like a book. It turns like a Bookwood. And this is a good design because you could get the honey and not the brood, and you can remove these leaves without killing the colony, which is a great step forward. But it still wasn't like the best design yet. And that one never really caught on. It didn't catch on. Despite Hubert's efforts to promote it. He would go into town and say, oh, well, let's see what's on the next page. Bees. What's on the next page? More bees. Everyone and town folk just never really caught on. No. But in the 19th century, there's a guy named Thomas Wildman, and he started working with what are called bar hives, which I have also seen called Kenyan bar hive. So I suspect that Thomas Wildman got the idea from Kenya. But it's like basically a long trough or like, you know, those standing planters that you can keep a number of plants in, but it's just basically like a long, rectangular raised box. Sure, it's like one of those, but then if you lift the top of the box, there's just a bunch of bars that stretch across the top inside, and that's it. They have, like a notch hanging down. But if you pull that bar up, you see that the bees have created combs dangling from those bars, which is this bar hive is still very much in use today. Sure. It's just not nearly as widespread as one we're about to talk about. Yes. There would be a man from Pennsylvania, minister named Lorenzo Langstroth, who said, I will one day be the father of American beekeeping, the Denver ones. Like, what are you talking about? He said, Just pay attention because I have discovered what's called the bee space. And everyone was like, what are you talking about? Is this a sermon? He was widely questioned. Like, everything he said, he'd be like, I have to go to the bathroom. People be like, what do you mean? What's wrong with you? Langstrom so what he discovered is there's this magic space called the bee space, where bees can really do their thing successfully. And he found out that bees would not even build a comb in a space tighter than 1 CM. Right. So he said, this is the bee space where they can produce the comb in the right amount, and not enough b glue is going to get in the way. Like, this is the magic area, and I shall declare it bee space, and it shall be fruitful. Yeah. And it was like, believe it or not, realizing that bees don't build comb or glue and anything tighter than a centimeter revolutionized beekeeping. Because now with that bee space, you could build these beehives so that on the edges of them, they were just a centimeter between the sides of, say, where the combs were built. You could keep these frames or these bars separated by a centimeter. So there's enough space, like you're saying, for the piece of work, but not enough for them to glue together, which was an ongoing, apparently millennial old problem of having to harvest and getting a bunch of combs stuck together at once with the space. Now all of a sudden, you had little bits of comb that you could manipulate a lot more easily. And that was like a huge contribution to be keeping, strangely enough. That's right. And he got the first American patent on a movable frame beehive in October of 1852. Hooked up with a cabinet maker from Philadelphia named Henry Borkwin and started building these things, started selling them and did okay, but he found out that his patent was way too hard to enforce. He tried to for a little while, but it was basically a waste of his time. And the patent was just walked all over and he ended up getting no royalties. But did revolutionize beekeeping. So a Langstroth hive then is a proprietary eponym. Is that what you're saying? Well, I mean, he got the patent, right? And he couldn't enforce it, so it just became like Kleenex, sort of. Or aspirin. Yeah, I mean, if you buy a Langstroth hive today, then for sure he's not getting any dough. Long dead. Long dead in the ground, this hive. This is really cool. We'll talk more about it later, but just put a pin in it that this is the most widespread hive. Like Langstroth figured out how to make a bee hive that's so close to ideal that since the 1850s, it's gone virtually unimproved. Just pretty significant accomplishment if you ask me. Yeah. And I looked at these war or wear hives. W-A-R-R-E. Right. Which is another kind, but I'm sure there are differences once you dig in there, but it didn't look that much different to me than the Langstroth. Yeah, I couldn't really tell much of that. I mean, I saw the Langstroth doesn't have this quilted thing of, like, cardboard shavings or whatever, so I think it's the very small differences that make a big difference in differentiating between these highs. Yeah. So should we take a break? I think we should. And then, Chuck, when we come back, we're going to talk a little bit about B Society. Okay? Let's do it. What if you were a global bank who wanted to supercharge your audit system so you tap IBM to UNSILO your data and with the help of AI, start crunching a year's worth of transactions against thousands of compliance controls. Now you're making smarter decisions, faster operating costs are lower, and everyone from your auditors to your bankers feels like a million bucks. Let's create smarter ways of putting your data to work. 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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. The Neogen device, developed by Rst Synthesis is a wellestablished Advanced Quantumbased Medical device using electric cell signaling technology. Treatment is noninvasive, safe, effective, and used in managing pain associated with neuropathy and other painful conditions. It helps improve circulation, offers better rehabilitation through pain relief, and activates the recovery processes, giving better patient outcomes. Visit Neogenreliefspane.com now for provider benefits. About the Neogen system, come chat with us. That's Neogenrelievespane.com. Your patience will thank you. All right, so I would direct everyone to our ten of ten TV show Stuff You Should Know, or in particular the B's episode, which, by the way, I wrote. I have an executive producer credit on that show from writing that episode. I have an executive producer credit on every episode. That's true, because I really earned it on that one, writing it. Well, listen, that's funny, because that's how it was explained to me at the time. But, Chuck, I just want to go on record here. I went to herculean links to keep you from getting stung by a bee in that episode, and they said, Absolutely not. Chuck has to get stung just to make the episode worth watching, he has to get stung. And I thought it was a better idea if you didn't, if we kept building up to it and it never happened. But they said, no, we're not going with that. But I tried really hard to keep you from getting stung. That's right. And we had little fake bees that they put on my eyeball. But I would direct people to the January 26 podcast episode instead. Why not both? Sure. But if you really want to learn about bees, that's where we dive into it super deep. So I guess we'll just consider this a bit of a recap. Okay, so in the world, there's something like 20,000 species of wild bees, but in honeybee or beekeeping, you're going to find usually one species of bee, APIs mela ferra, which is either the European or the Western honey bee. And there's different varieties. They call them races with, like, breeds of dogs. We call them breeds, but they're all still the same species, canis lupus. But with bees, they're all the same species, APIs melafera. But the races are different. So you have like, the Italian honeybee or the Carnolian, I believe, Carnolian honeybee or the Russian honeybee, but they're all races of European or Western honeybee. That's what you're going to find everywhere. Yeah. And these things are amazing. I remember at the time, we were just sort of obsessed with bees after that episode, so much so that we wanted to do it for the TV show. And one of the main reasons is because they're what's called a super organism, which basically means you take a Western honeybee out on its own, and that thing isn't going to do anything worthwhile with a good and order dinner at Roy Rogers restaurant. It's so dumb. No, but when you put all these things together, all these bees have very specific jobs that we're going to go over here in a second. And all these coordinated actions, and that is the superorganism. They are one whole, like 60,000 honeybees acting as one in order to produce honey. Hive mind. It's a hive mind. Right. I mean, we get so many hive mind, worker bees, all these things that are in our lexicon are all taken from the way bees do their thing. Right, exactly. And so when you put them together, this larger superorganism, an emergent property of the collective actions and the instincts that these bees are following, if you put it all together, they interact and form this larger whole, and that's the colony. And so on the individual level, you have three different types of bees. You've got worker bees, which make up the vast majority of the population. They're all female. They're all sexually undeveloped females. That's right. And they do almost all of the work, as usual, around the hive. That includes everything from raising the eggs to creating wax. What else do they do? They make the honey, they go collect the pollen, they defend the hive. They serve as guards at the entrance. Like they do almost everything. Yeah. They take care of that queen, which is the biggest one of all, literally. So this all made me nervous when I was reading this again, because so much depends on the queen. It all depends on this one. B. Wait, it made you nervous? Yeah, because it's not like, oh, there's a bunch of queens, so if one of them dies or something happens right. Then you're fine. You got to have that queen. And there's just one of them. I can't remember where we heard it, but somebody said somewhere that the queen is their slave. And that's actually kind of true, because the queen's whole job, Chuck, is to basically keep the colony going and optimistic through this pheromone that she creates, but also to lay all of the eggs and fertilize them. But that's a lot of eggs. It's a ton. Like, apparently a queen can lay up to a million in her lifetime, right? Yeah. And that's over a few years. But that's about 1500 eggs a day. But my point is this. The queen is their slave because she does this for them. She keeps the population going, but they decide when it's time for another queen to be born, as far as I know, sure. Is that correct? I think so. Okay, we'll find out in the list of mail. Then you got your drones, of course. Those are the male bees. It is funny. You have one queen, you have these males that all they do is mate with the queen, and then these female worker bees do literally everything else. Right. But on the other end, the female worker bees are the ones who get to decide, like, who lives and who dies. Sure. And if you're a male drone, once you've mated with the queen, which happens in mid air outside of the hive. Very sexy. It is super sexy. The queen mates with multiple males at once, gathers their sperm and stores it in a little sack, which she then goes and lays eggs and fertilizes the eggs as she sees fit. Because I believe unfertilized eggs, or drones and fertilized eggs are workers. So the queen is actually keeping an eye on how many of what are needed. But the drones, once they mate, especially when it comes time for winter, and all of a sudden they're starting to hit up their food stores and things are getting scarce. The drones get pushed out into the cold to go off and die by themselves. That's right. That's a pretty ignominious end. Yeah. And it's a good time to point out that at different times of the year, bees are going to be more well fed naturally. And as you'll see, when you're beekeeping, you have to keep track of what time of year it is because like you said, in the winter, it's going to be super scarce. But even in the fall and early spring, you're going to need to supplement their food intake. Right, exactly. Because here's the thing, just with this lifecycle of bees, in the spring, when the flowers start to bloom and the bees are going crazy, it's what's called the nectar flow. They are producing honey in overtime. So what you're doing is the beekeepers are saying, oh, okay, well, here I want to make sure you have plenty of room to store as much honey as you possibly can, because what the bees are doing is storing honey, literally storing energy away to help get them through the winter. And you're going in and saying, I'm going to take these honey stores that you plan to use to make it through the winter, and I'll leave you some. I'll leave you hopefully just enough so that you don't need any. But also, as the beekeeper, this human who's insinuating himself or herself, I'll hit you up with some food, too, to make sure you guys survive happy and comfortably through this winter in exchange for letting me take this honey. Right. Because I've got some toast inside that's just popped out of the toaster. Man, I had some creamed honey for the first time today. Oh, yeah. I'm a big time honey guy, but I have not had creamed honey before. Is that like spun honey or is that different? It is a combination of crystallized and liquid honey that's highly spreadable. Okay. And I got it. It's like just Trader Joe stuff. Who knows where it was made, but it's very tasty. At least it's doing nothing for my immune system, but it's doing a lot for my limbic system. Yeah, I mean, honey is sort of one of nature's miracles. It is. When you start talking about manuka honey and things that have like, these healing properties, and it's pretty great. Stung by a jellyfish. Put some honey on it. Oh, yeah. No, I bet it couldn't hurt. No, at the very least, you can eat something while you're doing that, and it makes things a little better. So should we talk about equipment for a bit? Yes, I think so, because this is about beekeeping. That was our brief bee overview. But again, go back to January if you want the full scoop on bees. But this is about beekeeping. And if you want to be a beekeeper, we also did a little short on beekeeping when one of our little shorts that we used for the car commercials, when we would go around to different locations, we did a little beekeeping bit because I remember we had smokers and we wore the hat and veil. I remember that, too. And gloves. I just had forgotten what the context was for. But yeah, it was for one of those shorts. I can't remember what we call them. Interstitials. That's right. The most dry, scientific, clinical name for those things. Those were good. Surely you like those. Oh, yeah, I think those hold up. Those are fun. Okay, good. So here's what you're going to need is new equipment. If you're new to be keeping, Dave here, recommend you get new equipment. Oh, yeah, you have to, because if you get inherited equipment, like once you're on the scene, somebody might be like, hey, I got an extra smoker, or here's some frames I can't use. They open their trench coat. They got a bunch of B boxes hanging inside. What do you have? What do you want? But as you will find out later on in our section on disease and bacteria and stuff, it's pretty prevalent. So you want to get your new equipment going if you're new to beekeeping. Just so you start out on the right foot. Yeah, because once a specific kind of bacteria that causes foul brood, once it's in your boxes, like your colony is toast and your boxes are done forever, you need to burn the boxes so they don't end up in somebody's hands because it'll just stay and linger and kill everybody. It's not good. So as we kind of said earlier, far and away the most popular hive among beekeepers is the Langstroth hive. Right. So we're going to just kind of focus on that one. But it is a lot of fun to just go look at exploded diagrams of the different kinds of hives out there that beekeepers use and see all the different parts or whatever. But there's too many of them to really go into. So we're just going to focus on the Langstroth hive. Even though with just the length of this introduction to how we're just going to pay attention to the Langstroth hive. I could have covered two or three other hive, probably so, but we're going to stick to just the Langstroth hive. Okay. So you could build one of these things if you are good at this kind of thing. But what I recommend is that you go online, or you go to if there happens to be a local Apiary store in your village, go buy one there. If you live in a village, there's an Apiary store for sure. But yes, they also sell mustache wax and beard oils. Handmade axes. Handmade axes. But this is true if you have a quaint hardware store, that's probably a good place to look. And then also, I guarantee there's a million places online to get them to. And they're relatively cheap, too. Yeah, not too much. You can get into bees for it seems like including the bees for less than $500, you can kind of get going. Right. That's what I'm getting. And probably if you really watch what you're doing, maybe half of that. All right, so you get your Langstroth hive, and this thing has a big box on the lower half called the hive body or the brew chamber. And this is where the bees are mainly. Yeah. And even below that, you have a stand that the thing is sitting on. It raises it off of the ground, and usually it's kind of angled so it's like a landing pad for the bees. And then it also improves circulation. Then you have the bottom board, which is the floor of the hive, which protects the hive from invaders from above. And then you've got the brood chamber above that. The hive body. That's right. And that's where they're going to be building that comb. That's where the queen is going to be laying her eggs. They're going to raise that brood up, and that's where they're going to store the honey that they think that they're going to be eating in abundance. Right. And then you've got a really important piece of equipment that would be very easy to overlook if you don't know what you're doing. But you're going to have issues if you don't get it. It's called the queen excluder. So you remember, Chuck, that you said that the queen is about twice the size of the workers? I don't know if that but that is true. You definitely did. Okay. I'm here to tell you, when you add a queen excluder, all it is is basically like a mesh or slats or something like that that are spaced far enough apart for the workers to easily make it through. But it's too close together for the queen to make it through. So the queen won't leave the brood chamber to lay eggs. She'll just use the brood chamber for that. Which means, though, that the workers can go lay honey in the chamber above the brew chamber, which is called the honey super. The box above that? That's right, the honey super. Not the supper? No, just the super. And I didn't see why they call it that, did you? No. The honey super position, maybe. I don't know. It's a nod to quantum physics, maybe so but this is where they're going to store that surplus honey when the plants are blooming and that nectar is flowing and you're skimming some off the top as the beekeeper. Yeah. And if you did not have that queen excluder, the honey super would be just another brood chamber, because the queen wants to use as many places as she can to lay eggs, and then they lay honey around it. So the eggs, which also serves as the nursery for the brood and the honey, they're all together in the same combs. But because you put that queen excluder, she's not laying eggs in that honey super, which means it's just sweet, delicious honey. In all of the combs on the frames, which we haven't talked about yet. Well, yeah, these are the frames. These are the frames that you can take in and out, they hang vertically. And these days, it's pretty amazing how far they've come. They are actually pre printed with beeswax or some sort of foundation made of plastic that just sort of says, here you go, bees, here's a little head start. Right. But you found some extra interesting stuff about the bees and their wax making abilities, too. Yeah, I did, actually. So it takes about a tablespoon of honey to make an ounce of wax, and bees make wax through a gland. Right. They eat the honey and secrete wax instead. And so whenever they create a new brood chamber, they make it, they secrete it as wax and basically a circle. And then they use their body heat to shape it into a hexagon. And the reason they kind of make a perfect little hexagon, too. Right. And the reason that they make hexagons is because they don't know this, but structurally, it is the most structurally sound shape in nature that uses the least amount of material. Right. Which is just astounding that bees instinctually know to make a hexagon. Hexagon. Right. Not octagon a hexagon. Right. But they start with a circle and then use their body heat to melt it into a shape. Well, anyway, would they have to do this for each egg that they put in a brood chamber? They have to do this for each cell that they put honey into. And then they also make wax to cap the honey off. So it requires a lot of honey to make that wax. Which means, logically, if you can give them a leg up either with preprinted honey or plastic or leaving as much honey as you can from the honey harvest, or leaving as much wax there as you can after the honey harvest, they don't have to make new wax. They can reuse the old stuff, which means that's less honey that your bees are eating to produce wax, which means it's more honey that you're getting. Yes. And by the way, if you're typing an email to me right now because I said hexagons are five sided, please stop it is six sides. Yes. Everyone knows that five sided structure is a circle. Wait, what is a five sided one? Huh? What's a five sided one? Is that a pentagon or? Pentagon? Yeah, you're right. Pentagon. I played enough Dungeons and Dragons as a youth that I should know this, but I don't remember. I get my gons confused sometimes. Everyone well, Chuck, I'll teach you a little cheat here. Just refer to all of them as polygons and you're covered. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. So like every hexagon it's a polygon, that kind of thing. Hexagon triangle, anything with three sides or more. It's a polygon. No, not a polygon. That's a circle. But ask someone to debate you, it can't you'll just shut them down every time? Yeah. And also make new friends at parties. Right. Come at me. Fight me, polygon. So you're also going to have a feeder in this thing. We talked a little bit earlier about the fact that you're skimming this honey and taking some for yourself as it's made in excess. And at other times of the year when it's like especially late summer and winter, their pollen resources are going to be lower, obviously. Right. Because things aren't in full bloom. So you're going to have to help feed these little fellas and little ladies. There are feeders. Dave here says something about a Ziploc bag with sugar water with a slit cut. But I've seen that's the most rudimentary thing I can imagine. One small step up is like sort of an aluminum pan with sugar water that slides in and out of this box. Yeah. And you know those like, pet feeders, those pet waters that have like, the water? Some of them look like that. Yeah. So that's specifically called the boardman feeder. It's just a mason jar filled with sugar water and screwed into the mason jar cap, which is inverted in a little wooden thing with some slots for the bees to get in and out of. And the cap is perforated, so the sugar water just slowly drips out. And so it's a long, steady supply of water that you slide the wood part that the cap is inserted upside down into into the front entrance of your beehive. So all you have to do is unscrew the mason jar and put more sugar water in every once in a while. And the bees need it. It's a really easy way to feed bees. That's right. But specifically you mentioned pollen. I saw something that I didn't realize. But when you reach about the fall, you don't want the bees to have any pollen if you're feeding them. It has to be like pure sugar water because if they eat pollen, that will produce solid waste. And bees are really clean and they won't go in their hive. They leave the hive to go evacuate their bowels, which actually ties into that yellow rain short stuff. We did remember that. That's right. But they'll go fly away from the hive, but if it's too cold, they can't leave the hive. So they will actually die rather than poop in the colony. Or some of them will be like, forget it, I'm living. I'm just going to go ahead and poop. But now the whole colony is spoilt, and the reason why is because they've eaten too much pollen and they can't make it until the spring to go outside and poop. So you don't want to feed them any pollen in the fall. That's right. And that is the opposite of our wives who would rather die than poop in a public place. Right. Exactly. Me too. I basically would as well. Oh, I'll poop anywhere. I know, man. It's an admirable quality. I mean, I don't love it, but I certainly won't put myself at risk. What's your technique? Do you go to, like, a happy place and just pretend you're not there? Like, you just leave your body for a little while? No, I just go kind of primal. Oh, yeah. Like a lot of grunting kicking at the wall? No, just like that. You got to do it. It's the most primal thing you can do. Sure. To force feces out of your body. Jerry's eating. I'm very sorry. I know. Sorry, Jerry. The miso is just drooling out over the crack of her mouth. I'm not doing it. She is. So let's keep going here because we need to move on to the tools, because that's the box that's the Langstroth hive. Get a good one, make sure it's solid. Yeah. And again, you don't have to break the bank. There's a cheap basic Langstroth hive isn't going to put you in the poor house. And plus, one other thing about Langstroft hive before we move on that's so ingenious, Chuck, is that it's modular and scalable. So you can easily remove the top boxes and put another brood chamber on, put another honey super on, and harvest more and more honey. If you break part of it, you can replace parts. Exactly. Yeah. It's like a really good inventor. Like, it makes sense that it would have been invented in 1850 and not really have been changed that much. Yeah, agreed. So we talked a little bit about the protective clothing that is that veil. You can have the cool little sort of safari pith helmet with a veil, but usually they will just fit over any kind of wide brimmed hat. You want to make sure it's snug. Some people, it depends on who you are. If you're really used to this, you can build up sensitivity to be stings, and you're like, forget the gloves. Forget covering my body. I'll just wear the veil. Some people might not even wear the veil because they're so cool. I think at least they wear the veil. Oh, no. I've seen people handling bees without veils, my friend. For real? Sure. That's crazy. Yeah. You think old time beekeepers are putting on a veil. All the videos I watched, everyone was wearing veils. They might not have been wearing anything else, but they had a veil, and they had the second thing. A smoker. Well, yeah, you got to have that smoker. And that is a very cool device, and I'd always wanted to hold one. And finally, we got to when we made that little video interstitial, and it looks sort of like they've compared it to an elongated metal teapot. Not a bad descriptor. It's just like a metal canister with a spout pointing upward, and it's got a handle that has a little bellows built into it. And what you do is and I always wonder what the heck was in there? You're just burning something. You're burning cardboard or you're burning leaves or something, and use that bellows just to pump a little smoke out. Right. And the reason you're pumping the smoke out is to calm the bees. And it calms the bees by masking the pheromones that say the guard bees are shooting out, which means that the other bees aren't picking up on this alarming pheromone, and so they're all remaining calm, actually. So it's an essential tool of the trade as a smoker. That's right. And you're also going to need a hive tool if you look those up. If you've ever used a Wonder bar, I think that's probably proprietary name, but it's kind of like a flat crowbar. Right? That's exactly what it looks like. Instead of a beefy round crowbar, I highly suggest you get a Wonder bar, too, because those are just great to have around the house. Yeah, I have one of those. You got a wonder bar. I do. I don't know if it's Wonderbar trademark pry bar, but it is exactly that. Yeah. So this hive tool is sort of the same, and it is used I think I mentioned bee glue earlier on that's propolis, and that is saliva and beeswax and other materials from the garden, maybe. And they use that to seal up gaps in the hive. But you're going to need to pry open stuff like get that be glue loose. And that hive tool is what you use because it doesn't destroy your beautiful hive box. Yeah. Because the frames are where they build these honeycombs, and you need to get the frames out to get the honey from the honeycomb. So, yeah, you're going to need to pry the frames out. Sometimes everything the bees doing is saying, please don't take my honey. Exactly. And we're like, oh, but we have a tool that allows us to do that. Right. Yeah. Including and up to stinging you to say, please don't take my honey. But yeah, we don't listen. Yeah. You want to take our second break? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. We'll be right back. What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? You aren't about to let any cyber attacks slow you down, so you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. 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The hard part is deciding where you'll go first, because when you earn 500 Advantage bonus miles after qualifying purchases, adventure is on so fast in your seatbelt and put away your tray table because there's so much world to see. And the city advantage. Platinum Select Card is your ticket. You can learn more@city.com Adventure and travel on with City Advantage. The Neogen device, developed by Rst Syndicates, is a well established advanced quantumbased medical device using electric cell signaling technology. Treatment is noninvasive, safe, effective, and used in managing pain associated with neuropathy and other painful conditions. It helps improve circulation, offers better rehabilitation through pain relief, and activates the recovery processes, giving better patient outcomes. Visit Neogenrelievespane.com now for provider benefits. About the Neogen system. Come chat with us. That's Neogenrelievespane.com. Your patience will thank you. All right, so if this whole thing has really floated your boat as it did us, because, Chuck, I guarantee you, both of us are going to be country folk beekeepers by the time we're dead yes. In our retirement. Right. So if you've been bitten by the bug, the bee. If you've been stung by the beekeeping, that's all that coming. Bug. There's actually just a few things you want to do to get started. It's not hard to get into. It's one of those things. Like, have you ever taken scuba diving lessons? No. You learn how to scuba dive and it takes about 30 minutes, and then the rest of the weeklong course is to teach you how to stay alive if something goes wrong. Right. Beekeeping is kind of the same way. Like, it's really easy to get into and learn the basics, but it takes years of just understanding and learning and picking up new things to really become an advanced beekeeper. Yeah. And you can read books and you can go online and you can take courses, but like, with everything, there's nothing like firsthand experience. And like you said, it's going to be a while. Be awhile. I know. I mean, to do that, I'm sorry, but in a couple of seasons you're going to really know what you're doing to a large degree. Yeah. Dave Russ says, bank, go find a mentor. There's plenty of beekeepers out there who are not going to yell at you for asking. They'll probably be happy to pass along this knowledge and information, I think. So it seems like a hobbyjob that people want to spread the love of. Right. Like creamed honey. So Dave says, though, there are some basic things. To start, you want to pick a location for your hive and one of the first things you want to do is make sure that you're allowed to have a hive depending on where you live. If you live out in the country, there are probably very few ordinances. Most ordinances either say you can't have bees here because this is a city and within the city limits, no bees are allowed. They say bees are farm animals, so they belong on a farm or bees are nondomesticated animals. The same thing. Or heaven forbid you have an HOA. Just forget about it. Yeah, literally forget about it. If you have an HOA. There's one place called Champlain, Minnesota, and they say at least as far as the University of Minnesota says that they allow bees so long as, quote, the neighbors are on board. That's the official yeah, from what I understand. I don't know if that's in the city code or the county code, but that's how it was put on the University of Minnesota website. So that is a good point, though. You want to make sure your neighbors are cool with it or at the very least that you have enough land that your neighbors aren't going to be bothered by the bees. Yes, but if you have a neighbor that says, I'm definitely allergic to bees, then I mean, tell them to move. Right. Either that or it's time for you to get into like RC planes. That's right. So you get your local ordinances all settled, you pay off your neighbor and then you want to direct that b traffic, like where you set it up on your property is important. You don't want to have the hive entrance and exit facing your neighbor's property. Right. You want to have it facing your house and you want it ideally facing south or southeast. Yes. And the reason why you want to have it facing south or southeast is so it gets all sorts of really good morning sun, because that'll wake the bees up and get them going and saying, get off your dust, lazy, and get out there and start foraging and make me some honey. That's right. They also say that it's goodbye if you have some bushes or a private or a fence near the entrance. Because when they leave the hive, that's going to encourage them to go upwards yeah. Rather than to your neighbors pool. That's right. So in addition to making sure the beehive gets morning sun, you want to protect it from strong winds. You want to make sure that it's definitely protected from afternoon, the worst of the afternoon sun, to say, like, between two and four. You don't want unobstructed son just beating down your beehive. It's going to cook them. And you also want to make sure that there's a good all weather cap on the beehive. It's going to protect it from rain and stuff like that, too. And speaking of rain, you also want a water source nearby. Yeah. I mean, you made a joke about going to your neighbor's pool, but that could happen because bees need water. They forage for water, and they cool the hive with it. They blend it with pollen to make bee bread, which is pollen, nectar and honey, and that's what they eat. And I think that's what the larvae especially feed on. Is that right? Yes, I think so. That bee bread. So if you live near a pond or you got to grew up like me and had a creek nearby your house, and then you're all set. You don't need to worry about it. But if you don't, then you're going to want to put something in, like a bird bath might be nice. Or Dave even says you can just put a large platter of water. Yeah. Dave also says put a ziplock of sugar water on beehive and cut a slit in it. So maybe go a step further beyond the platter. Well, it depends on your aesthetic, I think. I guess put some water in, like, a tire that stood up on its side. How about that? Just do that in your yard. Why are you picking on day if he's the best? Because I was just genuinely bad if I still put a platter of water out there. Put a little more thought into this. Okay. All right. So you've got everything except bees, and it never occurred to me where you get these bees. I thought you just set this all up and the bees would be attracted to it and fill it up over the course of a decade, and then you can start making honey. No, you can actually buy bees. Yes. And they arrive via postal service, from what I understand, or probably FedEx these days. But I read a Mother Earth News article from 1974, and they were saying, your postman will love you for this, but they're going to arrive in a package, a box filled with live bees, probably somewhere around 10,000 of them. Yeah. And a mated queen. That's important. It's not like you have all this and you're like, now I got to go find the rarest thing in the world, which is a happily mated queen. Right. This is one of the reasons I called Jeff over at the farm at honey Harvest Farm in Glenda, Maryland, because I was like, I couldn't find what made it specifically meant. It was called premade it. That's what they call it, premade it. So I was like, does that mean a virgin queen that hasn't made it yet or has made it beforehand? That's what it sounds like to me. Right? Yes, the latter is correct. They have the queen mate with a bunch of drones and they say yoink, and take the queen and sequester her so that she can't lay any eggs. And then they put her in a special container with the rest of the bees and ship them to you. And then you put the bees together in your own brood chamber with the queen in her sequestered thing, and you peel back a little like piece of tape or something, and that exposes a little candy plug. And the workers eat through the candy plug to free the queen. It's pretty cool how it works. It really is. And I've also seen that the candy plug, which is meant to also keep the queen bee alive during transport, if it comes out or something, you can just plug it with a marshmallow too, which is the most quaint thing I've ever read in my entire life. You should also try and get your bees locally. If you get them locally, then you know A, that they haven't been shipped a long way, which is going to stress them out and be that they're going to be hip to your scene, they're going to be down with your weather and just cool with the bars and the restaurants that are nearby. They'll know all about the local schools that the parents never stop talking about and everyone's just going to be happier. Right. So also, hopefully you can just go pick them up. But I do have the impression that there's tons of mail order bees, too. Sure. But whenever it is, you want to order them so that they arrive in early spring because your whole goal here is to get this colony up and moving and really healthy and well populated and rare to go by the time the spring flowering and the nectar flow begins. That's right. There's another way to do this, what I call the Chuck way, the Chuck version. Sure. That's to buy a nuke, right? And a nuke is a nucleus colony. And that is just sort of like the lazy person's all in one solution. You buy a hive box, it's preloaded, it's stocked, it's got an active queen, it's got eggs, it's got your brood, it's got your pollen stores. It already has honey, for God's sake. Right. And they call it, like I said, a short for Nucleus colony as a nuke. And you can get a nuke for not much more than this other stuff. Right? Yeah. And I mean, basically the brood chamber component that we were talking about with the Langstroth hive, that's basically what you're. Buying is they ship you, like, you say, a ready to go brew chamber, and then you just start putting a Queen Excluder and Superboxes and all that stuff on top and there you go. It seems pretty smart to me to try starting with that as well. When I was looking at the price, I was like, jeez, what are these nukes? Like $1,000? And it seems like it was all about $50 more than starting from scratch. But I think you can spend quite a bit on a starter kit of bees if you're say, looking to have just pure bred bees, like some berry and yeah, like just Italian honeybees or just Russian honeybees, because different races have different kind of tendencies. Like Italian honeybees tend to keep a larger population over the winter, which means that you need to leave them more honey or feed them more, but they're also friendlier more das, all that kind of stuff. But it's really expensive because those bees are artificially inseminated and really in a very controlled environment. Whereas with most of those ones that you're spending like 100, $200 on, 10,000 of them, they are what they call MutS, which are just like a whole bunch of different races of the same species of bee. And they have a lot of different characteristics, some of which may actually make them less susceptible to diseases than, say, like purebreds are. It's like a normal person compared to British royalty or something. Is it too soon? I don't think so. Okay, so once you've got everything set up, your main job is going to be to feed your bees, try and keep them from swarming, and then making sure they stay healthy from disease. And mites, you're going to be harvesting that excess honey along the way, like we've been talking about, and going to be feeding them that sugar water to keep them happy. And as you're doing this, you're going to be learning more and more about just sort of the shorthand of it all. When you go to even lift the back of a box, you're going to know just by weight, like how heavy with honey. The thing is, you're not going to have to keep pulling stuff out and looking at it over and over. That's pretty impressive. Yes, all these little shortcuts. But we need to talk about swarming because that's a big deal and something that seems like it could happen fairly easily. If you have a good, healthy hive going on and they're producing a lot of brood, it's going to become overcrowded. So part of avoiding this is to keep your population in check. But if you don't, then they're going to swarm, which means half of your colony, and sometimes all of it, is going to say, come on, Queen, let's go, let's leave this place. I don't like this apartment anymore because it's too crowded. Right. Which is just an unavoidable natural process, because if you think about it, what the bees are doing is reproducing and growing their population. And then eventually, when things get crowded, they split into two and go establish a new colony or leave the old colony behind. Right. So you're artificially preventing that from happening by doing things like inspecting the brood chamber for signs of queen cells, like little queen larvae that are being grown by the workers, which means that they're preparing to swarm and start another colony. Yeah, that looks like a little peanut sort of hanging off of your comb. And if you just go through and pick those off, literally just get them out of there, then the bees are like, okay, I guess we're not going to raise another queen now. But there are other things you want to do, too. Like, you want to actually physically get rid of some of the brood to control the population. You're just basically saying this idea about swarming, we're not going to do that. We're going to make it so that you have more room by controlling the population. Yeah. When you say get rid of the brood, that doesn't mean take these frames out and burn them on the fire. You're going to be involved, hopefully by this time with other local people in the area that are doing this. You're going to be going to beekeeper meetings and getting hammered once a month on mead. Right. And you're going to trade with your friends. You're going to say, hey, I got too much going on here. I'm afraid I'm going to get a swarm happening. So here's some brood frames if you can take them, and people are going to be very grateful for that. Yeah, because it's kind of like getting a free nuke supplement your colony that's maybe not doing so good because there are two problems. One, your colony can be too healthy, and then it's going to swarm what you want to prevent. Or it can be weak, which means that it can be overwhelmed by robber bees, nearby bees that come through and just steal a bunch of stuff and basically kill off the wheat colony. So, yeah, just to supplement your numbers with a brood frame that somebody doesn't want because their population is starting to swarm, that would be a very good thing to have. That's right. One other thing about swarming chuck, that's how you make a bee beard. That's right. You take a queen and you tire to your forehead, and the bees will come and form a beard around your face. That's what they're doing with the bee beard. It's pretty funny looking, and they will get stung. But the reason why they're not totally stung is because before they swarm, the bees gorge themselves on honey for their travel and to go establish the new colony. And they're just following the queen. And so if the queen is tied to your forehead, they're just hanging out, waiting to see what she's going to do. Totally. All right. We need to talk about disease because it is bad right now. There's something called the varroa mite, which is a parasitic pest and it is very small, came to the United States in the 1980s and is the most common cause of B death and colony failure right now because 42% of commercial beehives, almost half in spring of 2017, were infected with varroa. It's a bad, bad problem. It is because they will lay their eggs, these mites will lay their eggs on the larvae or the pupa of the bees, and they will feed on the pupa and either kill them or deform them. They will also attach themselves to adult bees and suck their blood. They spread disease. It's a really bad jam. And so being a beekeeper, you have to keep an eye out for any kind of mite infestation and then treat it accordingly. That's like a basic part of beekeeping, but also something that's a little more advanced than anything we could really go into now. It's just know that part of beekeeping is monitoring for diseases and pests and then treating them. Yeah, you don't want more than ten and there are various ways that you can test how many mites you have that once you get into beekeeping, you're going to learn all these little tricks, but you don't want any more than ten mites per 200 bees. And if you have more than that, then you're in trouble. And when you look at a picture of these things, like sitting on a bee and feeding on it, you just want to like, pry it off of there right. And squash it. Right. Then foul brood, which we mentioned earlier, is another big problem. And it got its name from the sulfur smell that a brood frame will have when you pull it out. And once you have that, your whole colony is gone. They're goners. And you need to burn your wooden where. Yeah, I saw dead fish because I saw sulfur and I was like, well, does it smell like farts? All right. But then I saw dead fish was kind of what a lot of people said it smells like. And if you've got that, then I'm sorry, that's what a letdown. It is a letdown. Especially if it happens right before they really start producing honey. Right. And that's where we find ourselves. Finally, you get to that sweet, sweet mellow gold, which is what you're doing this for, not only to get the honey, but obviously to also do the right thing by encouraging bee populations. But harvesting honey is what everyone is really in it for, whether you're going to sell it or just give it away to friends or just have some for your family. That's really the end game here. And so when you go to get the honey, there's actually a pretty clever little thing you put in between the brood chamber and the honey super that you're going to collect honey from that lets the bees out, but it produces a maze for them to try to get back in. So after 24 to 48 hours, all the bees will clear out and you can take your honey super and all of the frames laden with honey and put them into an extractor, which is definitely going to probably double the amount that you've put into your beekeeping so far. But from everything I've seen is if you're going to harvest honey, this is the way to do it. Did you see any videos on this? Yes. You can get mechanical motorized ones. It's like a centrifuge. But the ones I saw were mainly very homespun. Just sort of these hand cranked versions. Literally homespun. Yeah. You uncap it and remove the wax. And you'll see in these videos, they hold up the frames and just take a knife, like a hot knife, and just sort of cut the wax away from the frame. And then you can literally see the honey there. If you don't have an extractor, you can just do it the old fashioned way and lay it down and just wait for the honey to flow. But you can also stick them down in the extractor. The one I saw held about eight frames and you just crank that thing and it just slings the honey out. And filters, you have to have certain size screens for honey extraction to filter out the wax bits and b legs and Anthony or things. B parts. Sure you want to get that stuff out of there, too. Yeah. But then at the bottom is the catch where between the extractor and the screen is a reservoir and there's a spigot on the bottom and you put it up on your countertop and pure honey just flows right out of the bottom. It's pretty awesome. It's beautiful and tastes delicious. The good thing about the extractor, too, is all you're doing is carving off the top wax cap, but you're leaving the wax part of the chamber, the bulk of the wax intact so the bees can reuse it and they have to eat less honey to produce more wax for the next season. It's pretty great. It is pretty great. That's beekeeping, which is pretty great, too. Agreed. Got anything else? Right now? I got nothing else. We'll talk about this more later when we get into beekeeping as old men, okay? Yeah, for sure. Not that you have to be an old man to be into beekeeping. It's not at all what I mean. No. If you want to know more about beekeeping, go on to How Stuff Works and check out this awesome article by Dave Ruse. And there's also tons of other stuff around the Internet to help you. Since I said tons of other stuff on the Internet, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this something about our jingle, our theme song. Hey, guys. Been listening for about eight years, never had a reason to write in, and you get a lot of emails from couples who sing your jingle back and forth to each other. It's very cute. But my story is less cute. I just moved into a new house and it turns out we have the exact amount of steps on our stairs for me to stop to your jingle. Oh, yes. Ever since I discovered this a couple of months ago, it's become virtually impossible for me to not stomp your jingle on the stairs. Sometimes singing along too. I can't imagine how maddening that is. A couple of days ago, I was thirsty in the middle of the night and went downstairs for some water. I'm sure you can guess what happened next. Down I go into my front door, chipping a tooth. I was not guessing that that was going to happen. I wasn't going to guess that either. But Jamie, I'm very sorry that happened. Seriously, jamie is from Siena college, and I'm sorry. It's the worst of all earworms. Right? But that was the email. It just kind of ended like that. Yeah, I was like I wanted it to be like I went to the dentist and the dentist happened to turn out to be a long lost uncle who put me in his will or something. But no, it ended with the chipping of the tooth. That's it. Sorry, Jamie, that's all we can say. Ended like many of my own stories. If you want to get in touch with us, like Jamie did, to let us know you chipped a tooth or just to say hi or that an uncle put you in their will, you can go on to stuffysheno.com and check out our social links there. You can send us a good old fashioned email, wrap it up, slather it on the behind with honey and send it off to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that we mean your dog. 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How the Papacy Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-papacy-works | In February 2013, Pope Benedict said he would become the first pope to retire in 600 years. Check out this episode of Stuff You Should Know to find out just what the pope does and the process of choosing a new one. | In February 2013, Pope Benedict said he would become the first pope to retire in 600 years. Check out this episode of Stuff You Should Know to find out just what the pope does and the process of choosing a new one. | Thu, 28 Feb 2013 20:53:43 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=20, tm_min=53, tm_sec=43, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=59, tm_isdst=0) | 33208182 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant, and you put the two of us together at our new editor, Casey. Yeah. And you have stuff you should know. Yeah. Guest editor is not Matt, and this time, no Casey is Ky. Yeah. Welcome, Casey. And we are in what looks like the room of a serial killer. Yeah. Buffalo Bills. Yeah. This is the fourth room now we've been shuffled to in this office, and this is a brand new to us, and it definitely very much looks like there might be a head floating in a jar behind you somewhere. Yeah. All of the windows are blacked out with foam. Creepy. There's one single bulb light in the middle of the table. There's stuff stacked around all over the place. Like some hoarder serial killer is living here. It's not a good place. I don't feel good right now. Yeah. Like, temporarily living here. A serial killer wouldn't even live in here. This is just where they go to take evidence. This is where they keep the victim. Yeah. And that's where recording from today. Yeah. We want to set the mental stage. All right. We can do it. The mental environment has a pronounced effect on the mind, like where we are. Yeah. But no one cares. Remember, they're always just like, go, just put Chuck in the hallway and they're fine. Yeah. And apparently someone is listening to their voicemail just outside. This is great. So the Pope. Yes. So you know Joseph Rattinger? John Ratzenberger? No. For Cheers? No. With Clavin. Yeah. No. This guy is totally different. I thought that was who the Pope was. No, the Pope. You would be more familiar with Pope Benedict II. Yes. But his birth name was Joseph Radsinger. And following what is a very long tradition, as we'll see, he changed his name when he became Pope. Well, I don't know if you know this or not, even though you selected this article, but on February 11, he announced he's going to retire yeah. On, I think, 28th, I guess they gave two weeks, because roughly two weeks later is going to be his last day. And I felt I'm not Catholic, and I don't know much about the Catholic religion because I grew up in the south, and especially there are a ton of Catholics in the south compared to other parts of the country. Yes. It's very northeastern. Midwestern. Yeah. I felt bad for the guy, though, because people call them Pope scary and stuff because he sort of looked kind of creepy. Yeah. And I just remember thinking, that's not nice. He did. He was also drafted into the German military during World War II, which is kind of something. And he abandoned, didn't he? He deserted. Yes, deserted, ostensibly before he fired a shot at anybody. I think it was during basic training that he was like, I'm out of here. I might want to be pope one day. Right? Exactly. It's not going to look good on my resume. I have that down there. Yeah. Plus, also, he followed in the footsteps of Pope John Paul II, arguably the most lovable pope of all time. Yeah. I mean, he was 78 to 2005. That's a nice chunk of time in the modern era. He was a huge traveler. He was credited with helping to bring about the end of the Cold War. Yeah. To some degree, sure. He was beloved by all. Even people who weren't Catholic love Pope John Paul II. Yeah. He's probably the most impersonated pope. The one guy or maybe it wasn't just one guy. Is it Naked Gun? Well, yeah, and others, but it's the one I always associate. Looks just like him. John Paul Two. Yeah. JP. And they would do that smile in, like, the weird way with the hand. Very lovable. He learned from Queen Elizabeth. Yeah. Okay. So, yeah. Benedict said, hey, I'm very tired. I'm going to retire. And the whole world said, I don't know if you can do that. Can a pope retire? He said, oh, yes, you can. As a matter of fact, the last pope to retire was Gregory the 12th. Yeah. Just go back like, 600 years for president. Yes. 598, to be exact, where he basically retired to end what was called the Great Schism at the time. Oh, yeah, yeah. Apparently, there was a 70 year period where the papacy, which is the governance by the pope, left Rome and moved to Avignon, France. And I guess Gregory the 11th said, you know what? We're going to take it back to Rome. And that created the Great Schism, which, depending on who you ask, made Pope Benedict either the 265th or the 266th pope, because during this Great Schism, there was a pope in Rome and there was a pope in Avignon, France. So then Pope Gregory the 12th comes to power and says, you know what? I'm just going to retire. Right. It's going to end the Great Schism. He's the last pope, and I believe the first pope ever to retire. So Benedict so there's only been two benedict II is the second, as far as I know. Did you see Saturday Night Live this week? No, I don't. Watch us. I know these days they had crystal false on. Did you see the little Pope Retiring commercial? No. It was pretty funny. They did like, the typical financial retirement commercial spoof of the pope retiring and getting all the financial ducks in a row. It was pretty funny. I think my favorite SNL commercial is the one with Sam Waterston. Waterson from law and order. Jack McCoy. Which one was that? Where he talks about he's selling insurance to the elderly to protect against robots who want to come into their home and eat their medication because that's what they're fueled by and the robots are going to come to your home unless you have this insurance. They're fueled like pacemaker, man. It's really a great commercial. That's great. You put him in anything and it's going to feel like that kind of commercial he managed to do with the straight face, too. Of course he did. Class act. Yeah. Okay, so Benedict II announces he retires, and you choose how the papacy works. And I think we should point out we're talking about the papacy, which is this position in the world, this world leader figurehead, the head of the Catholic Church, papa, Vicar of Christ, the Holy Father, the Bishop of Rome, they're all synonymous with the Cajuna, the Pope. And what the Pope does is the papacy. Yes. So that's what we're talking about, is the papacy. It's like what the Pope is expected to do. How you get a new pope? Well, there's a lot of people questions. Yes. And this one is especially relevant because a lot of this is going to deal with the really interesting, I found process for selecting and electing. And of course, because it's religion A and Catholic religion B. Right. It's not just we get around and we talk about it and we raise our hands. I don't know. It's kind of a cool process, I think. It is. It's arcane and it's happening right now. It can't happen yet. No, the process is begun. March 15 is the vote. But they're trying to get it pushed forward, even. They are, because I thought it can't happen sooner than 15 days after the Pope retires. After the Pope dies. Oh, really? So they're going to push it forward because he's retired? Because there's no reason not to, basically. Oh, yeah. Because they don't have to celebrate the funeral rights or have a body on their hands. You're brilliant. Right. It's not me, it's people. Yeah, but you noticed that detail. Yeah. People saying, if we can go ahead and push this forward a little bit, but at the very we know it's going to happen on the 15th or earlier. Cool. And they're already talking about maybe the first African folk. I know a guy from Ghana or a guy from Brazil. Yeah, I'm pretty psyched about that. Mitre in the ring, I guess. Apparently it's going to be a very conservative Pope still, because Pope Benedict canonized or elected to cardinal 56% of the electorate. Well, and John Paul was the other 44%. So you're going to get a Pope who shares the same views as Benedict. Most likely. Probably. But that hasn't stopped people from writing endless opeds already saying, hey, the majority of Catholics believe X, Y, and Z now. Right. Can we get a Pope that represents the modern Catholic? And they're saying it's probably not going to happen. Wishful thinking, but it's probably not going to happen. But maybe they'll be from Latin America or Africa. Sure. Which would be it's a pretty big jump forward first non European and like a thousand years, I think. Yeah, well, we don't know yet. Well, possibly. Yeah. Let's see. I'm excited. Let's talk about this. Chuck, how long have we had Pope? Well, we have had depending on who you ask, st. Peter, possibly is the first Pope, even though they didn't have the office of Pope at the time. Right. But he's widely considered to be the first Pope because Jesus himself sort of handed over the reins and said, you know what? When I ascend to heaven right. I'd like you to kind of run the show for me. Right, Pete, if you don't mind. And biblical scholars love interpreting stuff that Jesus said. Yes, and he said something in Matthew 1618 that they take to say Peter was the first Pope. Peter was the person that Jesus said, it's up to you to run the church. Yeah, that verse is And I say also unto thee, thou, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And that is the Petrine guarantee. And theologians believe that Peter is the rock because Jesus spoke Aramaic, and Peter's original name was Simon, and Christ named him peter named him Sepus, which is Aramaic. Four rock. So they're saying not to be confused with both cephas. Yeah. Hank Williams Jr. Yeah, that's pretty good. So people saying theologians mainly say, you know what? That's the rock that he's talking about. The rock is Peter. And further evidence is when he also says to Peter, Feed my sheep. But you have to imagine his set in a certain tone. I know, but I worry just like, hey, feed my sheep. That's what I worry about. He's like, Buddy, I'm going to heaven. Would you mind feeding my sheep while I'm gone? Which is funny. There's sheep that actually died, because Peter was like he means I know what he means. I know what he means. Peter, I'm not a Bible literalist. He's got people to feed his other sheep. He never asked me to feed his sheep. He wants me to lead his people. He knows how I feel about wool. Okay, so Peter is the first pope. That's part of church dogma. Yeah, that's the petrine guarantee. Even though it wasn't like the Pope came after Peter. Right. And it came after Peter. Well, Peter went to Rome, leading his life to say, hey, Jesus is just all right with me. And he was killed for it by Nero persecuted the early church, which at the time was basically just Peter. Yeah, peter became a martyr. No, Nero didn't fiddle. So Peter becomes a martyr. He's buried on Vatican Hill and the Basilica of St. Peter is built over him. And from that point on, to honor Peter as the first Pope, all other Popes that fell into line behind him are considered to be the direct successor of Peter. So if you look at the papal family tree, there's Peter at the top, and then there's one other line, and it's all the Popes coming directly from Peter. Yeah. Whoever follows on this next one isn't descended from John Ratzenberger. He's descended from Peter. Right. He's following Peter's direct rule. Right. And as such, the Pope is considered to be carrying on directly the bestowment of power conferred by Jesus on the Peter. Yeah, and I kind of like that. I guess that sort of signifies it's the office and not the person, you know what I mean? Yeah. Like it puts the importance on the office itself and not like, hey, you're following this guy. Right. Well, you're following the original, the OG. I was going to say that, but that's disrespectful. And then I thought, I've called the Pope John Ratzenberger four times, so I think you got that covered. Okay. And then so you've got the idea that the Pope is a direct successor, Peter, which gives him tons of power. Basically, he's one degree separated from Jesus, converting the powers under Peter. Yes. And then a bunch of bishops got together to create the first Vatican Council in 1070 and said, you know what? Not only that, we have thought about it. We're theologians, and we've decided that the Pope is infallible in matters of spirituality and religion. That was a big deal, because it basically means you can't question anything that comes out of his mouth. If he lays down some doctrine, then that's the final word. Right. Because Jesus convert these powers onto Peter, and these people are direct successes of Peter and by proxy had the same power. Jesus was infallible ex post facto. So is the Pope. That's what they said, and everybody said, okay. We were listening to him anyway, but thank you for making official. Yeah, exactly. So that's the Pope. That's the power of the Pope. And again, this is the most powerful figurehead of any religion. There's 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, but there's not a living figurehead of Islam. With Catholicism, there's 12 billion. And there's one guy who's the head of it all, and that's the Pope. So let's say Benedict hadn't retired. Let's say he stayed Pope until he died. Yeah. What happens what happens when a Pope dies? Well, there's an authority called the Cardinal carmelingo. I like that name. Yeah, I do, too. Or Chamberlain is another name, and that's the Secretary of State of the Vatican. And Vatican City is the smallest independent state in the world. 100 and change acres right there in the middle of the room. And I think I told my story that time about walking around it because I was trying to find the way in. Yeah, and there's no way in unless you go in the front. Were you trying to sneak in the back door? Vague? No, I just thought, like, surely you can get in this way. So they'll let me. But there was just big, tall walls. And it's a long walk around the Vatican. Is it 100 acres? It's kind of a walk. Yeah. Things like 110 or one that's I think dead on a country mile as the bird flies. Yeah. All right, so where were we? So the Secretary of State assumes the non theological responsibilities of the Pope immediately, and that's sort of like if the President passes on, the Vice President takes over in the interim running Vatican City. Yeah. Actually not interim for the President. They are permanent. Well, until the next election. Right, yeah. Permanent meaning it's not an interim position. Unfortunately. Yeah. So they have to confirm that the Pope is dead, and they call the Pope's name three times. There is no by name, I think, and there's a myth that I had a hard time tracking down, that they would hit tap the Pope on the head with a silver hammer. No way. Three times. They don't. And apparently that is something that they did until the 1960s, and that went the way of the Dodo. I can imagine, because all the Popes have little bruises. Yeah. I think it was a tap and not like a post mortem bruising from a hammer. But I think they do use that same hammer to destroy the ring of the fishermen, which they remove once the Pope has passed. Every Pope has worn this for, like, 800 years. Yeah. Some version of it. It's a seal with Peter on a fishing boat. Fishing. And then the name of that Pope, and then they destroy the same one. But did you see whether they use the same gold to make a new ring? I don't know. That's for missing gold. 85% of gold is recycled. It's true. But apparently they use that silver hammer to destroy the ring and the seals, and the body lies there and repose for nine days. Consecutive. Right. They celebrate the funeral rights. There are no photos allowed. Because of the bruising? Because of the bruising. But once they have put the Pope in his vestments and the miter, I guess, although I don't know. You're probably not buried in the miter. Which one's the miter? The tall one. The hat? Yeah. I don't recall seeing John. Paul. No, he had his little skull cap on. Yeah. Which had a specific name, too. I can't think of it right now. Jamaica. No, I think it's different for Catholic folks. Then you are allowed, if so deemed, you are allowed to take a post mortem photo, like an official photo for documenting the situation. But you can't go in there with your cameras, and if the Pope is sick on his deathbed, you can't go in there and film that kind of stuff. Got you. It's untoward. It is. Then they bury him. Yeah, they bury him in, like, a little matroshka doll in three coffins, one in case of another, incase in another. So it's a cypress elm and then lead yeah. And who's working with lead these days? I don't know. I guess. Roman coffin makers. That's scary. Yeah. Like, how do you prevent any kind of lead poisoning when you're making a lead coffin? I don't know. I mean, lead still used, right? It's not like yeah, I think it's fairly discontinued in most cases. Yeah. You should read this. There's a Mother Jones article called The Real Criminal Element lead. It is awesome, man. Yeah. Basically, they tied crime rates and the decline of crime rates across American cities with the decline of leaded gasoline. Oh, interesting. Yeah, it's really interesting. And they do it pretty convincingly. They should have called it. Get the lead out. I thought so. Like, there's a bunch of different puns. They could have made sure they chose Wand. All right, so now we have to elect a new Pope. Right. Whether Benedict was dead or not, this is the same thing that's going to happen. And like you said, they're trying to move it up because he's not dead, they don't have to carry out the funeral. Right. So why wait? Exactly. And the first thing that happens is the College of Cardinals, the guys who are going to serve as the electors not the University of Louisville no, but the College of Cardinals, they get together and they enter what is called conclave, which means whiffy which means that they are basically sequestered from the rest of the world until they can come to a two thirds agreement. Two thirds plus one? No, I think that's a simple majority is half plus one. This is like straight up two thirds. Oh, really? I believe so. We need to change this thing. Well, no, you can, after twelve or 13 days, go to a simple majority. Yeah, but you want to be two thirds plus one is the first go, and then if that doesn't work, then you go to simple majority. Well, then you're probably right, because I think I was wrong. I don't know, man. We'll call them out. I think it might have been Tom Harris. We'll go with Tom. So we'll go with two thirds plus one in this case. So basically the Cardinals get together, they are sequestered, basically. There's, I think 120 of them, tops. Yeah, there's 117 right. Now they haven't picked the other three yet. I don't think there are another three. So there's between 117 and 120 electors, cardinals who are going to vote for Pope. I think it's no more than 120. That's the maximum number I got you. There's also an age limit. If you turned 80 before the day the Pope dies or retires, you're out. You're old news. And you can't vote. You can't be a Cardinal in the electorate even though the Benedict was like 78 when he was elected Pope. Right. Well, that doesn't cover Pope. That covers whoever is electing the Pope. Yes, I know, but I just find it interesting that two years later, you can't even vote right. Yet they would put someone in as the highest office. Yes. I don't know. Well, he was the oldest pope ever elected. Yeah, that's true. These guys can't even tweet. And you may laugh, but there are nine active Twitterers in the College of Cardinals. Well, the Pope has their Twitter account pontiffs, but nine of the cardinals tweet themselves, and they have specifically been forbidden from tweeting during this time period. I can see that. It's part of being under key. In conclusion. I wonder if they ever thought they would have to cover that, though. Hey, the world is changing. Tweeting cardinals. Okay. So there's two ballots a day, for a total of four. Two possible in the morning, two in the afternoon, and then after twelve or 13 days, if there's still no pope, they can say, you know, what the heck with this, we're going to go with the simple majority. Right. Which I think is 50% plus one. And then we'll elect a new pope. That's right. And while they're doing this, there are some details that have to be followed to vote for a new pope. Yeah, it's pretty cool. This information has always been out there, but now in today's age, it's really out there. So I think up until this election, a lot of people probably didn't understand exactly what's going on. Well, Pope John Paul published the guidelines and said, hey, everybody, we're just being transparent here. Here's what we're doing. Here's how it's done. So they're rectangular ballots, and this is all very important, I imagine they probably don't vary from this process. I wouldn't be like, you know what? I'm going to do a round ballot just to mix things up. Yes. At the top of the words Latin words illegal and sumo pontificom, I elect as supreme pontiff. So it's basically saying that this is the official ballot, and then below that, each cardinal is going to write down the name and pin of the Pope. Yeah. Hand in their little paper like it's elementary school student body election. They folded twice now. I thought someone else. Oh, no, they fold it twice. Right. And then they put it on a plate. Yes. And then they use the plate to dump it into the ballot box. Yeah. And they have to say out loud, I call as my witness Christ the Lord, who will be my judge, that my vote is given to the one who before God, I think should be elected, which is saying, like, I'm not bending the popularity just in a popularity contest. This is who I genuinely think God is. My witness should be Pope. And they have to carry it in the air. And I guess all of this is just sort of like why they put it on a plate and hold it in the air. It's just like, look, nothing's happening. I wrote it down. This is the same piece of paper. Well, it also makes cardinals while they're electing is a little known fact, actually float down the aisle toward the ballot box. And so holding the ballot up in the air makes the whole thing look even cooler. Cool. So you've got some guys who are charged with counting the ballots and basically tallying who's going to be pope. Of course they're called scrutiniers. Yeah. That's going to be my next band name. The Three Scrutiny's. Just the Scrutineers. Okay. Yeah. Because there's four of us. Well, I was going to say it'd be kind of cool if it was The Three Scrutiny because there was four really freak out the crowd, man. Yeah. So you've got the three scrutinyers and two of them. Okay. So you have one sitting who takes the ballot out of the ballot box, writes down the name of the pope, or the person voted for pope hands to the next person, the first to write it down, and then the third scrutinyer reads the name out loud, and the other two, they say, yes, that's the one I have here that I wrote down. And then they take it and pierce it through the eligible with the needle and move it along a line of thread. And then you have ultimately all the ballots tallied. That's right. And if they don't elect the pope, they burn them. That's right. And very important step before that, they tie the end of it. So it's a sealed circle with the ballots hanging from it. Okay. Because if it's not tied shut, that means the vote is still open. Right, yeah. Okay, so then they burn them and if they haven't elected a pope through that ballot, they add some chemical that makes the smoke black and they blow it out of the Vatican palace to let everybody know no pope yet. When they do elect the pope, they just let it be white smoke. Right, yeah. It used to be they used to use like wet straw and stuff, but there was confusion at times when it didn't burn appropriately. So now they just add a chemical that they know is going to do the job. Nice. And so when the new pope is elected, the guy comes to the he meets with the cardinal deacon, secretary of the College of Cardinals, the Cardinal Dean, and the master of papal liturgical celebrations. Right. That's a swinging crowd. It is. And he says, oh, please, really? This is great news. Thank you for doing this. And the dean, I think, asked him a couple of questions. Yeah. I have a feeling it's way more official than what I would say, because they say, do you accept your canonical election as Supreme Pontiff? What would you say? I would say you want to be Pope. You sure you want to be Pope? And then by what name do you wish to be called? And that's pretty straight up. You'd say that just like that? I'd say, you want to be pope. What's your name. Give me the name. Yeah, exactly. Who's this guy? We need to know what to put on your seal. Yeah, exactly. They do. So the Pope accepts. Well, I guess the Pope is supposed to accept. I'm not sure if that's ever not happened. I can't imagine. Because you would think they would withdraw their name earlier than that. Right. Or if they had second thoughts, that might be pretty bad, too. Right. They were like, Look, I just talked about it with my wife, and she's like, I don't know if we want to go into this chapter of our life. Let's just retire. Yeah. Okay. So each cardinal at that point, once the Pope has the name and has said, yes, I definitely want to be Pope, they approach them, pay homage to the new Pope, probably kiss the ring. Yeah, I would say so. I wonder if they have the ring made up already, because you're supposed to have that thing on that's basically like, Check it out, I'm Pope. I bet they do. I would imagine. Yeah, because the only thing that could happen is the Pope says, I don't want to be Pope. Yeah. And then they just make a new ring. Yeah. And they probably make the guy feel pretty bad, too, like, well, are you sure? Because we made the ring and everything already. I bet this is all spelled out in some rule book, not off use rules of the Catholic Church. Right. Like if they refuse yeah. You strike him on the head with the silver hammer. Maybe. So then, traditionally, the oldest cardinal in the conclave steps up there at St. Peter Square, there on the balcony, which we've all seen a million times, and says, Papam basically says, we have a new Pope. And then the Pope comes out and the crowd goes wild. Yeah. Like the Beatles. Yes. Like, it's serious stuff, man. Weeping. I know. In America, it's not as I guess things have just changed a little bit. I'm sure there are people in the United States that are still that move. Sure. But you see people from around the world, like, collapsing and crying, and it's pretty amazing to watch. Paper mania. Yeah. And so the Pope basically says, okay, let's do this. Here's my papal blessing. Good to meet you all. Sure. Let's go forth and spread Catholicism. That's right. We should do one on the Pope at some point, just about the duties. I mean, they have a few in here appoint bishops and cardinals, obviously, spreading the good word, writing the official documents about issues like what our official stance is, stuff like that. Yeah. And then getting world leaders to go along with them. Yeah. And back in the day, the Pope had a lot more sway in the non religious sector. Like, I could listen to me. They could crown new emperors and had military power and stuff like that. Yeah. Like one of the Pope's crowned Charlemagne. And started the Holy Roman Empire, right. Oh, yeah. That was something that Pope could do. Can't do that anymore. No. And we've mentioned Benedict changing the name like they ask, what name do you want to go by? There's actually an origin to this pope, John II. He was elected in 533, and he was the one that started it because he was born, his birth name was Mercurious, named after Mercury, which is a pagan Roman god. I don't think I should have a pagan name as Pope. So he changed his name to John II. And there you have it. That's where the tradition began. Yeah. And I think generally now they choose the name of a previous Pope that they admired, perhaps, or a favorite saint. Or a favorite saint. And then they get on with the Pope. I wonder what the new one? I'm really interested. I'm pulling for the guy from Ghana. Yes. I want to know what his name is going to be too. Yeah. You got anything else about the Pope or the papacy, I should say. No, the Pope mobile pretty awesome car. Yeah, it is. Do you remember that? Yeah, sure. When they came out with the bulletproof tube that he sits in, it's pretty smart. It stands in and weight. Yeah, it's a tall tube. That's right. Okay, well, if you want to learn more about the Pope mobile, you can type the word papacy, P-A-P-A-C-Y in the search bar athowstuffworks.com and I don't know what that will well, papacy will bring the article up. It won't bring anything up about the Pope mobile, I'm afraid. No. But just try pokemobile and see what happens. Might enter a portal into another email. Since I said pokemobile, it means it's time for a listener mail. I'm going to call this Canadian vets. What's up, friend? My name is Anne Marie and I'm a super fan veterinarian from Newfoundland, almost in Connecticut. I thought you were going to say Kentucky. I discovered you in 2011 when I went on maternity leave, and maternity leave here in Canada can be up to a full year. In addition to that, man, my daughter was born ten weeks early, so I was off for 14 months. Holy cow. Creepily. You both became my support system during this time. Luckily, I came upon the podcast at a time where there were around 200 episodes. I would push the stroller every day for at least an hour and laugh out loud at your antics. I listen to lie, clean cooked and did various baby related duties. Now that I'm back at work, I eagerly await new episodes. And I've gone back and submitted to listen to episodes I dismissed previously as boring. I encourage people to do that. Yes. Population is constantly a good one to go back to. That's what she listened to. Did you know that? No. She said I listened to recently and happy to report that even how population works entertain me. I even listen at work, particularly when I'm doing doggy surgery. You are a favorite while I'm doing a dental surgery, actually, last week, I listen to why do men have nipples while working in a dog's mouth? Thanks for getting me through some difficult tooth extractions. Anyway, that's off to you both. I suffer from a Malaysian hero worship. Wanted to say thanks for that. I don't know if I would call it suffering. My daughter and I say woot. Josh and Chuck. And my husband says, not that podcast again. And I guess he slaps his forehead. Wah wah. Yeah. So, Anne Marie, you got your own little silver hammer. Tap your husband on the head and say, my daughter and I are getting smarter. Tap him very lightly, lightly on that, don't you think, Chuck? So whoever Amarie's husband is, get on the train, my friend. Maybe get a helmet soon. She says, awkward hugs. And thanks to Canada. Thanks from or thanks to Canada to, I guess, for that 14 month paid leave. Can't you see her like she's putting a dog under, and she's like, one for you, one for you. One for me. Yeah, with the gas. All right. So thanks, Emery. And thanks to Canada. For some reason, if you want to send us an oddly worded homage or thanks or whatever, we love those. This is the best kind, and we want to hear from you. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can say stuff on Facebook.com. You know, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. And you can join us on our home on the web, our very own website with 42 inch rims called Stuffyshando.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-02-16-sysk-black-panthers-final.mp3 | The Black Panther Party | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-black-panther-party | The Black Panther Party was a complex political movement that was unfairly painted as a militant group who hated white people. Far from it, they were actually men and women trying to effect change in their community. Their history is one of the more inter | The Black Panther Party was a complex political movement that was unfairly painted as a militant group who hated white people. Far from it, they were actually men and women trying to effect change in their community. Their history is one of the more inter | Thu, 16 Feb 2017 08:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=8, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=47, tm_isdst=0) | 61260352 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everyone. Just want to let you know that this episode features a couple of little technical glitches that we didn't find very noticeable, but we loved this episode so much, we didn't want to try and recapture lightning in a bottle by rerecording it. All right. Try not to pay attention. Okay? Yeah. I don't think it's a big deal, but if you notice a couple of little hiccups here and there, that's what's going on. I just want to let you know 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. It's just the two of us. No producer today. We're producer free. Just the two of us. We can make it if we try. Yeah, let's try. Chuck. You and I, right? I think we're both pretty excited about this one. Yeah, this is going to be a good one. I love my history, as do you. Sure. Especially contemporary history. And especially history that I didn't get taught in high school. I don't remember learning much about the Black Panthers. No. In high school. None. So, Charles, you didn't know much about the Black Panthers. I didn't either. Little bit. Yeah. I would guess we were probably in about the same boat I went to college. Yeah, I don't recall learning much in college about them either, but I guess I knew a little bit. Here. There are some of the highlights. But it was in researching that I realized just how much if you don't actually go research it, just how completely wrong a lot of this stuff is, and not just in detail, but in overall tone. Like, you get the idea that the Black Panthers were nothing but, like, racist terrorists who basically wanted to kill all whites and take over the White House. Not true. No, not really. And after further digging, it turns out that a lot of that image that most people have today who don't really know much about the Black Panthers, that idea comes from a misinformation and smear campaign carried out very purposefully by the FBI back in the Boy. Let's just call him divisive at the risk of smearing someone, but has there ever been a more divisive individual in this country, perhaps? Well, who knows now? But Jay Edgar Hoover? Yeah. I mean, my God. FBI Director for Life. I mean, I want to say we should do a podcast on him, but it would definitely be a two parter because he worked for 187 years. Well, I should say that smear campaign, and there's a lot of other stuff to that campaign as well, beyond just smearing. But it had a name coin Tell Pro counterintelligence program, and that in and of itself deserves its own one or two parter episode, too. Yeah. I mean, at one point, Jay at Gerhuba came out in the news and said that the Black Panther Party was the single greatest threat to the united States of America. Right. And this was during the Vietnam War for the Uninformed. Like you said, people thought, all right, well and it was not coincidentally from that point forward, is when the cops really were like, all right, we truly don't have to even respect civil liberties at this point. We can go in and shoot people in their sleep. Right. Exactly. And what's Crazy Chuck, is when he said that it was less than three years after the Black Panther Party was formed. Yeah. So let's go back to the beginning, actually, we'll go back before even the founding of the Black Panthers, just to provide some context. Right. Yeah. So this is roughly the tail end of the Jim Crow era, right before right. At the New Deal era. And if you were black in America. Your experience. Whether it was in the south. Where it was just even more openly and overtly hostile. Or in the cities of the north. You were probably just statistically speaking. It was likely that you were poor. That you probably had routine. Especially if you were a black man. Especially a black man under a certain age that you were routinely mistreated. Harassed. Beaten. Or possibly murdered by police. And there was a tremendous amount of racial tension as a result. Right. Yeah. Not just up north. I mean, we're talking pretty much any major city. Right. But especially in the south. In the south, actually, there was a guy whose name was Robert Williams, and he was an NAACP leader in North Carolina, and he wrote a book back in, I think, and he called it Negroes With Guns. And it advocated blacks arming themselves and carrying out violence in self defense in the face of this racial mistreatment. Right. Yeah. Williams actually kind of codified or enshrined into a book form this idea that was pretty predominant among Southern blacks. It was like, look, stuff is real, and we need to defend ourselves. And that idea spread a little bit to the cities here or there, and it germinated in the minds of a couple of guys, a couple of college kids in Oakland named Bobby Seal and Hughie Newton. Yes. And they officially formed. It was called the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Initially. It was eventually truncated in Oakland in 1966. We'll go through there because they had sort of a roller coaster ride as far as what they did as a group and as a party. But initially kind of the whole thing was selfdefense. We need to defend ourselves against police brutality. And this nonviolent civil rights movement is great. We love Martin Luther King Jr. And what he's doing, but it's going too slowly. And in the meantime, we're getting beaten and killed in the streets by law enforcement. So we need to be proactive and do something about that. Right, exactly. And Robert Williams may have written the book, but the guys who formed the Black Panther, seal in newton. They weren't the first black rights group to advocate militancy. Although, again, you have to point out, like, they advocated violence and self defense, not aggression. Right. Yeah. Which is why they specifically chose the Black Panther as their I guess you said mascot, but as their name mascot makes it sound like a baseball game or something. Right, but there's a quote here from Bobby Seale co founder, and he said that Huey Newton said, you know, the nature of a panther. I looked it up. If you push it into a corner, that panther is going to try and move left or right to get you to get out of the way. But if you keep pushing back into that corner, sooner or later that panther is going to come out of that corner and try and wipe out who keeps Oppressing in that corner. And that was sort of the idea, like, hey, listen, we're trying to sidestep, we're trying to do the right thing, but if you keep coming at us, then we're going to defend ourselves. Yeah, exactly. Again, they weren't the first people to come up with this. And they looked around and kind of surveyed the black rights movements that were around and they kind of said, this one works a little bit, but that part of it doesn't work. This one we don't agree with, but it's a nice sentiment. Like the MLK nonviolent civil rights movement, like you said, they said, this isn't working. It's not happening fast enough, or it's not happening at all. And some other groups and people like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rat Brown, who were the heads of the Non Violent Student Coordinating Committee, were some of the first black leaders to publicly break with MLK's nonviolent theory and say, no, we need to meet violence with violence. Malcolm X was another one. And Malcolm X probably had the biggest influence on the Black Panther ideology than anybody else. Yes, he advocated black militancy that included violence. He advocated black self sufficiency and dignity. But he didn't necessarily say you were only going to advance with the help of other blacks. We need to exclude whites or other races from our struggle. And the Black Panthers, specifically Hughie Newton. And Bobby Seal really identified with that. And that was actually that became one of the hallmarks of the Black Panthers, that they were willing to work with other like minded groups regardless of race. Yeah. So that was kind of a big one that I wasn't aware of, that I learned from this. And then the other aspect of Malcolm X, it really formed like one of the foundation keystones of the Black Panther ideology is that it wasn't race that was the problem. It was class. They were basically Avowed Marxists. Right? Yeah. The central issue that created the struggle was class, was capitalism, and that the white establishment and the police and the government were keepers of the capitalist structure. And that same capitalist structure was keeping the black people in America down. And so to rise up, to become self sufficient, to get that chance that they needed to grow and advance themselves, they had to get rid of the capitalist structure itself. Yeah, they were very much into the socialist ideal, and one of the first things they did was they realized they needed sort of a foundation on which to build upon something easily digestible, that people could look at and could read and understand what they're all about. So very smartly. Early on, they came up with a very specific what they called their Ten Point Program, what We Want and What We Believe. And they wrote this out. We're going to read them in a second. But they wrote them out and then immediately printed them on a thousand sheets of paper and set up an office and started passing these things around. This office was in Oakland, which is where I think we already said where they founded, and they basically quit their jobs. Every member of the Black Panther Party was a full time, I guess you could say employee, but full time worker. Member. Yeah, member. And they gathered their paychecks, a few guys at the very beginning and rented an old shop storefront base and started handing out this Ten Point Program. Yeah, they did. You want to go over the program first? Yeah, we might as well just go ahead and read all ten so everybody knows what we're talking about, right? Number one, we want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black community. We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny. Number two, we want full employment for our people. We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give it a high standard of living. Number three, we want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black community. We believe that this racist government has robbed us, and now we are demanding the overdue debt of 40 acres and two mules. Number four, we want decent housing fit for shelter of human beings. We believe that if white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperative so their community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people. Yeah, and that was a big one. And as you'll see, a lot of what they were after was just like, the ability to live in a neighborhood where you could have a decent school and a decent place to live and a chance at work. Like it wasn't some radical thing that they were after. They just wanted the same opportunities, basically. Yeah. And I mean, I said earlier that if you were living and you were black and living in America in, the chances are you are poor. 32% of all black people all black people in the United States were living below the poverty line in 1966. Wow. 71% of the poor living in metropolitan areas were black. And in 1968, two thirds of the black population lived in ghettos. Wow. So, yeah, of course it makes sense that their agenda is we want to just get to basic normal and then we'll go from there. All right. Number five. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decade American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in present day society. Number six we want all black men to be exempt from military service. This is a big one. We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. Yeah. And later on in there, during the Vietnam War, some of them traveled to Vietnam and kind of found a common ground with the North Vietnamese. Right. It's very interesting. Is it my turn? It is. Number seven. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people. Pretty much speaks for itself. Yes, but part of that was that they point out that the Second Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed the right to bear arms, and that's going to be a big part of the Black Panther Party. They're credited historically as being basically the ones who pointed to the Second Amendment and said, hey, we're advocates of gun rights. Yeah, we'll get to all that. It gets pretty juicy. Number eight. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails. It says that they believe that all black people should be released from prison because they have not received a fair and impartial trial. Number nine we want all black people, when brought to trial, to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities as defined by the Constitution of the United States. Number ten we want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace, and as our major political objective, a United Nations supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny. They're basically saying, we believe that black should have the power to separate from the United States, from the white establishment and form their own self sufficient and respected self governing body, basically, right. So they took this ten point program. They founded a newspaper called the Black Panther, and they sold that for twenty five cents. It got to be a very popular newspaper. It had a really wide circulation, and it wasn't just black communities. There were all kinds of people reading this newspaper and it kind of aside from donations and stuff from various groups, it really kind of funded the organization, was the sale of this paper. Right. And every single issue, I believe, featured this Ten Point program on the inside cover. And quick shout out to the artwork of Emory Douglas if you've ever saw this great documentary called The Black Panthers Vanguard of a Revolution. Yeah, I watched that, too. And this artwork from this artist and graphic designer Emery Douglas, that was kind of the hallmark of the paper, was just gorgeous stuff. And I think he's one of those that has sort of not been lost to history. But I had never heard of him before. I think he did a cover for one of the editions of Native Sun. Oh, really? I was looking. I was like, that looks really familiar. That's where I saw it before. It's really good stuff. Yeah. So, Chuck, we've got the Ten Point plan and the original headquarters in Oakland, and all of a sudden the Panthers start spreading like wildfire, like their ideas, because the experience was so similar as far as poverty and being harassed and brutalized by police and just generally being held down by the white establishment. Since that experience was so similar throughout all the major cities and even smaller cities in the United States, the Black Panther Party spread pretty quick, and eventually they had something like 5000 members. And remember, that doesn't sound that much like that many people, but like you said, to be a member, you were committed to the Black Panther Party. Twenty four seven. You had to quit your job, you had to quit school, and your life was the Black Panther Party. So the fact that they had 5000 people doing that around the country is pretty nuts. But they have many more supporters. And the Black Panther newspaper eventually grew to a circulation of about 250,000. It's amazing. It really is. Well, I guess we'll get back to their history after this. All right. So if you want to start anything that you want to grow and be noticed, then it sounds kind of silly to talk about, but you need to be good at branding. Yeah, that's true. And I don't know that they specifically thought about it as branding initially, but they quickly realized that the media really ate this stuff up. When these black men in black leather car coats and black turtlenecks and black berets donning shotguns with the ammunition draped around their shoulder, the press ate it up. It was a cool look. And young black men wanted to look like this. Black women started growing out their Afros. It was all kind of sort of tied into the black is Beautiful movement, which was sort of just the notion of embrace your blackness. Don't try to fit in and don't straighten your hair. Don't try and look like white people. Like, wear your dashiki. Grow your afro out. Be proud of who you are as a black person. Embrace your roots. And the Black Panther Party was really tied into this, and it became a really big part of their branding and recruitment. Yeah. If you were hip at this time, like, you were definitely hip to the Black Panther look, even if you hadn't adopted it yourself, you were like, there's a cool cat walking down the street with a bandolier of bullets in a shotgun. So the Panthers, they had the look, they have the offices now. They have the newspaper. And one of the first things they started doing even before they really started to spread, but those first Panther members, hughie Newton, Bobby Seal, and then a guy named Bobby Hutton, was their first recruit. One of the first things they started doing was patrolling the neighborhoods of Oakland and looking for police who had stopped black motorists. Right? Yeah. It was almost like a guardian angels that protected citizens from cops. Right, exactly. That's a really good way to put it. Right. So they would stand there at a reasonable distance and just openly and obviously observe the traffic stop. And they would shout at the cop anytime he started to violate the civil rights of the black driver. And they were armed. They were holding shotguns, oftentimes not necessarily pointed at the cops, but in that documentary we mentioned, they would talk about how they would kind of bring it, move it from side to side, kind of shifting position, and as it did, it slowly was aimed for a moment at the top, and the cop got the point, like, yeah, I get it. You have a loaded shotgun and it's right there, and you could shoot me. And some of the first traffic stop monitoring that happened just scared the bejesus out of the cops. They had never experienced anything like this before. All of a sudden, there were a group of young black men standing there in black berets and shades at night, holding shotguns, trained on them from time to time. And the cops actually responded in exactly the way the Black Panthers did. They were much more hesitant to brutalize or violate the civil rights of the drivers. And a lot of times they just get in their cars and leave, especially if they were on patrol alone. Yeah. So that was one of the huge early foundational hallmarks of the Black Panther Party, that they were openly and armoredly, protecting their fellow blacks from police brutality. That was one of their major roles. Yeah. And the reason that they were allowed to have these guns is because one of their leaders, eldridge cleaver found in the California law books. They call it a loophole, but it wasn't really a loophole. It's kind of right there in black and white, as you are allowed to carry a gun on public property as long as it's not concealed. Right. Open carry law. And so they were like, all right, well, we have these guns. It says right here we're allowed to they would carry a gun in one hand a lot of times, and then this California Legal Handbook in the other. And they knew it by heart. They could quote exactly the code. And then obviously the cops caught on, the word got around what was going on, and it developed all the way to the California General Assembly. And when you see this documentary, it's amazing, man. The Black Panther Party marches through the building onto the floor of the California General Assembly wielding shotguns, loaded shotguns, and you see, obviously the white legislature just sitting there like, what in the world is going on? Including Ronald Reagan. Well, yeah, he was the governor. Right. And so Ronald Reagan was the governor at the time, and he is, in that documentary, quoted as saying, like, anybody who thinks carrying open loaded guns in public is okay is out of his mind, and ultimately signed an anti open carry law that closed that loophole. Yeah. The Mullford Act. Right. So Reagan signed some gun control legislation, big gun control legislation, in an effort to curb those patrols by the Black Panthers. Yeah. Obviously you hear, all right, Ronald Reagan does this. You think? Where's the NRA? And so I looked up, I was like, all right, what was just the climate at the time? Apparently in the late sixty s, the NRA, it wasn't until the late seventy s, nineteen seventy seven, when a guy named Harlan Carter took over the NRA, it's when they really stepped it up with the Second Amendment rights. They were really more strict version of the Second Amendment. Right. So the NRA was silent, and obviously Reagan being very tough on guns, he had, I guess you could call a conversion in the 1980s as well. And then he and the NRA teamed up together and started saying things like, well, no, it's okay, you can totally have guns. Right. This also happened to coincide with the breakup of the Black Panther Party yes. When the NRA and Reagan changed their stance on gun rights. Yes. One thing you said was that it was Eldridge Cleaver who noticed loophole. It was Hughie Newton. He was the one who really had that mind for law. Eldridge Cleaver was much more the militant revolutionary, and he was already a bit of a darling in the intellectual circles for a book of essays he'd written in prison called Solonice. Yeah. And so he joined the Black Panther Party pretty early on as their minister of Information, in large part their official spokesman, and he brought an air of real credibility and legitimacy and got a lot of left leaning intellectuals and entertainment types. Like Brando was a big one who was in favor of the party and supporter. But they really started to pay attention to the Black Panthers when Eldridge Cleaver joined. Yes, and his wife Kathleen Cleaver was also one of the well, we might as well go ahead and talk about women in the Black Panther Party. Yeah, like most organizations at the time, it was sort of from the top down a male driven organization. And they did have Kathleen Cleaver and they had Elaine Brown, who was also sort of one of the higher ups. But it was still and even they admitted it was still somewhat of a chauvinistic organization and most of the women didn't make it past what they called the rank and file, sort of operating the nuts and bolts secretarial work and just kind of making the thing go. On one hand, they did give women some positions of power, but never kind of at the top. Well, now, like you said, you named two of the big exceptions that rule, but they were big exceptions. Like Kathleen Cleaver was the first woman who was a member of the decision making body and Elaine Brown took over as chair, party chair, like the top official after Hughie Newton split for Cuba in 1970s. Like you said, most of the women in the Black Panther Party were ranked and file. But it doesn't mean that gender roles were totally rigid in the party. Like for example, you would just as often or frequently see women out armed doing patrols of the neighborhood while men were the ones responsible for some of the survival programs, the community programs that we'll talk about. Yeah. Well, Brown said they tried that and had minor successes. Is that right? Yeah. In the documentary, she said that was sort of what she tried to do is reverse some of the roles. And she said there was still kind of largely a sexist attitude which was a problem within the organization because you can't be that true community organization if you have that oppression going on within your own group in a gender sense. Yeah. And especially if women are the ones who are doing a lot of the actual work. Like something like 50% to 70% of Panther membership was female. Yeah, at one point. So yeah, you got to respect the people who are actually doing the work or else you got an arrogance problem at the top. Yes. And we should mention too that Kathleen Cleaver is a professor right here in Atlanta at our own Emory University law professor. Yeah. She went on to get a law degree from Yale and after years of living in exile, which we'll get to. All right, so you mentioned the survival programs and if you don't know what that is, you might be saying like, what in the world is Josh talking about? They had their police brutality program. So that's kind of what made the news, was patrolling the streets with these guns, keeping the cops in check. And by the way, we should mention that they're the ones who came up with the term pigs as a derogatory term for police officers. Yes, it first appeared in their newspaper and it caught on pretty quick. Yeah. So that was kind of what they made the news for at first. But I think especially Huey Newton realized early on that they can make a real difference in the community if they get these social programs going, that they're not being taken care of. Their schools are bad. These kids don't have access to good food, even. And they read that, scientifically speaking, that a good breakfast has a big impact on how a child learns throughout the day. So they started this breakfast program where they would give I think at one point, they were feeding, like, 200 children free breakfast around the country every day. Every day? Every morning. 20,000 children around the country who otherwise would have gone to school hungry and stayed hungry the whole day, ate breakfast because the Black Panther Party fed them every day, every school day around the country. That's insane. Yeah. They started medical clinics. Free clinics. Called the People's Free Medical Center. They offered vaccines, testing for diseases, treated basic illnesses, cancer screenings. Basically, these social services that white America fully enjoyed, or I should say, white America of a certain class fully enjoyed and started offering up these programs, which kind of became one of the hallmarks of the party. They weren't just this militant group trying to keep cops in check any longer. No, that was a huge I mean, that was as big, if not bigger, than their militant objectives. Is serving the community through these survival programs, too? Right? Absolutely. And they funded these programs largely through donations, which they would go out and solicit from the community around the cities. Right, yeah. And apparently, if you at least didn't give something, if you were like, no, I'm not giving you a dime, the Panthers would out you in their newspaper and call for a boycott of your business, saying, like, these guys care so little that they won't even chip in a dollar for kids to have a free breakfast. Yeah, they had a pretty serious organization going by this time that was directed, again, not just at patrolling police and fighting police brutality, but also at serving the community. Yes. One of the cool things they did was they started the Oakland Community School. Yeah. That was Elaine Brown. Yeah. And it was kind of her passion project, and it was pretty much free to students. And they had small classes. They taught poetry, they taught foreign language and current events. They taught yoga. Like all these things that the black community had never had access to. Black history is obviously a big part of it. They had Maya Angelou. And Rosa Parks and other civil rights leaders come in and speak at the school. And it operated for nine years, from 73 to 82. And Kathryn Cleaver has this one great story that she told on CNN about one young man who came to join the party because he wanted to get a gun and be on the patrol. They handed him a stack of books, and he looked at them and said, I thought you were going to army. And they said back to him, I just did pretty good. Yeah, she dropped the mic right after that. Yes, she absolutely did. But that directly relates to, I think, point number five on the Ten Point Agenda, where it says that they want education for people that teaches them about themselves, that gives them a knowledge of self. It says that if a man doesn't have knowledge of himself in his position in society, in the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else, which is exceptionally true. Yeah, so you've got all these programs, I think they had, like, 65 programs, what they called survival programs in place. And it wasn't until apparently these programs were starting to really roll and get the attention and support of a lot of people outside of the communities, even, that the FBI, led by Jegre Hoover, gave its full attention to the Black Panthers and they said about trying to destroy the Black Panther Party. Well, yeah. Hoover, ironically, these social programs are what scared him the most, because he knew that that's how you're going to get white liberals on board on this cause, which is exactly what happened. Like you said, they didn't shun the help of the white man by any means. They went arm in arm with these white lefties. Basically, watch the documentaries, it looks like today. These college dudes with beards, they look like modern hipsters and worked arm and arm. And at one point, they even got together who was the Appalachian group, the Young Patriots. Yeah. It's just like you see this video of these black militants giving handshakes and hugs to these rural white people who all seem like they were like, we have the same problems and we can just get together. And it's just crazy, especially in today's climate, all these years later, to see that happening. Back then. Yeah, I mean, they were in favor of anybody regardless, as long as they shared kind of the same sentiments or the same struggle. In 1970, Hugh Newton became the first black leader to ever publicly support gays and lesbians. Yeah, that was a huge deal, too. Yeah, absolutely. The point was, the problem wasn't race. The problem was this class struggle, and everybody of a certain socioeconomic status or who is a worker is being held back. You were saying Hoover was worried about those social programs. Yes. There's a quote from a letter that he wrote to an FBI agent who objected to targeting the survival programs as part of Coin Tell probe. Yeah. Hoover said, you state the Bureau should not interfere in programs such as the Breakfast for Children because many prominent humanitarians, both white and black, are interested in the program as well as churches which are actively supporting it. You obviously have missed the point. And his point was that you don't leave those programs alone because they have support outside the community. You target them because they have support outside of the community. That was the real threat. Way more than black men patrolling the streets with shotguns. That was a problem for local law enforcement, and the FBI was worried about it. But more of the point, they saw that as such a flashpoint, a potential flashpoint, that they could get the police to shoot and kill armed black men on the street with impunity they could deal with. That is what they understood was meeting violence with violence. What they didn't know how to deal with, aside from completely subverting it and sabotaging it, was generating goodwill throughout the community through these social programs. So that was the real threat to Hoover in his eyes. Amazing. So at this point. The party at the top had gotten a little the foundation had gotten a little loose due to a couple of things going back in time a little bit a few years before Huey Newton was arrested and convicted of killing a police officer. Which. On one hand. It sort of removed one of the pieces of the foundation. Which made it a little bit weaker at the top. On the other hand, it really got people around this free Huey Newton campaign. Yeah, that was Cleaver's phrase. Yeah. Free Huey. And again, the white liberals got on board, and it kind of swept the nation that basically Huey Newton was involved in a shootout with the cops and they thought wrongfully imprisoned and kind of railroaded through the system. In one sense, it sort of galvanized the movement. And another, anytime one of the leaders is operating out of jail, then that's not good. And he wasn't the only one. Actually, I think all three of the original Bobby Seal was in and out of jail a couple of times. And I think by this point, too, cleaver had fled the country to avoid jail and ended up in Algeria. He did so back in 1968 as part of a patrol. Cleaver and Bobby Hutton, who was the first recruit of Black Panthers and by this time was the treasurer of the Oakland chapter. They were part of a patrol that ended up was pulled over by two cops, and those two cops ended up dead, and everybody in the car fled, and Hutton and Cleaver fled to a basement where they got in the shootout for 90 minutes with police. The police threw in tear gas, and the tear gas, I guess, exploded and caught the basement on fire. So Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Hutton decided that they were going to surrender. So they came out with their hands up, unarmed, and the cops surrounded them and shot Hutton in the head, just executed him right there on the sidewalk. And Cleaver was taken to jail. He made bail. And right when he made bail, he was like, See you. Yeah, he split. He went to Cuba because Fidel Castro was a long time and big supporter of the Black Panther Party. Sure, there's apparently still one of them, mata Shakur, I believe, who is living still in exile in Cuba today, who's a Black Panther. But Eldridge Cleaver, I guess. Didn't like the climate. Ended up with Kathleen Cleaver in Algeria and formed the international chapter of the Black Panther Party. And that's where they would receive dignitaries from the North Vietnamese government or from Cuba or any kind of left leaning revolutionary group would come meet them there. And that was enormous because basically no other black liberation or black rights movement group had genuine, legitimate international support. The Black Panthers did. And in the eyes of the world, that boosted their credibility just through the roof. Oh, yeah. All right, so there's a bit of a I don't want to say power vacuum, but slight leadership vacuum because of the various top original founders being away from Oakland, either in jail or Algeria or in and out of jail. And it could have potentially been filled by a young man out of Chicago named Fred Hampton. And we will get back to Fred story right after this. All right, so Fred Hampton, by all accounts from this documentary and my research, seemed like he could have been the Bobby Kennedy of the Black Panther Party. Vivacious. He was a great speaker. He would give these speeches and just galvanize people. He had a great personality, and he was really getting kind of the movement back on track again in a big, big way when he was pretty much I'm not even going to say pretty much when he was politically assassinated by the FBI and Chicago Police Department. Yeah, he was executed for sure. What was it, december or fourth is when the raid went down. So it's something like 04:00 a.m.. Sometime in the wee hours, the cops kicked in the door fred Hampton's house or the house where he was staying. And 90 bullets, I saw 90, also saw 190 bullets were shot fired from the Chicago Police Department, and one bullet was shot by the Black Panthers. And that bullet was shot when the bodyguard to Fred Hampton his name was Mark Clark, was shot and killed and dropped the shotgun he was holding, and it went off. Yeah. And we should mention, too, this was one of many what they called raids after Hoover issued that edict that they were the largest and I'm sure there was an internal memo as well, which we don't know about, but when he issued that edict that they were the most threatening group to the United States democracy. It was pretty much open season, and they carried out these raids all over the country, where essentially cops would just kick indoors, guns blazing, shoot first, don't even ask questions. Yeah. But this one was a little more even worse, it was even more pronounced because this was targeted. Yes, exactly. And it was targeted specifically for Fred Hampton. And it kind of falls in line with this part of COINTELPRO. One of the foundations of COINTELPRO was that it sought to prevent the rise of a black messiah that could consolidate the masses. And that was Fred Hampton. Right. Well, he definitely fell in that. It was MLK. So was Malcolm X. Basically, any black leader that was assassinated definitely fell within that. And Fred Hampton did as well, for sure. So he was assassinated not by the FBI, but by the Chicago PD. But the Chicago PD were able to carry out a targeted rate because the FBI had supplied them with a map drawn by one of their informants of the apartment Fred Hampton was staying in. Yeah. And it was under the guise of they have a stash of guns in there, which they did have a stash of guns and ammunition in there. And that was the excuse they used to go in and shoot him in bed while he slept. Yeah. And if you are questioning whether this was actually an attempt on Fred Hampton's life, those 90 bullets that were fired, most of them went into Fred Hampton. And three people who were sleeping in the same bed as Hampton, where he was shot and killed, were not hit by bullets at all. Yeah. Including his eight and a half month pregnant girlfriend, who they grabbed by the hair and threw into the other room, tore her robe open. And the story of the cops was they knocked on the door, were denied entry. Then they opened the door, and there was a woman aiming a shotgun at them. Later on ballistics test, they did everything and basically figured out that was 100% sham. All the bullets were found, ballistically to have gone into the apartment, none going out of the apartment, through the walls. And in this documentary, they interviewed a few of the people that are in there, and they were just like it was mass murder. They basically just came in and shot the place up. They examined the angle of the wound that showed that Hampton was lying on his back in bed from somebody standing above him. And in 1970, a coroner's jury ruled the deaths. Justifiable everyone got away with it but the city eventually. And the federal judge approved a $1.85 million settlement. But that wasn't until the years later. But the FBI, apparently the agent who was handling the informant who produced the map was so pleased with the results that after the raid that resulted in Hampton's execution, he, I guess, mailed J. A. Gar Hoover with a request for an extra $300 because he wanted to give the informant a bonus. Yeah, bigger black eyes on American history, for sure. One of the other black eyes on the Chicago PD at this time was one of these raids was on the Breakfast for Children program where the supplies for breakfast were burned. Like the place was set on fire by the cops. The Black Panthers are at, like, open war with the FBI and with the police department to the late 60s were crazy. Yeah. In large part because of this. Yeah. I mean, for sure. There was another big shootout, and this is all sort of coming to a head. If it feels that way, that's exactly what's going on. In 1969, there was another big shootout, and this was major. And I think it was in Los Angeles, wasn't it? Yeah, it was. It was the first time a SWAT team was ever used. Yeah, they employed the SWAT team, which was invented by the LAPD and 200 La. Police. And I think it was like six or eight Black Panther Party members were involved in a full on, hour long gun battle just right there in the streets. So things are coming to a head. Sort of the secret plan here by Hoover is working, which is he wants to fracture the party from within and sow seeds of discontent and discord. So they had been through the years planting informants in the Black Panther Party in the party, and they knew it. The Black Panthers did. So a lot of distrust. When, you know, who can you trust? A lot of this distress happens even among the higher ups that were formerly like a pretty strong union. Right. And that happened for sure. It's a case of Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton. When Huey Newton got out of jail, he was eventually freed, and it was a big deal. And they thought this was going to be sort of the rebirth of the Black Panther Party in the wake of the death of Fred Hampton. But he came out of jail, and he and Cleaver, they always sort of had different priorities, but they managed to come together. But they were truly fractured at this point. Yeah, they were. Newton and Cleaver were, like, openly criticizing one another with Cleaver still in exile. But Cleaver had the entire New York chapter dedicated to them. And years prior, the Black Panthers had formed what was called the Black Liberation Army, but it was an army of defense until 1971, I believe. He was still in absentia, but Eldridge Cleaver said, hey, we're going to take this from defensive to offensive and basically create a new terrorist group out of the Black Liberation Army. And they started a campaign of violence against cops where they would ambush cops and just kill them. There wasn't any retaliation for police brutality. It wasn't self defense. Like, they were ambushing and killing cops. And it happened in cities around the country. And the fracture between the Black Panthers itself was so deep that Cleaver's faction and Newton's faction were assassinating one another. We're taking out each other's people. So it was a big deal. And the Black Liberation Army officially split from the Black Panthers. In. Yeah. And of course, at this point, Herbert Hoover is sitting back in his chair, choking on his cigar from laughter because this is exactly what he wanted. Was this infighting? So Newton gets out of jail. He's trying to get the social programs going again, but he also becomes addicted to drugs and by all accounts is sort of losing his mind and has become power hungry and has sort of lost the original calling that he had and has gotten sort of drunk with power and was not functioning mentally like he should have been due to the drugs. Right. So it was his big beginning of the flame out for himself and the party. Yeah, for sure. His downfall, definitely. It didn't exactly mirror the party, but it was a herald of one of the founders was totally losing his marbles. Yeah. Because he was addicted to heroin and cocaine, and he actually had a very sad end. He died during a drug deal on the street in 1009 and Auckland. But he said that he was committing revolutionary suicide by being addicted to drugs and basically killing himself that way. Yeah. Some of the other ones had not quite as tragic but strange ends. Like Eldridge Cleaver. Right. Yeah. When he returned from Algeria with Kathleen Cleaver, he became I think both of them might have become born again Christians. And Eldritch Cleaver eventually became a registered Republican. Yeah. I did not see that coming. I did not either, and I'm sure a lot of people didn't. Right. And then I mention the internal violence with one another. Right? Yeah. There was a big turning point as far as public sympathy went. In 69, there was a guy named Alex Rackley who was a member of the New York chapter, and he was suspected to be an FBI informant. And it's still, after all these years, never come to light whether he was or not, but the Panthers had the idea that he was. So they took him to the New Haven chapter where he was tortured. They tied him up to a bed and poured boiling water on his body for days. And then eventually, I guess, he confessed. Although, if you ever listen to our torture episode right. False confession. Torture. Yes. You can get a false confession pretty easy if you torture somebody. They took him out to the woods and shot him in the head and chest and left him. And when his body was discovered, bobby Seale had been in New Haven speaking at Yale, like, just hours before the guy was killed. So he got charged with the murder. And this is one of the founders of the Black Panther Party. On trial for murder. And during this trial, which he was acquitted, but a lot of the infighting came out, and the Panthers had managed to keep it out of the public eye and under wraps for up to this point. Now it came out in the trial. So people realized that there was a lot of schisms and fractures within the leadership itself. They lost a lot of public sympathy when they found out that they would carry out extra judicial justice on their own members. And it was a big thing. It was a big turning point for the party as far as the public was concerned. Yeah, like I said, they were sort of the two factions with Cleaver and Newton. Some people went with Cleaver, some people went with Newton. A lot of people left the Black Panther Party, period, at this point, because they either didn't know who to give their allegiance to or they just felt betrayed by this fracture and the party wasn't what they thought it was. So the numbers are declining. It's definitely in sort of free fall at this point, and Bobby Seale decides, here's what we need to do. We need to close down as many chapters as we can and pool the resources and the money and bring everyone out here to Oakland because I'm going to run for mayor. And we need to go all in on this legit push for political candidacy because I think I can win. So they literally called up people on the East Coast, in the Baltimore office and New York offices, and said, Shut them down. Come out here to California, and we need to go all in on not only running for mayor, but on a massive voter registration campaign to register people in urban communities to vote. So I think in the end, they got, like, 50,000 new people registered to vote. And out of eight or nine candidates, he finished close enough in second to get a runoff. He got, like, 40% of the vote. Yeah. But ultimately lost in a runoff, in a narrow runoff and did not win, which sort of was one of the final nails in the coffin for the party because they had committed so many resources to try and get behind Bobby Seal's run for mayor. And he, incidentally, still lives in the Bay Area and is very much still an activist. Bobby Seal is. Yeah, he was also did you ever see that documentary on the Chicago Eight? It was, like, animated. No, it's very good. Yeah. He was one of the Chicago Eight. And Seal, he actually went to prison. This is before his mayoral run. But he did. Like. Four years. Or at least was sentenced to four years strictly for contempt of court because he rejected that he was getting a fair trial because I don't think there was a single black person on the jury. And he rejected that he was being tried by a jury of his peers. And he kept protesting in the middle of court. And eventually, at one point, the judge had him gagged. But he got, like, four years for that. Yeah, gagged is in, literally chained to his seat with tape over his mouth. Yes. And that set off all sorts of protests in the streets. People want that judge removed. I thought that was that not during the Panther 21 trial. Was that the other one, Chicago? No, that was the Chicago Eight trial. Okay. And that was a different trial. Also, where did you ever hear the urban legend that Hillary Clinton got Bobby Seal off of murder charges? Yes. That came out of that Alex Rackley trial where he was on trial for murder and he was acquitted. And Hillary Rodham Clinton was nowhere near the actual trial as his attorney. She apparently was a law student at Yale still and was coordinating with the ACLU to monitor the trial. So she was there, but apparently had nothing to do with the defense. Got you. But that was an urban legend that came out of the 2000 senatorial campaign. Well, the Panther 21, I mentioned just quickly, that was in New York, the New York Chapter 21 leaders at the Black Panther Party were rounded up and arrested on conspiracy charges. And this is a really big deal because the New York chapter was one of the biggest ones in the country after Oakland. And people got involved and tried to raise money, like celebrities got involved and donated money. And at one point, I don't know if it still is, but it was the longest criminal proceeding in New York state history. It was a 13 month trial by jury, and they were all found not guilty and released. All of them were found not guilty? Yeah. The pan through 21. Wow. And that's jumping back in time a little bit. I just wanted to mention that. So there's a distinct legacy beyond just the look or the image or black Power. And black Power we should also say. I think it was Stokely Carmichael who either coined that phrase or at least was the first to really kind of pick it up and run with it. And Stokely Carmichael is Nonviolent Student Coordinating Committee. They got together with the Black Panthers early on, just in the popular culture, the Black Panthers live on. But there's even more of a legacy as well. Before he died, Eldridge Cleaver gave an interview, I think back in 1997, and he said that he basically blamed the gang violence that plagued inner cities in the 80s. He traced that directly to the death of the Black Panthers. He said that as it was, the US government chopped off the head of the Black Liberation movement and left the body there armed. That's why all these young bloods are out there now. They've got the rhetoric, but without the political direction, and they've got the guns. Interesting. So he basically traces that directly to the Black Panthers being taken down. You got anything else? Actually, I do. So we were talking about how there's a legacy there's not just a legacy of the Black Panthers. It's a legacy of brutality against black people that apparently is at least as bad, if not worse today than it has been. Chuck so, the Tuskegee University in Alabama has records of all the linking that took place in the Jim Crow era. 1895 and 2911 black Americans were lynched during those years. And the worst year of the Jim Crow era was 1892, and 161 people were lynched. In 2015, 258 black people were killed by police in the United States. So not a lot has changed, and it's possible that it's gotten worse. But if you look to the Black Lives Matter movement, they have chosen the way of king and preaching nonviolent rhetoric for social change rather than the Black Panther rhetoric of militancy and violent self defense. Yeah, I think a bit of the Black Panther Party spirit, though, is alive in the Black Lives Matter movement. For sure. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. That's all I've got. That's all I've got. Good one. Yes, I thought so, too, man. Do you ever see the movie, the one with, like, Mario Van Peebles? Yeah, he made it. He wasn't in, I don't think. Okay. No, I didn't. I heard it was not good. Yeah, I want to see Malcolm X. I've never seen that one. Oh, that's great. Is it? Yeah. Spike Lee's movie. Sure. Yeah, really good. Okay, I'll check that out. Yeah, the Panther movie. I just read a few reviews today, and apparently the setup is pretty good with some of the history, but then it kind of goes off the rails. Okay. And not just goes off the rails like bad movie, but bad movie, and not historically accurate or honoring, like, the subject matter dance scenes keep breaking out. But I do think that I was like, man, why hasn't there been a movie made about Fred Hampton? Yeah, he sounds like he's a pretty inspiring figure. Yeah. Seeing some of the speeches, like, he had it going on. He said his one big quote was, we're not going to fight fire with fire. We're going to fight fire with water. Nice. I thought that was a good one. Yeah, that's a great one. Yes. That's black messiah talk right there. Exactly. If you want to know more about the Black Panthers, there's a bunch of stuff you can do. You can go on to the site@housetoforecast.com and search those terms. You can go watch Black Panthers. Vanguard of Revolution. You can watch Black Power mixtape that has a lot to do with the Black Panthers. I haven't seen it yet, though, have you? No. You can go to Emory University, I bet, and get in touch with Kathleen Cleaver and maybe offer to buy her coffee. Yeah, there's just a lot of really good articles out there that just search Black Panthers, and there's a lot of eye opening history that you didn't learn in school. And since I said you didn't learn in school, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this addendum to rubber trade from the Elastics episode. Hey, guys, just listen to the one on Elastics. It was fun and informative as usual, but I wanted to call attention to a small, important omission. You were discussing the rubber trade in Latin America, and you only mentioned Brazil, although it was indeed the largest exporter of rubber in the area, the Amazon basin and the Putumayo River Valley region in Peru and Colombia were also important sites for the production of rubber trees. Sadly, when you combine global demand with a natural product, the result is usually some form of exploitation. In the case of rubber, it came to a horrible extreme with the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company, or as it was known in Spanish, the Casa Arana, named for Julio Cesar Arana, a Peruvian businessman that set up shop in the region, enslaved, tortured, and mutilated indigenous populations to the brink of extinction and the pursuit of rubber. His crimes were documented and made public in 1913, but his business and atrocities only stopped when rubber production moved to Asia and he couldn't compete. This whole rubber bonanza is chronicled in the excellent Columbian novel The Whirlwind by Je Rivera. Today, the offices of the company, the Casa Arana, or Arana House, are being converted into a historic site. Remembers of local tribes can gather and remember those atrocities in their own way, telling their own stories and their own words. This is one of those poorly documented, poorly discussed examples of genocide as a result of trade, at least in Colombia, every kind of economic bonanza is somehow tied to one massacre or another. So that's the downer I wanted to share. Nice. Who is that? That's from Bogota. Santiago. Santiago is the person who wrote it in. Yes. Thanks a lot for writing that, Santiago. We appreciate it. Yes, that's a good one. And this has been like an eye opening history lesson through and through, huh? Absolutely. If you want to give us an eye opening history lesson, we love those. So get in touch with us. You can tweet to us at Joshua and at Syskpodcast. You can hang out with us on Facebook at Charles W. Chuckbryant and stuffychannel. 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 howstofworks.com. Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon music that's so good it's Criminal morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Erkart and. Hairstylist Ash Kelly. This charttopping series will have hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
What is terror management theory? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-is-terror-management-theory | Terror management theory isn't about mid-level bureaucrats in Al-Qaeda -- so what exactly is it, and what does it say about human culture and our perception of mortality? Join Chuck and Josh as they explore the implications of terror management theory. | Terror management theory isn't about mid-level bureaucrats in Al-Qaeda -- so what exactly is it, and what does it say about human culture and our perception of mortality? Join Chuck and Josh as they explore the implications of terror management theory. | Tue, 24 May 2011 15:49:35 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=15, tm_min=49, tm_sec=35, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=144, tm_isdst=0) | 25139075 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey. Hi. I'm Josh Clark. That was Chuck Bryan who just said hi. Good times. When you put the two of us together, you're going to get something called Stuff You Should Know. It's like mixing baking soda and vinegar and chest hair. That's stuff you should know. Gross. It's explosive, right? It is. Chuck? Yes? Are you okay? Yeah. Great. Okay. Does that not sound convincing? No. And I know that you won't be okay by the time we finish this one. I thought this is very interesting and well written. Thank you very much. I would agree. It was very interesting. Of course. Well written. Have your fingers doing the typing. Thank you, Chuck. I appreciate that. You want to do this one? Yes. Okay. So, Chuck, there was a study released in a little known journal called Conservation Letters. You may have heard of it. Okay. Have you? I hadn't until I read this. I hadn't either until I found it, but it was by Conservation International, will Turner and a couple of other people from that group. And the point of this paper was to point out that even though we may try to mitigate climate change, we're still screwing things up by trying to mitigate it, and by not preparing for the worst eg climate change, we're ultimately going to screw things up after the Earth is already screwed up. Okay, let me give you a couple of examples, all right? First is one fifth of all the world's tropical forests lie within a few kilometers of areas that would be totally underwater if sea levels rose by just 1 meter, right? Yes. 31 miles of heavy human population would be underwater. 31 miles. The forests are within 31 miles of heavy human populations. Right. And so these human populations aren't just going to sit there and drown one and take one for the Earth? No, they're going to move upward, and as they move upward, they're going to encounter these forests and they're going to say, hey, that bird looks delicious. Hey, I can burn this tree and cook this bird. Hey, Mama, let's get it on. There's going to be all sorts of weird things said in these forests after climate change takes place, right? Yeah. These untouched forests will now be touched and plundered. Right. And by the way, the same one fifth of the forests are home to exactly half of all of the alliance for Zero Extinction sites, which means that these are sites where animals that are filled with animals that are on the verge of extinction, humans show up, it's over. Okay? Right. So that's if climate change happens and we don't figure out what we're going to do for shelter and fuel and food ahead of time, right. That's just natural. That's the scenario. The other scenario is, okay, we're trying to mitigate climate change now before some sort of disaster happens in the future, right? Yes. Let's say hydroelectric power. Yeah. Let's build a dam. Why not? Because that's clean and green. Yes. When you release water, it makes turbines move, which generates electricity. Completely cleanly. Right. Yeah. So how can you go wrong, Chuck? Well, it didn't say so in this particular paper, but I remember a little podcast we did about reservoir induced seismicity and a Science Channel short film we did on that yes. Where building dams can potentially cause instability in tectonic plates from the heavy water and then no water. Yeah. And if you build one too close to a dam, it could cause an earthquake. Cause an earthquake. So that's one way. That's one way. Another way is that when you build a dam, that river backs up and creates a lake in an area that wasn't ever really supposed to be a lake, and all of the deer and the squirrels and the koala bears and the plants are in big trouble. Right. What's more, you also affect the freshwater downstream of the dam, and basically, you screw up the environment. Right. This sounds like a you're darned if you do, you're darned if you don't kind of thing. Right. So, Chuck, somebody reading a news report about this paper could say, what's the point? Why do anything, right? Just let me eat my Hungry Man dinner, and I don't care anymore. I don't care. Right. Like, I can't do anything about it. Yeah. And that very understandable and reasonable reaction is kind of caused for concern among a lot of critics of the media, because let's talk about whether or not science believes that anthropogenic or man made climate change is real. Josh, National Academy of Sciences. Who? We actually know some people there, very nice people. They do great work. We do. Hi, Rick. Hey, Rick. Hey, Marty. 1372 scientists were polled by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and 97% agreed that anthropogenic climate change is a real thing. And they even went so far as to say, what's up with you 3%? What do you think? And they kind of found out that they didn't have the expertise to really determine that. Right. They went back and shamed them. Yeah. Based on that 3% citation and publication rates, they said, these people are basically stupid, which is why they don't believe in man made a climate change. Right. So this poll at least indicates that science says, yeah, man made climate change is happening. It's a real thing. Okay, so you have science on the one hand saying, yes, there's a problem, people. And you have the public on the other hand saying, all right, I don't want to drown, and I don't want to drive these species out of extinction. What can I do? What can I do, mr. Scientist? And the group that serves to connect these two, the people who know there's a problem and maybe have answers, and the people who can actually create change by carrying out these solutions is the media. And it's about here where that disconnect comes about, especially when there's doomsday scenarios. Yeah. Let me read you another stat which feels a little awkward because he found the stat a Gallup poll last year. In 2010, the future 48% of Americans said they believe that the seriousness of global warming is, quote, generally exaggerated. And that was a 17% rise from 1997, when we supposedly have a lot more information, probably over that time period. And you hit the nail in the head. It's because of something called alarmism, thanks to something called the media. Right. And part of it is alarmism. Another part is that there's such a thing as professional climate skeptics, like bloggers, reporters, media influencers, who are like, no, it's not real, and then take money from PR companies. Sure. But part of it is alarmism. If you put enough problems onto a person, they're going to just throw up their hands and give up. Well, there's also a British study that you found that the think tank Institute for Public Policy Research, they did a review of more than 600 news articles in the UK. This is just in the UK, right? Yeah. On climate change. Yeah. And they found we should read some of these. This is the alarmist language being used by some of these 600 articles. Right. The climate of fear, serious climate change is now inevitable. That was James Lovelock, the person who came up with a guy of theory. He also said, same guy said, the Earth has passed the point of no return. He also called for the temporary suspension of democracy until we can handle climate change. Really? Yeah. Another one said we're headed for Dodo status words like point of no return, civilizational collapse, global chaos and Malcolm Gladwell's favorite tipping point. Yeah. Your favorite person. So that was the alarmist language. Right. And it creates the sense of enormity. Right. And that sense of enormity creates a reasonable distancing from the problem. Like, there's nothing I can do about this. There's nothing any of us can do about this. Again, I follow to my Hungry Man dinner, I have to admit, well, it's a pretty normal human thing to do. Well, basically, you're kind of being charged with, like, save the planet now or humans will be extinct in the blink of an eye. Right. And who is not going to shrink from that a little bit and say, Where's my Hungry Man? Right, but they also found that there are two other large categories that climate change reporting language can be put into. There's also non pragmatic optimism, which is basically like, it's not going to happen in our lifetime. Who cares? Right? Yeah. And then there's pragmatic optimism, which is like, you can change your light bulbs and make a difference. We can save ourselves, but we have to do something. That's pragmatic optimism. What they found was far and away the most common type was alarmism, right? Yeah. Because it sells headlines. It sells headlines. It sells headlines, sells papers. It does. But there really aren't papers anymore. So it sells clicks. Exactly. 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 homepage and enter code stuff. So, Chuck, Josh, the guys who from this British think tank, what was it? The institute for public Policy Research, I don't think they meant to which is fine to say that they failed to show causation like you've got alarmist language, you have people who don't care about climate change any longer, are afraid of the problem, aren't thinking about it. They didn't show that one caused the other, they just showed that they're correlated. But other studies have shown that if you manipulate the public in a certain way, you're going to have a counterproductive reaction from them. Right? Yeah. Not the reaction that you're intending, which I thought this is really interesting. The Northwestern study you cited in 2010 in Canada, they did a public service announcement, A, that said binge drinking is a bad thing. You shouldn't binge drink, you should feel guilt and shame for binge drinking. But what happened? Well, they found that people who were already exposed to the feelings, guilt and shame and they were shown this, were likelier to go binge drink within the next two weeks than people who were exposed to these ads and had some sort of neutral emotion going on. Right? That's right. And even scarier, there was one in 2009 in the journal of Experimental Social Psychology, which is a fun read, cigarette packs, they found, that said, really blatant aggressive messages like smoking can kill you actually increase smoking in some people. Right. Very specific set of people. But if you're trying to get people across the board to quit smoking, it would be a good idea to not use these death related messages. You want to go for death neutral messages. Is that what it's called? That's what it's called. Really? Yeah. So that study, the 2009 study from the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology was carried out, conducted by some terror management theorists. Chuck that's right. Terror management theory is the coolest sounding theory of all time. Has nothing to do with terrorism. So all of you who are listening to this podcast hoping for one on terrorism, you can now be officially disappointed. Yeah. And when I first saw terror management theory, the first thing I thought it was terrorism. I think of terror. You know what I see in my mind? I see, like, a 70s horror anthology paperback cover management. Yeah, right. Yeah. Like maybe a red skull or maybe the cover to Stephen King's dense Macabre. Never seen that. Yeah, nice reference. Queen Club. What? Que Quay. You have that great funny lines in that one podcast. Which one? It was one that just came out recently when I was doing the QA for the episode, I genuinely, like, was cracking up at my desk. That is awesome. That's very good. Okay. That happens all the time now. So where are we? Carer management theory. This was created in the 1980s by psychologists at the University of Missou. Go, Tigers. Tigers. Yes. Prairie tigers. Prairie tigers. Go, Prairie tigers. And based on the work of Ernest Becker, who is the author of Denial of Death, which a lot of you may have heard of, and we've talked about him before plenty. I think we have, haven't we? We've talked about him and I think definitely. Is there a worse way to die? Yeah, he came up big time, but he was an anthropologist who basically said, okay, all culture is created to distract us from being obsessed with our inevitable death. I think he was obsessed with death. He definitely was. But through his obsession, he managed to free himself, I imagine. So that's what he thinks. It's a big distraction. Everything from sports on TV, television, probably. War is used as a distraction and to create meaning in life. Well, actually, the war was a big one that he used the I can't remember what it's called. It's not sanitology. That's like the study of death. Beckers was more like the obsession with death. But basically he was saying, we are aware, innately, that we do create culture to distract ourselves from death. So when we encounter another culture that's totally foreign or alien to us, and we look at their culture, we see how ridiculous it appears that their belief systems just appear ridiculous to us. Right. That it reminds us that we do the same thing. Our beliefs are ridiculous, and then we start thinking about our own death. So we want to destroy this culture that we encounter because it's reminding us of our own death and we hate it. How does that fit into cultural relativism on her? That's the opposite of it. I was about to say cultural relativism is also flawed, we figured out, to a certain extent, because it just allows absolutely anything wholesale, but it's the opposite of what I just described, cultural relativism. But terror management theory takes Becker's ideas and introduces them from anthropology to psychology and has really kind of started to standardize them. So the idea is that you are afraid of your own demise, and so you cling like mad to the culture that you most identify with and you've come to identify with. Yeah. And they keep finding in study after study that this theory holds up. And that's called what? Distal defense? Yes. Interesting. So let me give you an example of the study. There were a bunch of judges that were used in the study, and I guess they chose prostitution to use it as like it's the same case, same offense. It was easily standardized, maybe, but they took some judges and basically were like, hey, you're going to die eventually to one group. And then they did another group where they gave them some activity that basically guaranteed death. Saliency, I believe okay. Where they weren't thinking about death at all. Right. And they sent both groups out to handle their prostitution cases. And the judges who have been reminded of their mortality tended to throw the book at prostitutes. And the researchers theorized or postulated that the reason these guys through the book of prostitutes is because they were buying into their culture. They were clinging to their culture, the morals and laws and what they believed in. Right. And if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Chuck, you've been hungover, like, tragically hungover before, right? Yeah, once or twice. So you don't want to take any risks whatsoever. You kind of feel like you're at Death Star. You're on some sort of edge right there where you're really hanging out there and you're really vulnerable. And Milo Notice makes you cry while you're watching it on the couch. You really need to be around Emily and have her support right then. Right, yeah. I think that's the root of it. That's the basis of it. When we're reminded of death, we cling to what we find comfort in, and we tend to find comfort in the charade of society or culture that we create. I bet you could even trickle it down a little bit, even beyond death, when you're feeling most fragile and vulnerable. Which obviously death would be the ultimate in vulnerability. Exactly. But that's when you need the support most, and you cling to what you know most. Right, but I mean, like, if you got fired from a job or something, there was some disruption to your normal life. Right. You're going to cling to it. So that's distal. That's the distal defense. There's also proximal. This is what regards to climate change. Yeah. And that's when you downplay the seriousness of something like that's. Kind of me, I don't think about death much, and I'm willing to really, like, play it down, probably be like, oh, you know, sure, I'm going to die when I'm old, like everybody. But I don't want to think about that. You just downplay the significance of it. Right. I wonder, though, I mean, is that the best you can hope for? What? To die when you're old? No. To just kind of downplay it and not genuinely not worry about it. Is that really flawed? I hope not. I never think about death. But I guess what I ask because I have the same approach, I tend to think, well, okay, I'm aware that I'm going to die one day. I'm aware of death. I don't think about it. I'm not obsessed with death, especially not my own. But I wonder sometimes, like, in that last few minutes, am I going to freak out? Because people do. Yeah, you don't see that in the movies. Emily is very preoccupied with death. Really? Yeah. She didn't talk about it much, but she's kind of a very dark side. Like, oh, I'm driving home and I could easily slip off the road and hit that tree, or there's a tornado watch in the area and a tree is going to fall on her house and kill us all in our sleep. I don't think about that stuff. But how does she react to that? I think there's a low level of anxiety, probably. Yeah, she would probably agree with that. Yeah, she doesn't listen to the shutter. That's fine. Say whatever you want now. 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 longterm commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. So you got proximal and distal defense mechanisms when reminded of mortality, right? Yeah. And imagine both can probably happen too, right? Sure. Not one or the other. Right. But with the doomsday scenario on climate change, it seems like terror management can explain that through the proximal defense where you just downplay it like, oh, okay, well who cares? It's not that big of a deal. It's not going to happen in our lifetime, that kind of thing. So I guess if we were to give advice to the media, which we never do in an article yes. The media doesn't listen to us anyway, even though we're sort of a part of it. Are we? I don't know if we ever fully concluded that it would be to basically adopt the more pragmatic, optimistic approach I think tends to work. But it doesn't look like the media is going to do it Chuck, because tell me about CFLs. Yes Josh, CFLs. When they first came out it was all the rage and green living and as soon as everyone was like, yeah you know what, I can deal with the fact that it looks a little funny and I'm not used to this white or light. I'm going to do it because I'm going to do my part, my very small part. I can't exact change against climate change and in the media all of a sudden started reporting stories about mercury. Is it mercury? Yeah. And CFLs and you're going to die if you use them. Exactly. Alarmist language. This is sensationalism. And it's been around since the first words were printed. Extra. Read all about it. It was like you're going to die from the plague. It's still around. In this case it's climate change and it's making people shrink under their couch instead of doing small things that can actually make a difference. Prescription doctor Bryant. You know what I do is I don't watch local news. I don't watch any news. Really? No. Do you? No. Now that I think about it, not really. I mean I watch selective stuff like if there's like a good video or something I'll watch it. But I think I get most of my news from Twitter or magazines. Yeah, I get most of mine from the internet and a lot of times not from leading sources on the internet. You can usually get an honest truth if you seek out some of these other websites. Yeah, okay. I wish I could think of one. So terror management theory and Ernest Becker makes another cameo. Thank you, Dr. Becker, for showing up. If you want to learn more about doomsday, climate scenarios, terror management theory, tobacco warnings, this article has got it all. You can type in doomsday and climate change and I think it will bring this article up and Handy search Bar brings up listener mail. That's right Josh. We're going to call this. These kids are ripping us off. Is this Catholic stuff you should know? No, just tongueincheek. So Josh. So, Chuck, we are teachers so, Jerry, we are teachers at Mountain Ridge Middle School in Colorado Springs at the base of America's Mountain Pikes Beach. We were inspired by your podcast over the years and became regular listeners and decided our 8th grade class should write podcasts in the style of stuff you should know. Record them and edit them. Sounds like a good thing. Yeah. Cool exercise. So we shared portions of some of your podcasts with the kids, asked them to develop the plan and rubric, and based on the elements that they heard in your show, the Chuck and Josh is a jazzy theme song jokes and stats demonstrating a thorough understanding. Listener mail, the whole soup, the nuts. Basically, the students were permitted to choose their topics. We encourage them to find out what's the deal with whatever they were curious about. Topics range from hover crafts to grilled meat and carcinogens to hypoglycemia. So these are some smart kids. Yeah. The sound quality isn't as crisp, obviously, but you think you'll get a kick out of it. You should have heard our first one before we got microphones. The most interesting aspect, though, guys, was you're really surprised who excelled. One pair of students didn't have a history of being the most academically motivated, but their delivery was really smooth and professional. And the Emo kids were surprisingly funny. They seemed to get the Chuck and Josh banner and could become excellent radio personalities one day. Awesome. Another group, shall we say, is not the most socially proficient face to face, but behind the microphone they really came alive and had a fluid delivery and were animated. That was The Emokids. The chemistry was amazing between them. So that is from Emily and Sean, who are the tag coordinator and IB coordinator at enrichment team leaders. Right. And we have a clip. They sent us a clip. And we're going to play just a little snippet right now. Let's see what you guys hey. From Colorado Springs, Colorado. It's just like Mother used to him. Some originated from the older tradition of tea tasting. When people discovered the Tea Health Digestion, they began adding food to tea time, giving them dim slum. Dim slum is a dish that involves small, individual portions of food, usually served in a steamed basket or on a plate, is typically served as a breakfast. This usually includes vegetables, steamed dumplings, roasted chicken, and rice and noodles. Awesome. Pretty cool, huh? Yeah. Little emulators, little ripoff artists. Yeah, I know. Just kidding. You guys will be hearing from our lawyers. That was an excellent job, and we want to tell the whole class where to go. And that's really cool that your teachers did this. Yeah. So thank you, Emily and Sean, for letting us know about this. We appreciate it. You guys keep on keeping on. Keep doing all sorts of cool things. Don't be so judgmental of The Emo kids. They're people, too. If you have a cool theory that you'd like us to hear of I'm always down for cool theories, aren't you? Yes. Send it to us via email at stuffpodcast@housetuffs.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseupworks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The House of Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on itunes. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means schools out, the sun's shining, the daylights longer. And best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music my Favorite Murder from exactly right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarif and Georgia Hardstarkk, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanted 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/2017-07-01-sysk-metric.mp3 | SYSK Selects: Why isn't the U.S. on the metric system? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-why-isnt-the-u-s-on-the-metric-system | In this week's SYSK Select episode, the U.S. stands proudly defiant and the world looks at Americans as dopes for the U.S.'s stubborn refusal to go metric. However, the States have been going metric for about 150 years. Find out what's the haps in this we | In this week's SYSK Select episode, the U.S. stands proudly defiant and the world looks at Americans as dopes for the U.S.'s stubborn refusal to go metric. However, the States have been going metric for about 150 years. Find out what's the haps in this we | Sat, 01 Jul 2017 19:24:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=19, tm_min=24, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=182, tm_isdst=0) | 34992484 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everyone, it's me, Josh. And this week for SYSK Selects, I've picked why Isn't the US on the metric system? The big spoiler is this. It kind of is. So check it out. Welcome to you. Stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W, Chuck Bryant, and since we're together and there's some microphones present and Jerry's in the other room, this is Stuff You should do. That's right. Yeah. There's a musty, dusty little hole. I'm glad to be back in this room, actually. Me, too, because we did these in another room for a little while again, just moving us around. Yeah. We don't have a process or something. Yeah. What they do is they tie a yarn around one of the microphones, and they just sort of drag it through the building and we just chase after it like a little dumb puppy. Yeah. It works with dollar bills, too. Yeah, dollar bills and microphones. So you're doing okay? I am sleepy. Well, that's good, because we'll see what happens. This one might put you all the way to sleep. I was up all night. Yeah. This is going to be fun. Are you hallucinating at all? I'm a little funky, so cool. Yeah. This should be good numbers. This is history, though, really. Yes, it is. More than math. History, culture, anger. Yeah. Napoleon, for God's sake. Yeah. We're talking about the metric system. That makes sense to say that, Chuck. We've got this kind of meme that's run through our podcast, where we kind of make fun of the metric system, but we also go to the trouble of calling out the metric equivalent of whatever we're talking about with feet, usually. Sometimes we're sort of at it. Like, if we feel like doing it, we'll do it. Yes. But we've done it enough, so it's become a thing. Yeah. Right. The metric system and us. Has become a thing. I thought it was high time that we got to the bottom of this whole big problem, which is the US. Is the only industrialized nation that isn't on the metric system. Right. Fully on the metric system as a nation. You did a great job with that, man. That is absolutely true. We're the only industrialized nation that doesn't have compulsory, compulsory metric system usage. It's voluntary, but it's still pretty widespread. And if you go back and look at our law books, the law of the land, you will find that the metric system is very much entrenched in the US. And so all these people who say the US. Isn't on the metric system, you're wrong, largely. Yeah. Look at your ruler there in your little three ring binder. Probably says centimeters and millimeters. That's metric. Right. But that's if you're in the US. If you're elsewhere outside of the US. They just have centimeters and millimeters. Right. They don't throw the inch in there. No, the inch is so clean, though. I love the inch. It is clean, and it is it represents this legacy from so long ago, when people used the width of a human man's thumb as a measurement, and that was an inch. And apparently there's some languages out there where inch and thumb are the same word. They're interchangeable. Yeah. I wondered about if obviously, the article points out, in the early days, like, you said, they would use body parts. Like, what was the fore is what you think it is. Yeah. Like, people that had smaller of these, did they get ripped off in transactions? Slightly. Like, I got a small thumb. Like, what are we going to do? Right. Or do you bring along your buddy? Do you hire the guy with the big thumbs? Be like, you're working for me in transactions. That's what they call the master blaster technique. That's where the heavy hitter came from. But yeah. So there's a certain kind of earthy colloquialism to the US customary system, which is what we use. The inch, the foot. An acre, did you know, is the average amount of land that a human with a team of auction could plow in a day? That's where we got the acre from. That's cool. It all makes sense that it's root. The problem is it's extraordinarily unscientific. Yeah, true. Which is what the meter is. The metric system is extremely scientific, but it's got its roots fairly far back itself. It goes back to, like, 1670. Should we get into this? Let's talk about this. Sounds a great robust intro. You're feeling good? Yeah. Okay, good. Thanks. All right. So like we said, for many, many years, as man evolved into smaller societies, into bigger and bigger ones, the thumb and the foot and the forearm and things like that, it's getting a little crazy to handle all this, right? Especially if you're using a forum over here. But this guy is using a neck. Yeah. You both have swords. So as we formed larger societies, we thought, you know what? It's getting really confusing. We got commerce going between various lands. We got to codify this, right? Or do you say codify? I say codify. Oh, you do. Good. Well, we agree on a pronunciation. So in France, things were just as confusing, and by the time the French Revolution came around, they said, you know what? Everything is all wackadoo. Charlemagne here has had a pretty good system in effect for a while. Let's just dive into this system that Paris uses. Well, yeah, the problem is Paris wasn't any more scientific than anybody else's, but it was Paris. It was. And that was, I think, Louis the 16th that ordered some people to start looking into how to standardize measurements, because France had it worse than anybody, right? Well, yeah, because they thought it was a good idea. But he got more pushback than he thought from the noble folk, so much so that they overthrew him yes. And he said, you know what? Let's convene here the Estates General, which was supposedly a group of an assembly of people from various classes to be all represented, and let's figure this out once and for all. Right. And again, they overthrew the king. But along the way, they also adopted a systemized standard of measurements, which is based on this stuff devised by a monk back in well, matrix was the system. Right. But metric comes from the Greek, which means to measure, right? That's right. So Mutant came up with this idea that you should take you should be able to create a standard unit of distance of length based on something that has to do with the Earth. Just take it away from the humans. Humans come in all shapes and sizes. You need something that's going to be persistent, and let's say a degree. Persistent. Persistent. Okay. Not only is it always there, it's in your face, too. Okay. Got you. So he was saying, let's use some sort of measure of a degree of longitude. Right. Yeah. Which makes sense, because that had already been established. Yeah. So he kind of put this forth. He said, and by the way, you should make it based on a decimal system. Very smart. A ten base system, which is very easy to divide and multiply by, and it's not arbitrary. Right. And base it all around this length, like everything, like volume, mass, all this stuff. Make sure it's around this one length. And he went and died. But his ideas lived on that's. Right. And so when the National Assembly really started to look into this system of measurement, they found Mutant's ideas were alive and well and pretty practical. Yeah. And they said, let's do this. And then they said, all right, if we're going to do this, let's form a commission from the commission and said, let's base it on these three principles that were established by Mutton, who I don't think we said it was a mathematician. Obviously, he was a mathematician and astronomer. I think they all were wrong then, weren't they? Yeah, they kind of went hand in hand. It was better they made beer. Yeah, exactly. Which meant there were also mathematicians and astronomers. Sure. So they had the three basic principles. It should be equal to a portion of the Earth's circumference. Okay, I get what they mean. But that would be any unit of length that's smaller than the Earth circumference. Yeah, I get what they're saying, though. You know what I'm saying? Like anything. You could just arbitrarily pick any length, and you could say it's based on the Earth circumference. You could. But what they were saying was it has to be a portion measured off of an already extent, like something we already know. Right. Take a portion of it. It could have been 80 miles, though. Sure, it could have been, but that wouldn't make sense. I digress. Number two, volume and mass, like you said, would be derived from length. So everything's going to be related to each other, and you could figure it out mathematically. And everything's got to be multiplied or divided by ten if you want to get something smaller or larger. A decimal system. Yeah. This is just brilliant, genius stuff for a guy in 1670 to be coming up with. Sure. And for it not to have been adopted right away. But the French, when they really started looking at it, they figured out, okay, this is a pretty good system. We're going to go with this. And those two guys started measuring from Barcelona, Spain, to Dunkirk in northern France, and they measured along this one line, and they came up with a quadrant of the circumference of the Earth, basically this meridian that ran through Paris from the North Pole to the equator. So it's a quarter of the circumference of the Earth. And they figured out that a meter could conceivably be 110 million of that quadrant. So it's 110 million of the meridian that runs through Paris as it goes from the North Pole to the equator. That's the fact of the show for me, that's a meter. And also the fact of the show said they decided how to do it and to call it a meter. And then they went, Well, I guess we need to figure out how long this thing is. I would have thought it would have been the other way around, but I guess it doesn't make sense. Like I said, it's arbitrary. Let's come up with a system and then say, all right, that base unit of measurement, how long should that be? And also, it's pretty nationalistic, too. It's this meridian that runs through Paris. Sure. The metric system is an extremely French invention. That's right. Which is kind of one of the reasons you can go back and say that the US. Doesn't have it. It's also one of the reasons a lot of the world does have it, because after the French Revolution, napoleon came to power and Napoleon conquered a lot of land and he brought the metric system with them. Yes. At this point, it was solid. I think it took five years for them to completely adopt it or officially adopt it. And once you have the meter in place, you had everything else because it was all based off the meter. Right. So they're humming along, and then, like you said, Napoleon says, I'm going to take the meter with me and conquer Europe. And now everyone all of a sudden is gaining traction. The meter across the pond in the US. At about the same time. Right. The federal government was like, you know what? You can't have a country without a uniform system of measurements and weights and all that because of commerce. Sure. That's the basis of this whole thing. Right. If you're just a little huntergatherer band and you're getting your own food, you need virtually no measurements or weights or anything like that. If you start trading with another band, you want it to be fair. You suddenly need a system of measurements and weights, and then as that trade increases more and more, the need for that system of measurements and weights to be uniform around the world increases tremendously. Right? Agreed. So the US. Assembles the colonies in the States and says, we need to have some sort of uniform system of measurements. So Thomas Jefferson was the first guy to pick that up. Right. I mean, it's in the Constitution. Yeah. Previous to that, obviously, because they came from England, they used the British standard, the British imperial system, which was pretty antiquated. Yeah. But it still looks a lot like what we're using today. Exactly. And like you said, they put it in the Constitution. What was it? Article one, section Eight. And then TJ said, you know what? I like this decimal system. I think it's a good idea. But that means we got to send these dudes over to France and we got to find out. They got to bring out their meter stick and show it to us, and we got to bring one back with us. Right. And it's really expensive, so let's just keep what we got for now. Can we trust the French? Do we need to have our own surveyors go make the same measurement and make sure that this isn't somehow like French centric, franco centric? So he kind of backed off of the whole thing. There was also a big fear that once Napoleon died down, that there was going to be a there was metric backlash. Yeah. That it was just kind of follow away side. Maybe we should wait and see. They thought sort of like investing in Napoleon. Right. Who wants to do that? Nobody. Nobody. Around about the same time. Also the French had supported the US. During the Revolutionary War, and then after the Revolutionary War, the enemies, Great Britain and the United States, established a treaty called Jay's Treaty in 1795, and basically it said, hey, let's chill out a little bit. Let's see if we can get along. We're going to withdraw our troops from the Pacific Northwest. We the Brits. You Americans can start trading in the West Indies. And the French was like, what the heck? I thought we were in bed together. Yeah. So what's going on? So all of a sudden, there's hostilities between the French and the Americans. So much so that when the French held this big metric extravaganza debuted to the world. Yeah, it's pretty funny, I thought. I mean, it was necessary, but I could picture a convention center with various styles of meter sticks. Right? Yeah, here it is. But the US. Didn't get an invitation. Yeah, they got snubbed. So let's point that out again. The US. Didn't get an invitation when France was like, the metric system works. We're going to introduce to the rest of the world. Everybody can adopt this except for you guys, because we're mad at you. Yeah. So I guess the ultimate question that we're answering in a roundabout way over this whole podcast is why isn't the US. One of those countries chalk this up as one of the early reasons why they didn't want us to? They didn't invite us. They said, screw you guys. We'll go Matrix, and you do whatever you want with your little ruler. Right. In the USA. We will. Guys, by this time, I think, 1821, john Quincy Adams ordered a survey of all of the states and all the measurements and weights used in the States, and he said, you know what? This is uniform enough. We're going to stick with this. We're fine. Yeah. We don't need this French invention. Paul Giamatti said no. Yeah, he was John Adams. Right? Yeah. Okay. However, as we said, the metric system throughout the rest of the world, despite the fact that Napoleon went by, the metric system caught on enough, and it wasn't just tied to him, and the US was like, man, Europe, you know, everyone has really gotten on this metric thing. We might have missed the boat a little bit. Right. And is that a problem? So in 1866, Andrew Johnson said, you know what? I'm going to sign into law that is lawful in the United States to employ the weights and measures of the metric system and all of our contracts and dealings and court proceedings. Like the government standard. Right. Exactly. He said, if somebody uses the metric system in a contract with you, that's legal now. So right there, the US. Just legally adopted the metric system. The big loophole was it's not compulsory right there. That's right. If somebody wants to, it's legal, right? That's right. Which is kind of funny, because that added to this already cluster of the US customary system, where there's, like, 300 different units. A lot of stuff are the same. They have the same name. There's nine different kinds of tons. I know. Did you know that? There's the short ton, which you never want to get your hands on if you're looking for a full time. That's right. The displacement time, the refrigeration ton, the nuclear ton, the register ton, the metric ton, the SA tun, and the ton of coal equivalent. Chuck, that is a ton of tons. It is. But now the metric system has just kind of poked its head in under US. Law, and it's now entrenched. It's made its first foray into the US. That's right. Flash forward another nine or ten years. Yes. 1875, another special assembly in Paris said, we're going to bring together 17 nations, and you know what, us, get your butt over here. Yeah. Come on. They're like, all right, we'll come. Come on. You okay? Don't be mad. Will you pay our way? They said, no. So they went over and signed the treaty. Of the meter, which is a real thing, set up the International Bureau of Weights and Measures and a general conference on weights and Measures to consider and adopt changes over the years. And also said, you know what, if we're going to establish this meter, we need to set up a lab where they keep all this stuff in their official form in case, like the seed vault, in case the world ever goes to pot. We got that meter stick in this closet here. Right. And they actually did have a meter stick. It was the international prototype meter. It's so funny you have to do it, though. Yeah. This is the meter, and this is the one that all are measured from. And it's housed in this area, this office in Severe. Yeah. I thought it was buried beneath a crypt in the catacombs of the Louvre. Is it? No, I'm just kidding, because it seems like something the French would do with their tom Hanks would have found it, though. Oh, I got you. Yeah. So they did have that. They had the meter. They also had the International Prototype Kilometer. They had a mile on the kilogram. Yeah. And that's made of iridium and platinum. It's kept in an airtight jar, and it is the kilogram everything else is measured off of. So they made copies of all these, and all the countries that ratified the Treaty of the Meter got copies of their own, and the US got their own in 1890. So the US is going like metric crazy now, especially because of this guy named Mendhal, right? TC. Mendenhall. Mendan hall. He was the superintendent of weights and measures. And the Mendenhall Order of 1893 said, you know what? We're going to establish our fundamental standards for LinkedIn mass on these metric units. We'll call it a yard, but a yard is eventually they settled on zero point 94 meters. Right. And the kilogram or a pound equals 0.45,359,237 kg. So think about this. This is huge. TC. Men and hall changed everything with this Men and hall order. Yeah. We still use the pound inch system, the US customary system, but it's defined by the metric system. Yeah, the si system. Right. I don't think we mentioned that yet. They haven't changed it over to that yet. No, they haven't changed the name. We're still on the metric system at this point. Just gave spoiler alert. But think about that. That's huge. So it's kind of like, all right, everybody's talking here. But if you go beneath the surface, there's one more level. The US is operating on the metric system. That's how we define everything. 120 years. Yeah. To screw you rest of the world. We are on the metric system. We just call it miles and inches. Right. So about this time, there's like this kind of metric fever that's sweeping the US. And then Men at all dies, and it kind of dies with him. Magic fever might be overstating. No, there were pennants and t shirts. All right. No, actually, that didn't come until the 70s. Yeah. So men and hall dies. Metric fever kind of dies out a little bit. And then part of that treaty of the meter, Chuck, was that there was a conference established, a conference on this metric system, where they would meet and, like, adopt changes to measure thing. Yeah, it's cool because they weren't like, this is a perfect system. It never needs to change. Right. They figured out ways to improve it over the years, and in 1960, huge change came down where they stopped tying and defining the metric units of measure to the original things like that meridian, the 10 million. Instead, they tied it to immutable laws of the universe. That made it even more precise. Man yeah. And this was mainly done because of science. Science demanded a tighter and more refined system. Right? Exactly. So now a meter is no longer defined as 110 million of the meridian that runs through Paris as it travels from the north pole to the equator. A meter is the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1299,792,458th of a second. That's a meter. Right. Or they just say, a meter is this thing, and they hold out the meter stick. Well, they still have the kilogram. It's the mass of the international prototype kilogram. That's the only one that's still tied to it. But, like a second. That's another metric standard that we use here in the US. You didn't notice the time it takes an atom of caesium 133 to vacillate 9,192,631,770 times between two hyperfine levels of its ground state. That's pretty good. So, basically what they did was the meter became even more scientific. The metric system became so scientific that they stopped calling it the metric system. They called it the si, the international standard. Right. Yeah. They could have gone the other way. They could have gotten less scientific. It would have been more fun, I think. Well, that was kind of the thing. And I think that it's like yes, it helps science tremendously. Yeah. But it also is going further away from that customary stuff that we use here. The thumb inch. Yeah. Now it's caesium 133 atoms vacillating, and it's more scientific, and it's less human. It's just more precise. Yes. Which is good for everybody. It is. They also added a lot of in just millimeters or meters or kilometers. They also added a lot more, like prefixes, like nanometer. Yeah. There's no PECO meter, which is a trillionth of a meter. Is that the smallest? Yeah, so far. Wow. Because a nanometer is a billionth of a meter. Jeez. Yeah. All right, so are we back to the US. Yeah. Things change. That's the point of all this. I'm sorry about that. The point was the meters are kind of there, hanging out, and then, bam, they expand it and make it way more scientific. Comes back like gangbusters. It does. And it took about close to 50 years from the time Mendehall died in 1924 to 1971, when the US. National Bureau of Standards wrote a report called A Metric America. And obviously I was born in 71. I don't remember that, but I remember the following ten years, which was the recommendation for the transition. He said, let's try and do this over the next decade. So I remember as a young child the big push. It was a very big deal. It's always in the news, we're going metric, we're going metric. Congress enacted the Metric Conversion Act in 75, but said, you know what? This ten year deadline should be voluntary. Again, still not compulsory. Which is yet another reason why we didn't fully go metric. I guess they had their reasons, but they said, let's not make this a compulsory thing. It smelled pretty Canadian, I think. Did it to Americans. And a lot of people resisted. Right? Yeah. So globalization increases. We're doing more and more business. With more and more nations around the world, american companies found themselves maybe at a disadvantage or at least challenged to keep up because they're still converting things and trying to get their trade partners to convert. Or at least we'll do the math for you, but know that when you're getting pounds, it's this much in kilograms. I mean, you're packaging products, say, in Arkansas, that are being sold in Florida, but they're also being sold in Dunburg. Right. And you need to have two different packaging that's expensive and stupid. That makes you less competitive globally. That's true. So this Metric Conversion Act, in 1988, there were amendments passed saying, you know what, let's go ahead and call this the preferred system of weights and measurements for trade and commerce. A little further along. A little inch further along or millimeter further along. Inch. Okay. And then they said, the federal agencies are going to have to use this system for procurements, for grants, for business by the end of 1992. It's going to be our government standard. But that loophole is still there. If you were not a government agency, it was up to your discretion whether you wanted to go metric or not. Yeah. If you're a private business, it's up to you. You can still ship by the pound if you want. Right. So that whole thing came into effect by 1000 1992, and the US. Government was officially metric, right? Yes. Some industries in the US. Took the opportunity to go metric, too. Like the pharmaceutical industry went hard metric, which means dirty. It went all metric. Yeah. Say, like the beverage industry went soft metric. Sad. Which is why you can see fluid ounces and milliliters right next to one another, living in harmony on your can of soda. That's right. Tools are metric. Bicycles tools are metric. And standard, though. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Very good point. Film, remember that stuff? Yeah. Film was metric. I hate saying it was. It still exists. 35 millimeter, 70 millimeter, eight millimeter. Super 16. My favorite, 16 millimeter. And now, of course, it's all just on a digital card. SD card. Right. An inch. There's no SD card. That was funny. When we sidebar here when we were shooting our TV show, there's a tradition in which when you shoot your 100th roll of film, you pop some champagne on set. And we did that, and I was like, how do you know? Yes, we're not shooting rolls of film. Apparently, there's some conversion that camera guys know that this is the equivalent of our hundredth roll the film. Lance the camera operator? Yes. Okay. Extraordinaire, extraordinaire. He was explaining all this to me, but I didn't realize that he was saying, like, this isn't a metaphorical champagne thing, right? Like, there's champagne in the other room and go get some, Josh. I was like, oh, thanks for explaining, and walked away. And then I see, like, everybody else kind of bust, and I'm like, I didn't get any champagne. You didn't? This whole product? No, I had no idea. Metaphorical. I went off to my dressing room. Okay. But we were all standing around drinking. I had no idea. I bet Lance is sweet about it. He was. But at the time, I was like, why is Lance looking at me weird while I'm walking away? All right, so as of now, some people estimate about 30% of American manufacturer products and companies have gone metric. Not too bad. But the public at large has still pushed back for a few reasons, cost being one of them. It's expensive to change all these documents and change your company over to metric. I think NASA said it would cost $370,000,000 to change all of our drawings and tens of thousands I'm sorry, thousands of man hours just for the space shuttle. Yeah. And, man, am I glad they didn't go to the trouble of doing that. Seriously, what a waste. So money is one thing. You can't just jump to the metric system overnight, but you can also make a case, if I may interrupt, Chuck. That money can also be saved using NASA as an example. Also, in 1999, NASA lost its Mars Climate Orbiter because the attitude control system was on our Imperial system, our US customary system. Right. Inches, that kind of thing. But the navigation system guiding the thing was on the metric system or the Si system. That's where you get screwed. And there was a discrepancy, and it flew too close to the planet overheated and is now just $125,000,000 space junk. Wow. They couldn't figure that out. They thought they had, probably, I guess, or else they just didn't think of it. I bet they thought of it. It was probably an error. And the author of this article points out that stubbornness and individualism is another reason Americans have it, especially if it's the French that are pushing it. On us. Right? Exactly. I don't know about that a while. I don't know how it first came up whenever we talked about the Metro system, but years ago, somebody listens to us named Amy Wang sent in her graduate thesis for design school, and it's called Amtraka. Do you remember that? I do remember that. So I looked it up again, and apparently it was this whole thing of like, basically putting metric things into normal, everyday things in the metric terms. So, like, your coffee mug say this has this many milliliters in it, or a taxicab. You know the little signs they have on the roof? I saw one where it's driving and it shows how fast it's going in kilometers per hour. So what are they any bystanders little things to just slowly convert people to the idea? Yeah. And is this something that there's a thesis on? Like, this is a proposal that we should try and do that kind of thing? Yeah, something like that. I don't know if it's going anywhere, but I think there's some validity to that. As far as Americans go, we don't like things being pushed on us, which is probably why they always made it up to you. Yeah. Either that or business interest. Just take away that compulsory part and then just kind of sneak it in little by little over the years. Although is it a big deal anymore? Yeah. I think ultimately we can kiss the US customary system goodbye. You think? I think so. Sure. It's that whole globalization thing. And if the business interests were the ones holding it back before then, they're going to be the ones driving it now. They're like, let's just go to metric. It's going to make everything way better. Did you ever see the deal with Myanmar and Liberia? Why they're the other two? No. Liberia, I imagine, would be because it was originally a US colony. That's about the sake of us. I don't know about Myanmar at all. I have no idea why they wouldn't be Malibu's. Right. Delicious. Yeah. Let's see. You got anything else? I got nothing else. So the answer is check. The US is pretty much on the metric system. Yeah. Just not 100%. That's right. We got a lot of it. A lot of it. Okay. If you start looking around for things that have meters and milliliters and liters, you're going to see a lot of it here. Right. Just open your eyes. Band. That's right. If you want to know more about the metric system, we got a couple of things on the website about it. Pretty interesting stuff. Just type metric system into the handy search bar@householdworks.com. And I said handy search bar, which means it's time for listener mail. Josh, I'm calling you. Inspired someone to do something different in their life. Oh, good. Hey, guys. Thought I'd never be writing in, but I thought you should know this. I've been listening for a while. Love your podcast, listen to them while I do my homework to make it a little less tedious. So I live in Anchorage, Alaska, and go to high school there. Recently, I've been introduced to a certain program called Rotary. This program, among other things, sends and receives students looking to study abroad. I would just like to say that you guys have really inspired me to participate in this program the next academic year. I was always so consumed with trying to be normal, even though I never really was such a common experience. I know. Since I've started listening to your guys'podcast, I have come to realize how much I don't know and have to learn. I've had quite a time watching and listening to people who are smart, cultured, and eloquent, like John Stewart, for example, who I love, and I do too. Are you saying that that was her, but it's us. Okay. Right? Where's he like John Swift. Sure. Okay. I didn't want to speak to you. You guys share the same qualities. Wow. How about that? We share qualities with John Stewart. I don't buy that. You don't? All right. I love the idea of becoming a better person purely through the appreciation of knowledge. I'm hoping that my trip next year will be an eye opener since I live in such a cut off environment up here in Alaska. Not that I'm complaining. I also hope it will prepare me for going into the Peace Corps as a civil engineer. Man, that's awesome. I probably would not have had the courage to sign up for this stuff myself and deliver broad for a whole year if it wasn't for you guys in your podcast. I won't know where I'm going until December or which language I'll have to learn. Some of the options are places like Brazil, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Russia, South Africa, Thailand or Turkey. Those are all great. Yeah. Turkey. You're not a Turkey fan. I'm just getting parts of Turkey. You're beautiful. I'm really glad that I am pushing myself. We had that Turkey sky that rode in, remember? Yeah. After we bagged on Turkey and he sent the pictures, like, what do you think of this? Yeah, look at these topless features. Didn't he win something? Didn't he win that at all? Oh, maybe. So did you want to send that to him? I can't remember. Yes, we did. Okay. I'm really glad that I'm pushing myself out of my comfort zone enough to do this, guys. I'm so excited. Thank you very much. Maybe I'll send you a postcard on there. And that is from Sydney. That is fantastic. Sydney, we take full credit for pushing you to do this, so long as you have a triumphant and successful return. If anything happens to you, we have never heard of you, but congratulations on that. That's pretty awesome and huge. And thanks for writing in and letting us know that. Let's see, what do you got? I don't know what are some other things that America has been stubborn about? Oh, that's a good one, Chuck man, that's a good one. Examples of American stubbornness we want to hear. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffyshno, and you can send us a good old fashioned email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcast. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
What's sarcopenia and what can you do about it? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-sarcopenia-and-what-can-you-do-about-it | Sarcopenia is a form of muscle loss and coordination associated with aging. Luckily, a little extra effort can prevent its onset. Tune in to learn more about sarcopenia -- and how to prevent it -- in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Sarcopenia is a form of muscle loss and coordination associated with aging. Luckily, a little extra effort can prevent its onset. Tune in to learn more about sarcopenia -- and how to prevent it -- in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:46:11 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=14, tm_min=46, tm_sec=11, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=230, tm_isdst=0) | 21954734 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Everybody loves Altoids. Little mints that come in tents. But once you the ments are gone, you can do some really neat things with the leftover. Ten people have made empty three players, cameras, even stoves. Check out howstopworks. Cominnovators to find out more. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is Charles Bryant. I don't even know why I say that. Chuck. I should just go with Josh and Chuck here. No, you get your thing. This is a stupid intro. Chuck. Let's start over. You say that every week. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Chuck Bryant. This is stuff you should know. Thanks for listening to us. Thank you. And even harder things would go out if people actually paid for this. But still no people like free. Yeah. Good for them. Well, yeah, we're not charging for it. No. Fear not everyone. I'm just saying. Right. And you know what? Think about that before you write in and tell us we're idiots. Yeah, we'll give you your money back. Did you ever see that Simpsons where Bart goes off on that Itchy and Scratchy fan? No. Where he's actually talking about the Simpsons. The guys like, I feel like they owe me something as a loyal fan. I think it was Comic Book Guy. He goes off on and he goes, oh, really? They owe you something? For years and years of free programming and entertainment that they've provided you at no charge. That's what happens, though. People take ownership, and I do the same thing we all do. It's nice to be owned. It's like Lost sucks now, how could you do that? Does it suck? I've never paid any attention to it, actually. I think this past season was a return to form, but the previous season was a little lame. It happens. Moving on. Moving on to Sarcopenia. Well, speaking of aging aging television shows. Yes. We could also discuss aging human beings. Very nice, Josh. That was clumsy. That got delivered by a drunk pizza guy. Let's dish on Sarcopenia. Okay. I just like that name. It's a good name. It is. So, Chuck, there are some obvious signs of aging as we progress in our years. Sure. Especially, it seems like, these days, once you start to hit the mid to late 70s, right? All of a sudden, boom, you're, like, half your height. He stooped over, your rib cage is sunken in. Like the guy from the Unforgiving Metallica video. Right. Sagging skin on the face. These are the signs of age. And you just kind of take this for granted. I know I did until I wrote this article. But it turns out that a lot of this stuff can be prevented. Yeah. And a lot of these signs of aging are circumpania, which is age related muscle loss. Right. And we just want to say out there, if you are under 40, like many of our listeners probably are, listen up, because it will happen to you, too. And you can remember this one day and use it, or you can advise your parents and grandparents. Well, actually, the whole reason this came up was because I was talking to my dad about it, all right? He just turned 71 on July 4, and he lost a bunch of weight. He's looking like Mr. Burt Reynolds these days. He wear the makeup a lot, actually. Only mac, though. Only the good stuff. Right. But his muscles are starting to attribute because he's losing a bunch of weight and he's advancing in age, but he's not exercising as much. So I said, you know what? You're at risk for circuit. And I'm going to look up this article I wrote, and you were sitting next to me and you said, are we podcasting on that this week? And I said, yes, we are. So here we are, everyone. That's how it happens. There's the backstory. People always wonder how we pick. That's how we pick sometimes. Yeah. And the whole reason also because we do have a fairly young listenership. This can be prevented most easily by starting young. Yeah, starting young. So let's talk about circumventing. Let's talk about muscle loss first. Let's talk about muscle Chuck. Protein. Yeah. Yes. Muscle mass is protein, basically the end. And I like how you said that in the article, that the body seeks stasis. So what you want is that balance between production and usage of that protein, right. You don't want to overproduce the body seeks stasis in many ways. Well, yeah, that's the level that it's seeking at all times with everything, right. Equilibrium. Equilibrium, buddy. It's a beautiful thing. So, Chuck, muscle is obviously produced in the body. We don't just go by a length of muscle and insert it where we want it one day. Yeah. Right. Yeah. We actually can produce our own through nonessential proteins. These are proteins that the body produces on its own. Right. Then we have essential proteins that we need to build muscle with. We derive these by jumping on gazelles and eating their throats out. Right. Or just eating peanut butter and things like that. The container protein, tuna tearing the throat out of peanut butter. Right. We got to tear the throat of something to get muscle. Right. And those are essential proteins. You're right. You might have already said that. I think I did. But it doesn't matter, buddy. So we take this protein and the stuff we produce, that's called synthesis. And the stuff we use, the essential proteins, that's metabolism, right? Yes. And we never really lose our ability to metabolize proteins as we age, but we do tend to lose our ability to synthesize our own. Right. This is where you want to get into hormones. Correct. You are just setting me up all day long, buddy. Insulin like growth hormone. IGF one. Yeah. Testosterone and growth hormone, they all play a role in the production of the protein. Josh. Did you know that? I did. I wrote this article. Well, anyway, the point is, these hormones hormones are the chemical messengers in our body. They do all sorts of crazy stuff I just wrote about whether or not you can get pregnant while you're breastfeeding. And hormones are amazing. And by the way, I know everything there is to know about the menstrual cycle. I know everything. Ask me any question later, I'll tell you. Minarchy the problem, Josh, is that these hormones decline as we age, right? So the protein production is not getting the signals that it used to right through the hormones. So nonessential protein production slips, leaving only essential production I'm sorry, essential proteins that you ingest. And I think you indicated that as we get older, we actually need more protein. So that's kind of like a one two punch, right? And we don't necessarily get more protein. Once you establish a diet in your lifetime, you usually kind of stick to it, especially in your 70s, right? I mean, people may kind of come to understand their bodies. I can't remember how Douglas Copeland put it in Generation X, I think. Aware of your body. Right. People become aware of their bodies later in life. So they may change their diet some, but generally your protein intake will remain the same even though you need it more. So you've got hormone decline and protein deficiency. So that's two of the three. Actually. We didn't even mention the third yet. Well, this is the most vital one. Motor unit restructuring. Right. So you've got these three things hormone decline, protein deficiency and motor unit restructuring, which we're about to get into. And all of a sudden, you've got circuit. You're stooped over, your face is sagging again. You look like the old guy from the Unforgiving video. You're walking slow. What is the unforgiving video? You know that Metallica song? Unforgiven? Yeah, sort of. It came out post. Good. Metallica. Yeah. Before horrible. Metallica. Okay. So it was during the middle of Metallica after Ride the Lightning. Before whatever that loses. Yeah. Okay. When they started wearing eyeliner and stuff. When they cut their hair. So we've got circuit, but we haven't really talked about that. Motor unit restructuring. This is the most important factor. Right. Let me tell you what a motor unit is. Yes. Okay, so, Joshua, things called motor neurons. And they command the muscle fibers to voluntary muscle fibers. Voluntary muscle fibers to do things. Right? So that's a motor unit as those two things together, right? The muscle fibers that command and the neurons. The muscle fibers and the neurons that command them. Yes. That's a motor unit. Right. And again, it's strictly voluntary muscle we're talking about. Yes. So the neuron gets a command from the brain. I think in the article I use the example of raise right arm and punch Chuck in the neck. I would never do that. I'd say. Shut up, Brain. So the brain sends a signal to the neurons involved in raising your right arm, and they fire and contract the muscles innervation, which is what's going on. Like you're lifting your arm. It's really a bunch of muscles contracting. And when I think about it like that, I think about little tiny pirates, like pulling on the hoisting, the sale. Sure, like that. Like He Poe. And all of a sudden your arm is raised. Right. There you have it. It's called innervation. Technically, when the muscle fibers are caused to contract from the neurons. Right. Now, raising your arm, that would be pretty much probably exclusively the result of slow twitch neurons. Yes. We need to explain the difference here. There's two kinds of neurons. There's fast twitch and there's slow twitch. FPS e and st and fast twitch. Fast switch. Fast. I like fast twitch. Fast twitch that's really hard to say is Irish wristwatch. Yeah, exactly. It's very specialized because they command, like, only fast movements. Like when you run or like eye twitches your eyelids. Yeah, like really precise movement. But there aren't as many of them because they only command a certain limited number of functions. Right. Well, one fast switch neuron will command, say, just a few muscle fibers because it has to be precise. Right. So it can't be concerned with a whole bunch at once. Right. Which, on the other hand, is the mass. I think the way I put it in the article was the fast twitch neurons are kind of agile, like a tightrope walker, where slow twitch are like bulls in China shop. Right. They're just kind of big and dumb and lumbering and brew. Exactly. The slow twitch neuron is going to raise your arm, right. Because it's just a bunch of just muscle fiber that isn't really involved in anything precise. Big dilutes. Big dilutes. The problem is that the Ft, the fat switch ones, they die off as you age first. Right. They're the first to go. So what happens is, if a group of muscle fibers are no longer commanded by a neuron, they're at risk of atrophying, which is muscle death. Right. So then all of a sudden, you have muscle loss to prevent. The body has a pretty cool system. This is very cool. Out of nowhere, the closest slow twitch neuron, the one that's closest to the dead fast switch, will take over, will attach itself and take command in place of the fast switch. Right? Yes. So you still need these precise movements, but now they're being commanded by a big, dumb lumbering neuron. Right. So that is the restructuring. That's motor unit restructuring. Right. And the result of it is a loss of coordination. A loss of quick reaction is less precise. Right. So that's part of that lack of balance that happens as you age. It's actually the result of muscle loss. Exactly. And that's part three of what you call the perfect storm that can increase the onset of sarcopenia. Right. And when this happens, especially along the spine, the muscle fibers along the spine, when there's motor unit restructuring or just straight up neuron death, that's what gives us our stooped posture, because to stand upright, it requires muscles going heave. Right. And when you lose it, you end up being stooped over. So these put together all these signs of age, the loss of the intercostal muscles between the ribs, stoop postures, sagging skin. It's called senile sarcopania. Yes. And this is the most preventable type of circumpania. You can also get sarcupania from disease. There's some other, much less preventable forms of you said environmental conditions can sure. Like, basically, if you lay down in a highway tunnel for several years and just inhale carbon monoxide constantly, sarcopenia will be among the various maladies that develop. Right. Well, the good news, though, like you said, is that this can be prevented. And this is the message that you need to talk to your parents and grandparents about. And what people like me need to remember very soon as I am aging. Right. And there's an easy solution to this. Yeah. Weights. Weights. Resistance training. So for a long time, doctors well, they still do, but physicians have or the medical establishment has always recommended something like, I think, 30 minutes of exercise a day. It's all about cardio, usually. Cardio, like walking, running, swimming, getting the heart going, and yeah, you need to do that. But it has little to no effect on sarcopenia. But resistance training does. And they've done a bunch of studies on this. This is one of those articles, Chuck, where I wrote it, and there was just so much awesome information out there. It's a really interesting article to write, despite when it was assigned to me and I found out what circuit was, I was like, you got to be kidding me, right. Why would I be writing then? Yeah. Me of all people, I need to write about whiskey. But there's been a bunch of studies that have turned up some really surprising results. Right. So there was one that I came across that put a group of elderly people aged 78 to 84. Yeah, this is pretty impressive on resistance training. And by resistance training, we're talking about I don't know where you lift weights with your legs by just, like, flexing them outward. I don't know what it's called. I've done it before. The machines, probably. I doubt if they recommend that the elderly go in there and start hitting the bench press. No, as a matter of fact, they recommend that the elderly not try this first. Right. By themselves. They need, at the very least, the advice of somebody who knows what they're talking about at the gym, who works at the gym. If you're not a personal trainer, you want to talk to your doctor first if you're elderly. But the point here is that if you are elderly and you are developing circumpania, it can actually be reversed by resistance training. These signs of aging can be reversed. This study that had 78 to 84 year olds, they put them on a resistance training program and they saw an increase of protein synthesis. Remember, that's the stuff that's the ability to lose as we get older. Right. The increase was 182%. That's unreal. I love that one. That's huge. Yeah. Because normally there's like, increases and whenever you look at a study, it's like, oh, there's a 2% chance that's significant. This is enormously significant. Just by doing weights, we can synthesize protein, right? Yeah. Can I tell them about the other one? Please do. The USDA did this one and they said that the elderly participants who did resistance training for 45 minutes three times a week saw for twelve over three month span saw an average increase of 32% muscle fiber and 30% increase in strength. Yeah. And that's huge, man. That's 45 minutes three times a week for twelve weeks. It's nothing. No, not much. And if you're 70 or 80, what else are you doing? You're not working. Yeah. Hit the gym. Yes. Wapner commands you. Should we talk about astronauts? Well, yeah, I was hoping we get to this. The whole reason that we know that resistance training works is thanks to our friends at NASA. This is weird, man. What happens is astronauts have a similar existence as elderly because it's very sedentary. They're in a space shuttle and there's not much room. They're weightless. They're just hanging around, drinking Tang, doing nothing. They never did nothing for nobody. Here's the interesting thing. Joshua and I know you know this they have an opposite effect, their slow twitch weightlessness. Weightlessness does not just if you're an astronaut yeah. You're doomed being weightless. The fast which ones actually, the slow twitch ones dial first and then the fast which ones pick up the slack right. Rather than down here on Earth where the fast twitch dies off first and then slow twitch picks up the slack. And I've heard of this. I didn't know the science behind it, but I had heard that if you're weightless in space, like, these people that are up there for like a year at the base station are coming back and like, tearing calf muscles. Yeah. That's the result of it. It's not a loss of coordination, but very easily torn muscles because the little precise fast switch neurons are not used to controlling, like these huge they don't do the heathrow that well. That's crazy, man. Yeah. So that's to work this all out. If we figured it out in outer space one day yeah. And I think the last point is yes. You're supposed to do cardio. You're supposed to do the 30 minutes of walking every day to stay alive and all that but the point is you can't walk if you can't stand up straight, right. You can't walk away. You're sarcopenia. So you want to do the resistance training first. You want to start that regimen first and then move into walking. Yeah. And again, if you're twelve years old and you're listening to us, you have no idea how this applies to you. But my friends, it does. Sarah are amazing. Eleven year old fan. No, she's twelve now. She's twelve. That's right. This does apply to you, just as it applies to Chuck and I. And let's go hit the gym, buddy. Let's do it. Yeah. You mean arnie. So Chuck, if anybody wants to this is one of those articles where it would be good to kind of print out and have around to refer to, I think. Plus there's some really good links and lots more information page to give you more information. Lots more information. You can find that article by typing in sarcopenia. That's sarcopenia in the handytoolbar@houseeffworks.com. And before we do listen to mail, Chuck, let's do a little plug. Yeah, we haven't plugged ourselves in a long, long time. We're not big on tooting our own horns. No. So we are going to plug our blog, which we haven't done in a while. And you can go to the housetopworks.com website. Yeah, go to the blogs. You'll see it over on the right side. The blogs of how stuff works. Yes. There's a lot of people have blogs. Do we have seven, eight, nine now? Yeah, they're all really great, actually. They are. Tracy, our colleague Tracy Wilson writes fan stuff. It's all about geek, dumb. Katie does the history stuff. Blog stuff you missed in history class, I should say. Scott's over there with auto stuff. Science. We've got the whole shebang strickland and the gang with tech stuff. The brain does one. Yes. But yeah, you can find all of them at the blogs@howsefworks.com. And I think it's blogs houseupworks.com, right. Or the home. Should we plug the webcast too? Definitely. We haven't plugged this in a long time because we were not too sure of ourselves at first with the webcast. But we do a weekend. Are we now? When did that happen? I think it's good. Okay. We do a Webcast every Wednesday at 100 Eastern Standard Time. And it's live. It's live video without a net. And it's pretty clear that it's live when you see us stumble through certain things. Not this week or last week, the week before. We actually started over like five minutes into it. Did we remember? It got so out of hand we're just like, let's just start over. I don't even remember. It's a lot of fun though. And it's a little different than the show. It's a little more news oriented. We talk about current events. We don't cannibalize the podcast. No, not at all. So it's fun. You can watch that on our blog, actually. Yeah. So that's our webcast and the blog, which means plug time is over. Yeah. And that means listener mail. That's right. Josh, I'm just going to call this it Made Me Feel Good, and it's from Omaha. That's a great title. I always think of these on the fly, you understand? Dear Josh and Chuck, I've been meaning to write you and the history stuff gal for a long time now for helping me survive horrendous long international plane trips. For work, I save up a bunch of podcasts and listen to them to keep out the noise of strangers exchanging small talk and baby screaming and to take my mind off my anxiety and border. However, now I really have something to thank you for. Friday, I got back from a trip to Brazil, during which I listened to the podcast on Tako and other parasites prevalent in Brazil. Lovely. And the next day, I had to put my beloved bunny of nine years to sleep. It's awful. Is that related to taco plasma? Not at all. I have been heartbroken. It was very sad. Yesterday, driving home from work, I played a couple of your podcasts I hadn't listened to on my trip and found myself laughing out loud. It was amazing. I hadn't felt like laughing or even smiling for days. And you two cheered me up more than I thought was possible. Awesome. Sure, you didn't save my life or anything like you did with the hypermiling woman, but you certainly helped my emotional state. For that, I thank you. Keep up the great humor. I'm sure it helps people more than you know. This from Brim in Omaha, Nebraska. Brim? Yeah. Awesome. And that awesome name is a last name or a nickname. She had a different name, and I can't say it on the air. Oh, I got you. We don't say full name. Did you give her that nickname? No, that's how she signed it. But then her full name was there as well. That's fantastic. Yeah, it made me feel good. Well, if you have any stories about how we make you feel better about a dead pet or any international travel you'd like to tell us about, you can send that in an email to stuffpodcast@housetuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Want more housetofworks? Check out our blog on the Hastofworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means schools out, the sun's shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon. Music. My favorite murder from exactly right media. My favorite murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarre 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." | ||
431623a2-53a3-11e8-bdec-0b9f3ae5513e | Sammy Davis Jr: National Treasure | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sammy-davis-jr-national-treasure | Today Josh and Chuck sit down and detail the complicated life of the late, great Sammy Davis Jr. | Today Josh and Chuck sit down and detail the complicated life of the late, great Sammy Davis Jr. | Thu, 27 Feb 2020 12:59:33 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=27, tm_hour=12, tm_min=59, tm_sec=33, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=58, tm_isdst=0) | 54178880 | audio/mpeg | "Hello, everyone in podcast land. If you have ever wanted to see us on stage telling jokes and slinging facts and you live out west, you can come see us in Portland, Oregon, or Vancouver, Canada. Yep. We'll be at the Chan Center in Vancouver on Sunday morning, March 29, and then we'll be at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland on March 30. And if you want tickets and info, then the best thing you can do right now is to go to Sysklive.com. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant, and there's guest producer Dylan sitting in again like a great guy, like a cool cat. Baby, I thought you were doing evil German doctor for a second, and then I figured it out. No, man. Wait. I haven't said it yet. And this is stuff you should know. Okay, that was a good one. That no man was wonderful. I love how Sammy Davis Jr. Always said cat and baby, he was such a cool dude. Okay, do Sammy Davis Jr. Saying, we have ways of making you talk. What sounds German about any of that? Just do it, please. We have ways of making you talk, man. Pretty great. And that's a little soft shoe. It's great stuff, Chuck. So, Billy Crystal used to do Sammy Davis Jr. Way back in the 80s when Blackface was super cool to do and not controversial. Did he do? Blackface Sammy Davis Jr. Yes, dude, he did. Blackface Sammy Davis Jr. Eight years ago at the Oscars. What? Yes. You don't remember that? No. It's the last time he hosted the Oscars agent 2012. They did a remote intro thing where he was doing different things, and the last bit was him in Blackface again. And people were like and this was in 2012, so there was Twitter and there was Facebook and this social media, and people were like, that wasn't cool in the can't believe he's doing that now. For real. Sammy Davis junior's daughter came out and said, you know what? If there's one thing I know, is that my dad is looking down and laughing and smiling at Billy Crystal doing this. He was roasted pretty heavily for it, rightfully so. And he hasn't been around a lot, but he wasn't around a lot before then. Do you think that did it? Like, that was the demise? I think it helped. Yeah. I haven't seen them in a while either, man. How did somebody not step back and be like, okay, wait, we're about to do Blackface. I know. How did no one on the production crew of the Oscar say, not a good idea? I don't know. Well, he did it. So I came across something that I thought was pretty interesting. I saw a 1985 interview with David Letterman. Yeah, that's all. And Sammy Davis Jr. Says in this interview, he did blackface. Yeah, he was a little kid. Apparently, his skin was lighter when he was a kid, and they wanted him because he used to tour with his uncle and his dad, as we'll see, and to get around labor laws, they would pass him off as a midget. Yes. And to do that right. Yes. Thank you. They gave him a candy cigar and put him in blackface and told anyone who would listen that he was a little person. That's right. Although, again, they didn't say little person. No, they didn't. Boy, this is a really controversial episode right out of the gate. Well, there's a lot of sort of I mean, he was a complicated guy. His father was black. His mother was Puerto Rican. He eventually would endorse two presidents, both Kennedy and Nixon. He served in the army. He was a Rat Packer. He was shunned by racist and also shunned sometimes within his own black community. Yeah, like a little pinball getting bounced around. And little is right. He was also a little guy who always, I think, had a complex about his height, about his looks. He had this weird sort of underbite jaw that would jut out to one side when he talked. Just a really fascinating guy that was super, super talented and had his little tiny fingers and a lot of pies from singing and dancing and performing live and in movies on TV and just really fascinating guy. Yeah. When you look back at the Rat Pack, he was the one that brought the actual talent to the Rat Pack. Like, Sinatra could sing, martin could sing, everyone. And the Rat Pack was talented. Right. But he was multi talented, like dancing, doing impressions. Yeah, he had, like, a little gunslinger roof. Did you see any of that? Yeah, I did. He's amazing. I watched a PBS documentary for their series American Masters on him, and it was, like, almost 2 hours long, and it was really in depth and really good, but they had some amazing footage of him just doing all sorts of different stuff. So I guess let me revise that. Yes, the Rat Pack was talented. Sammy Davis Jr. Was more talented than all of them put together. All right. Did you see any of that documentary of the USO. Tour? There were a few clips in there, yeah. Yeah. So if you want to see a difference, if you think Sammy Davis Jr. Is just the candy man or Mr. Bojangles Babe Man, watching him do Mr. Bojangles and knowing how he felt about that song, it's very heartbreaking. It is. But if you see this documentary, in 1972, he did a USO. Tour of Vietnam where he performed at drug rehab camps and some other forward bases. If you look at this man, this is like as swinging 70s kind of rock and roll as it gets. Really cool stuff. He was a bad a performer. He was at places like some of them were kind of full on productions where they were capable of pulling that off. Other times there's this great footage of him where they could have nothing but a microphone, and he's just like, all right, give me the mic, and I will basically kind of do my own beat boxy rhythm section and sing and dance, and the soldiers are just loving it, man. They're eating it up. Yeah. And this is like he was a world famous star by then, but also he was an older dude. He'd really had his heyday in the late fifty s, and throughout the he's out there in Vietnam belting out Motown hits and drumming on the mic stand. I didn't see all of it, but yeah, you can tell it was pretty cool. Yeah. He's even more of a talented performer than people realize, because you do think of him as doing like, standards and show tunes and stuff like that. And he did mostly do those things, but he was talented in all sorts of different ways. So the Grab star helped us out with this one, and he said that there were a few defining sort of things about Sammy Davis Jr's life that inform who he was. Right. One was that he came from poverty. He performed with his, like, he said, his uncle, which was not his real uncle, but his dad and his uncle will Maston Trio. Will Maston Trio. Right. And they came from nothing, and he did not have any money. And he talked later in life about the thrill of leaving a waitress $100 tip and walking around with $1,000 in your pocket. He said, yeah, later on in life, yeah, he's like, that was a year of salary. And he was like, no one understands that unless you've been at the bottom. Right? And he was definitely at the bottom. And he and his father and his uncle will work their way up. They started all throughout the Depression on the Chitlin Circuit doing Vogueville, and he didn't go to school once, because this is really important to understand. He spent his entire life in show business and the earliest years constantly on the road with his uncle and his dad. Yeah, so that's the second point. Never went to school at all. Did not learn to read and write until he was in the army, and always apparently had trouble writing. And he always looked at it as he was always sort of ashamed of it. He was proud of who he became, but always was ashamed of his lack of formal schooling. And he called his what he had was the facade of intelligence, which Ed rightfully points out is just bunk because there are many kinds of intelligence. He was a very intelligent guy, right? He just didn't have formal schooling. But he was very self conscious of this and about representing the black community. So, like, have you ever mispronounced something because he didn't know it would make him feel really bad because he thought that that represented black people as a whole. So that's number two. And the third thing is that early on, his family, his dad and his uncle, really kind of shielded him from racial prejudice. He certainly encountered it on the Chitlin Circuit, but he didn't really get the full deal until he went into the army, and it was a big shock to him. Right. I think this kind of explained that he approached racism differently than some of his contemporaries, especially when he got to the army and was confronted with the full brunt of it. And that kind of informed how he viewed race and racial discrimination and the dynamic between the races in the United States in the middle of last century, because he hadn't really seen it firsthand or experienced it firsthand. He hadn't been in school, and so other little white kids hadn't bullied him. Right. Or he hadn't been around town and just lived in a set space where most kids were introduced to racism first hand. He didn't get that until he was 18. And so by the time he was 18, he was like, this isn't right. Who do you think you are? And so when he got to the army and was confronted with it full on, he approached it differently. Whereas some of his contemporaries in the army who were black just kind of kept their head down and tried to go along and get along, he would fight back. He wouldn't not back down. He would not step down. And he spent a lot of time in the army physically fighting white racists who were trying to make things hard for him. And apparently, at some point, he fought one he fought one guy and one he beat up some white guy who had done something racist to him. I'm not sure what it was. And then after the fight, the guy beaten said, you may have beaten me, but you're still black. And apparently, this got to Sammy Davis Jr. In such a way that it just transformed his approach that he realized he could fight white boys his whole life and probably win some of the fights, probably get beat up a lot of the fights, get his nose broken at least twice, but that it wasn't going to get him anywhere. And so he decided then and there that what he could do is fight prejudice through his performing. He would be such a good performer, he would transcend race, at least while he was performing. And he managed to do that, or as much as anybody ever has in the history in modern history, at least in the United States. Yeah. So he's discharged in the army in 1945, goes right back to the Maston Trio and touring with him. And even though he was just a little kid growing up in that trio, he was sort of the star still. Yeah. Little Sammy. Little Sammy. Like little Stevie Wonder. Yeah, he actually chuck. He won his first contest at age three, at like an amateur hour or amateur night, and he's saying, I'll be glad when you're dead, you rascal, you. That's what he knocked the house down at age three. And that was the formal start to his show business. Yeah. You want $10? Yeah. About $150 today. Yeah. Which for him, I mean, that's a lot of dough. Sure. For a very poor kid. Right. So he gets out of the army, goes back to the Maston Trio, and this sort of corresponded with the same timeline as when Vegas started. Become a big deal and a big entertainment center, and they played Vegas a little bit. And we should point out to you on the Chitlin circuit, they were never making much money. No, it's a grueling thing. And they did get paid, but it's not like they were getting rich out there. I mean, you'd have to be a vaudeville superstar to make a lot of money. And this is also during the Depression largely, too. So people didn't make money in general. Right. But doing three, four or five shows a day on that circuit. But goes to Vegas, starts performing in Vegas, starts doing impressions, which he did throughout his career, was very good at them, and audiences ate it up. And then Frank Sinatra, the chairman of the board, as they say, gave him a call, or gave their people call and said, hey, I want this guy opening up for me in Vegas. This trio opening up, took him under his wing. That was a big deal. It was a very big deal. You do these great impressions, you do me. It's hysterical. You're so talented. Open for me in Vegas. And that was where he said, in Vegas, for 20 minutes, twice a night. Our skin had no color. But the second they got finished, he said, other acts to go out and gamble and socialize, have a drink. He said we had to go through the kitchen with the garbage. And that's when it would all sort of hit home. Once again, they had to stay in, like, an entirely different part of Vegas that, from the looks of it, almost didn't have electricity. Dusty roads. Yeah, that's where they had to stay. They were beloved performers, but that's where they had to go stay after the show. And I saw that even after he was a member of the Rat Pack, a superstar, he had used the pool at the Sands, and guests in the 50s complained enough that the Sands agreed to drain the pool and refill it because Sammy Davis Jr. Had been using the pool. And this is after he was a star already. That's how vile the segregation was, even in a place like Vegas. All right, let's take a break, and we'll come back and talk more about the Candy Man right after this. So Sammy Davis Jr. Wrote a bunch of memoirs and autobiographies over the years, and one of them is a very great Spinal Tap choke. I know you still haven't seen it, right? I saw it, but I've only seen it once, and it was a couple of years ago. Okay, so one of his I think his first one was called yes I Can. Sure. There's a great scene in Spinal Tap when Bruno Kirby as a limo driver is talking about it and he said something about yes I can. He said, although the real title should have been yes I Can if Frank says it's okay because Frank called the shots for all those guys. I remember that, too. That's very funny joke. He just keeps going off about that, doesn't it? Yeah, that's good stuff. You know, Billy Crystal and Bruno Kirby had a very famous falling out. And legend has it Billy Crystal sort of had him blackballed. What is up with Billy Crystal? My impression of him is changing dramatically. He really sells it when the cameras are on. Yeah, well, that's what you do. You know, that's crazy, though, to be that. Wow. I mean, we know the game. People think you and I like each other. Right? We got everybody cool. It's amazing. Like, what were their names of the mythbusters? Yeah. Like the day the camera stopped rolling, released press statements saying, we never liked each other. I know. Why would anybody do that? Even if you didn't like each other, why would you just let it go? You know? I don't know, but it's Jamie and Adam. Adam, that's right. Adam's a great guy. I know him a little bit. Are you implying Jamie's not I don't know how many okay. I'm not siding this took a really weird turn, didn't it? It did. So back to Sammy Davis Jr. His star started rising. Well, his star had already risen. But in the 70s, when the variety show came about, which was a big deal in the even into the 80s, sammy Davis Jr. Was perfect for that medium. Well, this was, I think, even earlier than that, when TV really started to dominate. The earliest shows that they had were vaudeville shows that led to variety shows. He had his own variety show later in the he was so and it wasn't a huge hit. But for someone who can dance and sing and do impressions and do comedy and for God's sake, is a real deal gunslinger right. A variety show is pretty great. It really was. So he's getting on the TV. The Vegas gigs have really put the Willmaster Trio on the map. And they were doing really well. They had reliable work, that kind of stuff. People knew who Sammy Davis Jr. Was. He was already a protege of Frank Sinatra by this time. But it wasn't until 1951 that the big break came through. And it really came through in a really kind of Hollywood story kind of way. Where they were given this one shot in this one particular spot at just the right time in front of just the right people, and they killed it, and that was it. Sammy Davis Jr. Was a star from that moment on. That's right. And that was at Janice Page and a show at Cirros, which is now The Comedy Store. Right. Oh, really? I didn't know that. Yeah, it became The Comedy Store after Cirros, but it was sort of a legendary place in its own right. Oh, yeah. But everyone apparently it's debatable whether or not it was an Oscar party after party or not. But regardless, there were a lot of Hollywood people there, including Bogey and his Rat Pack. Sure. The original Rat Pack, which wasn't called the Rat Pack. No, it was, actually it was. Yeah. Well, why did never mind. I'm not going down that rabbit hole. What that's? All right. Okay. So he kills it there. He's doing impressions of people that are in the audience. Everyone loves them. They sign with the William Morris Agency, and an overnight sensation 2030 years in the making starts happening. Yeah. And we should say so. Sammy Davis Jr. Became known for his impressions. He was groundbreaking in the sense that he would do impressions of white people. And up to the time. Sammy Davis Jr. Started doing impressions of white people, if you're a black performer, you could do impressions of other black people, and that was it. It's not okay for you to do white people. Sammy Davis Jr. Just started doing white people, and the white people loved it. And at that show at Zeros, he was doing impressions of some of the people in the crowd like he did a killer, Carrie Grant. And Carrie Grant was a member of Humphrey Bogart's Rat Pack, and he was probably there that night. So there were a lot of people who were getting impressions done of them. They just loved it. Killed. And I think Janice Page said I was the headliner tonight. I think these guys should be the headliner from now on. Which is pretty cool of her to do that. It's amazing. Yeah. So he gets a record deal after that. He's putting out, like, showtoons old standards. Sure. He does a pilot in the mid 50s with his father and uncle about a trio of black entertainers that are kind of struggling called Weebly. Yeah, I would love to see that. Well, there's another pilot we'll talk about later that you definitely need to see. I haven't checked it out yet, but I know I know the one. It's pretty legendary. Yeah. So a big thing happened that same year in 1954 is Sammy Davis Jr. Had a wreck in his Cadillac. And the Cadillac and this is just horrific to think about because I've seen these in the middle of the steering wheel. They had these little decorative cones that stuck out his left eyeball. Hit that thing and he lost it and wore an eye patch for a while and then a glass eye. Yeah. Apparently he remembers coming out of the car with holding his eye in his hand, and then that's the last thing he remembers. The next thing he remembers after that was waking up in a hospital bed. And when he woke up and realized that he had lost his eye for life, his eye was gone. He was really scared that his career was over. Yeah. This is 1954. He just got in his big break three years before and was on his way up, and now all of a sudden, he loses his eye. And the thing about losing your eye, in addition to, say, having to sit for publicity photos and try to be a leading man in movies or on Broadway or that kind of thing, you have to relearn spatial awareness. You're going from binocular vision to monocular vision, and that has all sorts of weird, tricky effects on you. Sure. So if you're a dancer or a gunslinger or doing some old soft shoe or whatever you're doing, you have to relearn how to move. And apparently one of the things that Sinatra did that was really stand up for Sammy Davis Jr. Was he had them basically come convalesce at Sinatra's place and really guided him in saying, like, you need to relearn how to move. You're going to be fine, but you're going to have to start really attacking this, and you can't really sit around and feel bad for yourself. You need to relearn movement now rather than spend a year feeling sad. And that was a huge help for him. It was. And he also was kind of maybe his life did kind of pass before him because he definitely had an awakening of, what have I done here with my life so far? What greater purpose have I served? And what can I do from this point forward? And put a pin in this. But this was the first exposure to Judaism. In the hospital, he got a visit from a rabbi. And just put a pin in that because that will come back again later. Okay. Is there a pin in it? Well, look, all right, I don't even know where this pin came from, do you? I don't. Well, you do have that pin cushion right there. Yeah. This little tomato one with the strawberries dangling off of it. Do you remember those? Oh, man, do I? Was there a 70s mom that didn't have one of those? Yeah. With a macrame owl hanging on the wall behind it. Yeah. So here's where it gets really kind of great. As far as knowing what a stand up guy Sammy Davis Jr. Was, his success is booming. And you would think, Sammy Davis Jr. You can leave that will maston trio behind. Yeah. Because it's really all about you. He said no, man, sign us all up, babe. Three way split and that's what they did. He ensured, contractually, that they would get a three way split. That endured. Ten years after he left as a solo performer, he was still giving them 33% each. Yeah. For 15 years total. They got a third of the profits, each of them. And, yeah, originally they were still doing their Vegas show as the Willmaston Trio featuring Sammy Davis Jr. But then over time, remember, his uncle and his dad were a good 20 years older than him. By this time, he's in his 30s. So they're starting to get they're losing their stuff a little bit, so they start to not be in the show quite as much, stepping back. But even still, he made sure they were taken care of for another 15 years. Correct. A third. And this is a third during Sammy Davis Jr's peak earning years. So he got one third of what he would have gotten had he just basically said, dad, Uncle Will, thank you for teaching me everything I know. I'm going to move on now. Best of luck. Let me know if you need the loan. Instead, he just took a third of what he could have gotten and gave the other two thirds to those two, which is for 15 years. Chuck, that's really amazing. It's pretty great. So that pin, it actually wasn't in there that long. We go ahead and take the pin out. Okay. Because after that first meeting with a rabbi, he reads more and more about Judaism. He draws a correlation between the plight of the Jewish people and the plight of black people. And it really spoke to him, and he converted. And some people said, oh, this big publicity stunt. He's like, no, this is not a publicity stunt. He said, this is my new religion. And he very humorously started referring to himself as a one eyed black Jew, sometimes a one eyed black Puerto Rican. Black Puerto Rican Jew, which was very sort of in keeping with his self deprecating style, for sure. He's like Tim Watley. He converted for the jokes. Man. I remember that one. I've been plowing through Seinfeld again. One of my favorite things that always gets me is when Gerry calls George BIFF. Yeah, it never fails to make me laugh. So good. Let's not take another break. Let's plow on here, right? Yeah, sure. All right, so dating wise, he is dating black women and white women. When he dates white women, he gets racist threats from white people, and he gets condemnation from the black community for betraying the black community by dating a white woman. Right. He can't win. No, he really couldn't win. Apparently, from what I saw in that American Masters documentary, he really was in love with Kim Novak. From what I thought, she may have been the love of his life, at the very least. He never got to explore whether she was or not. But when he said that he intended to marry her. I guess it was in the 50s. There was a contract put out on his life by the studio head at, I think, Columbia, where Kim Novak was an actress. Yeah. Harry Kohn was the studio head. And this was back in Vegas and Hollywood. There was some mob and Mafia dealings going on, for sure. And Sammy had some mob friends, too, just because he was friends with Frank. And that was just sort of the thing. These guys would come to these Vegas clubs and he would meet them. He sought protection from a Chicago gangster that he was in with. The Chicago gangster was like, I can't help you in California. He's like, I'm no good there. I can protect you in Chicago. I can protect you in Vegas. Can't do anything about California. It's not my territory. Supposedly, and this is where it gets a little hazy, because some people say it happens, some people say it didn't. Supposedly, he was even kidnapped for a few hours to scare them. But who knows if that's really true. Well, apparently one of his friends who was there said, no, it wasn't true. He was never kidnapped. But the contract basically said there was a contract that said you have 48 hours to marry a black woman or you die. And whatever it was, whether there was an actual contract, whether it just got to him that there was, it didn't matter to Sam and David Jr. At that minute because he broke it off with Kim Novak, much to his own hearts break, married a black woman. Yeah. Proposed to a woman named Lorray White, who she was a black singer, and I think they had dated years before. And I guess he never copped to the idea that it was an arranged marriage that was basically a business proposal. But that is definitely how it's portrayed by the people who were there at the time, were his close friends, that he even paid her $10,000 to do this. And I'm sure it was very kind and congenial to it, but they described that day, his wedding day, the Lorraine White, as probably the worst day of his life, tied for first with the day that he lost his left eye. Yeah. And we can't look over some of the ugly parts of that day. He got drunk and physically assaulted her in the car just after the wedding reception. Not making any excuses for the guy, but it was certainly not right to do that. Right. So their marriage didn't last terribly long. I didn't see how long it lasted, did you? Yeah, a little over a year. Okay, so about a year. And I guess he considered that the heat had gone down or whatever by that time. But I get the impression that the fact that Kim Novak had been taken from him, she's strictly out of racism. Like, Kerry Cohen, I'm sure, was a racist, but he was also a businessman. And the reason that he was doing this was because he knew America was racist. This is at a time when there were laws that prevented black men and white women or vice versa, to marry. Yeah. It wasn't legal yet. No. So the idea of one of his biggest stars, Kim Novak, marrying a black man, he decided that he just couldn't take that risk, business wise, and so he threatened Sammy Davis, Jr. Whatever the reason was, sammy Davis Jr. Really bristled under that. And so in this is, a few years after he had to break it off with Kim Novak, he got married to a woman, a Swedish actress named My Britt. And he had children with her and was married to her, but he also ran around on her almost constantly, from what I understand. And you get the impression that My was in part a well, just put it as PG as possible. Thumbing his nose at all of the racists out there who took Kim Novak from him. He was saying, I think, as somebody put it, I'm big enough now that you can't tell me who to marry, and I'm going to marry this beautiful six foot white woman yeah. Who looks like Margot Robbie. Sort of. She does. Yes, she does a little bit. I haven't put my finger on it. And their children were incredibly beautiful, thanks largely to their mom, too. But they had three kids together, and they were married for eight years. And I think it's very sad because Margaret immediately lost her career. So she gave up her career to be with Sammy Davis Jr. I don't know. She must have fallen in love with them because she had three kids with him, too. But she gave up a lot, and he gave up nothing. And I think that it was very unfair on his part to ask for what he asked for from her and give so little in return. Yeah. And what was also not fair and sort of a black eye on John F. Kennedy was that Sammy Davis, Jr. Had been scheduled to perform at the 1960 inauguration, and he disinvited him because of his marriage to a white woman. Kennedy personally had him disinvited. This wasn't like Kennedy's advisors or anything like that. No, it was him. And he said apparently, people said it was a political move because he didn't want to alienate Southern Democrats. But either way, that was a big fracturing of the relationship between JFK. And Sammy Davis Jr. He never got over that. No, he never did. And it was also a moment where Sinatra, who had stood up for Sammy Davis Jr. Multiple, countless times against racists, against studio heads, against the record company executives, against all sorts of people, didn't he did not stand up and argue and try to persuade JFK. To change his mind. He just quietly went along with it. And I think that broke Sammy Davis Jr. As much as JFK betraying him, and probably even more because he expected more from Frank than he did from Kennedy. And the other thing about Kennedy resending that invitation. Harry beliffeni's invitation wasn't rescinded. And Harry Belafonte was married to a white woman and was there with his white wife at this inauguration party. So sammy Davis Jr. Couldn't help but take it personally. And he really did. Yeah. It was a big deal, a big moment in his life, and a very sad moment, and a lot of people think that it led to him later on, embracing, probably illadvisedly, the Nixon campaign in the early 70s. That's right. You want to take a break? Yeah, let's take a break, and we'll talk a little bit about his work in the civil rights movement right after this. This cat is interesting, man. Right. I don't know if everybody is picking up on it. Did you know this before? Because this is your pick, right? Yeah, I've always been pretty fascinated with him because we haven't even gotten to this super weird and interesting stuff. Yeah, right. Which happens in the 70s. So in the possibly because of the JFK treatment, is when he really starts to get more socially aware, starts donating money to the cause and marches at Selma for the civil rights efforts. When he supported Nixon, it was not just the thumbing of the nose at Kennedy, but he bought into Nixon and thought that it was going to be a good choice for black America. He regretted that later on, of course. Sure. But it wasn't just a poopy pants move like, hey, well, I'm going to support Nixon now because you disinvited me. Exactly. And so one of the other reasons that he embraced Nixon is that Nixon embraced him as a human being and really stood in stark contrast to the treatment he received from Kennedy in that Nixon actually seemed to really like Sammy Davis Jr. A lot of people are like, the Nixon administration was just using Sammy Davis Jr. They were at the same time using what's called the Southern Strategy, which is they were stoking racism among Southern whites to get them to turn on the Democrats. But he also apparently really did like Sammy Davis Jr. And admired him. And under Nixon's administration, it tastes like bitter acid, saying that Sammy Davis, Jr. Became the first black person to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom, and apparently Sammy Davis Jr. Was an avid Lincoln fan, and sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom with some of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln's personal effects in this room just blew him away. Oh, I'm sure. And that was actually how he ended up in Vietnam doing this USO tour in 1972. He said, what can I do to help? And Nixon said, that would probably help a lot. But that just contributed even further to his alienation from not just black people, but young black people, too, because it was a really tone deaf move, as I saw it described at the time, that was not the kind of thing you did. Vietnam was so unpopular that even the troops weren't particularly supported at home. It's not like today where it's like, we really, really hate these endless wars. We really disagree with the hawks and the military industrial complex that supports us, but we're still going to be supportive of the troops who have to go there, who are over there, whether by their own choice. Well, I guess it's all volunteer army. They still deserve support, these individuals over there overseas. That was not necessarily how it was during the Vietnam era. So Sammy Davis Jr. Going over there to support the troops after embracing the Nixon administration really furthered this rift between him and the black community, which and I don't know if we really said this enough, was unfair and unjust because he was a Fervent supporter of the civil rights movement. During the mean Fervent, he marched in Selma with Martin Luther King Jr. Scared to death, apparently, but he still went, and he still did it. He contributed a ton of money to the civil rights movement. He was legit, for sure, but he also was friends with Richard Nixon. So one kind of tarnishes the other, for sure. So in the 60s, he is blown up. He's everywhere. He's on stage, he's recording records. He's on TV. He's doing Celebrity Roast. He's on Broadway. He's writing books. He's doing the gunslinger thing. He's making a lot of money at this point and starts spending a lot of money because he came from nothing. Like we said, this is when the Rat Pack thing really heats up. And he's hanging out with Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford, Dean Martin and, of course, the chairman. Right. And started their first movie together, which was Ocean Eleven. Not a great movie. Oh, disagree. No, I think the original is not very good. No, I liked it. I thought the remake was great, but did not care for the original. I liked the original. Yeah. Hanging robin in the seven hoods yeah. Also not great. I don't think the Rat Pack ever made a great movie. Okay. That's just my opinion. What about Time Bandits? Fantastic. Okay. They were hanging out at the Coconut Grove and the Ambassador Hotel, which is a place that I have a neat little quick story. I did a commercial shoot there before they tore it down, and it was an empty hotel at this point that they just use for movie shoots. And it was an overnight thing, and it like 200 in the morning. I was working in the art department. They said, Here, you need to go assemble all these flags that we're going to hang. And they said, Just go in the Coconut Grove and do it because there's plenty of room in there. And I went in there all by myself, sitting in the dusty old shadows of what was once the great Coconut Grove, and for like an hour and a half by myself, like, sitting in a booth that the Rat Pack might have sat in. Wow. That's amazing. Really pretty neat. And later that night, I got to go see where Bob Kennedy was shot. Oh, that's where he was shot. In the Ambassador Hotel, right in the kitchen. And the overnight security guy, it was just sort of one of those slow shoots. He was like to me and my friend, he's like, you want to go down the kitchen, see what happened? And we went, oh, yeah. Wow, that's amazing. And it was super cool and creepy. Wow. Anyway, that's a great story, Charles. They're hanging out with the Rat Pack, and this is where it gets a little, like, dodgy, because the Rat Pack, they were all best buds. They genuinely loved each other. But when you look at their old stick, there is a lot of sort of racial joking about Sammy. It's all in good fun. But there were often jokes made about him being black, being the only black member. Dean Martin one of his famous jokes was he would pick little Sammy up on stage because Dean was a big guy and Sammy was small and thanked the audience for the N Double ACP Award. So stuff like that. So in that documentary and I'm not justifying that at all, but in that documentary, whoopi Goldberg is like, you could take any segment of their show and be like, this is really offensive for Italians or alcoholics or women or black people or Jews. And she said they went hard on everybody. But from what I understand, at least as far as Sammy was concerned, he didn't secretly have a chip on his shoulder, and he had to just put up with this to be a member of the Rat Pack. He seemed to really not like he didn't take it as if they were being hostile or cruel, that it was just part of the act, and that's how he took it. Yeah. I mean, it was certainly a different time. I mean, there was for sure, no doubting about it, that back then you could make jokes about all kinds of things that you can't joke about now. Yeah. It's not like I used to hang out with Sammy Davis Jr. And had five talks with them or whatever. So it is possible that he did harbor resentment from it. But that's not the impression that I have from the research that I've done, let me tell you. Josh right. But apparently no one did, because this is a really bizarre thing about him. When he was talking about converting to Judaism, I think in, like, a 1966 Playboy interview, he was talking about losing his eye and then converting to Judaism and that it happened during a period of soul searching and that he did all this and went through all this even though he was convalescing at Frank Sinatra's house. Even though apparently Jerry Lewis spent seven days at his bedside when he was in the hospital, had all these telegrams coming in and all this outpouring of support. He considered himself alone and that he was a loner. And that's really bizarre when you step back and look at that. Because Sammy Davis, Jr. Always had friends. He was always the life of the party. He was always a good guy. Everybody wanted to be around him. He was always having fun. But he considered himself a loner. Apparently, he didn't let people in. Yeah. So even if I had been hanging around with them, he probably wouldn't have had that conversation with me anyway. You're like, Sammy, I don't feel like I know the real you. Come on, Sammy, let it. And he said that's by design, babe. I feel like I'm tripping or something right now. So his career is booming in the result of that, of course. Well, through the guess is that he's not around much. He had a lot of regrets about not being around as a father, as a husband. He was floundering, he was drinking a lot, he was using drugs. So in 1968, he got divorced. In 1970, he married a woman named Altoviz Gore, who was 18 years his junior. Great name, backup dancer. His children did not like the fact that she was so much younger, but they were stayed married for the rest of his life. Yeah. He was like, oh, if you got a problem with her, you should probably not know about everything else I'm doing. Yeah. So here's where it gets really interesting. Very interesting. Sammy Davis, Jr. Had a convergence of two interests in the 70s. He became a member of the Church of Satan. He was an honorary warlock, and he got really, really into porn. And, you know, there's no better way to say it than he was a swinger. He was in orgies. He participated in Satanic orgies. Right. Yeah. That was actually I don't know if it was his first orgy or not, but that's how he became part of involved in the Church of Satan, like the original Church of Satan with Anton LeVay there and everything. Like the real good golden years of Church of Satan. Exactly. He went and participated in a Satanic orgy, sammy Davis, Jr. Which I think is like a regular orgy, but with just more like red candles. Yeah. And pentagrams and black robes and stuff like that. But then the black robes come off. But I think the pentagrams stay on. But I read this really interesting Vice article about it. I read it to you. He was apparently at the first one, and this would have been in the late sixty s, and somebody in a hood is trying to get his attention and it turns out he lifts the hood and it's his barber. Barber Jcbring. He would later be killed with Sharon Tate by the Manson family. But he was basically like, hey, Sam, it's me, Jay. How are you doing in this awesome and then they went back to they're coming back down. Yeah. But, yeah, he was hugely into pornography, into orgies, into swinging. He loved cocaine and loved drinking. I saw Arsenio interview with him must have been very shortly before his death rates. Like, you know, I had to give everything up. And I don't miss all the other stuff, but I miss booze. I miss whiskey. I miss vodka. I love that stuff. But then I also saw another interview where he basically said the same thing to Larry King. Like I've given everything up. I don't smoke anymore, anything like that. And then somebody went backstage. And there's Sammy Davis, Jr. Smoking a cigarette, drinking a brandy. And he goes, Sammy, what are you doing? You just told Larry King that you gave all this up. He's like, I plan to. So who knows what he actually gave up or didn't do? But his whole jam was, I want to experience every possible human experience I can. And I approach all this stuff without judgment, which is how we ended up becoming involved in the Church of Satan, which went on for years. Yes. No judgment here. If that's his bag, it's not hurting anybody. Right? Did you see the one quote about the ritual with the lady who was tied to the bed where he decided it was okay? Yeah, he was talking about it, and he was like, that chick was loving it, man. Right. Well, I won't say the rest of the quote, but do you remember yeah, I remember. So all of this led to what we were talking about earlier, this TV pilot that is legendary in Hollywood as one of the weirdest, worst things that Hollywood has ever produced. And it was a pilot for a TV show in 1973 called Poor Devil, which was about a man who was a low down on the totem pole or I guess high on the totem pole cole Shoveler in hell, who is offered the chance to work his way up the ranks in hell if he can get the soul of Jack Clugman, a living white man on earth. Right? Jack Clugman, Quincy, MD. Yes. And it is on YouTube. And, dude, it is amazing. I have not had a chance to see yet. I can't wait to see it, but it sounds amazing. I saw it described as like he's a reverse Clarence it's a Wonderful Life, which you wouldn't possibly understand that. Yeah, sure. But just imagine that somebody's not trying to get you to be good so that they can or understand how great life is. He's trying to get him to follow his most bitter revenge impulses and stuff like that. But at one point, apparently, Jack clubman wants to get in touch with Sammy Davis Jr. The devil, and is like, oh, I know. I'll call the Church of Satan downtown they'll know how to get in touch with them. And the Church of Satan went because apparently the pilot was aired and they were all about Sammy D at this point. They made him an honorary warlock. He used to flash like the devil horns at them from stage when he would love to do a show in San Francisco. Yeah. Christopher Lee, by the way, played the devil, which is pretty on the notes, but perfect. Yeah. So that doesn't succeed, obviously. It's terrible. The starts to fade a little bit. He's still around, of course. He was on all in the Family and a very famous episode where he kissed Archie Bunker on the lips. We have to talk about the great, great Cannonball Run. Yeah. He was in there, wasn't he? Yeah, man. He and Dean were partners. I forgot about it. They dressed up as priests. That's right. Heavily drinking, smoking priests. They played themselves basically as priests who wanted to drive fast. That's pretty great. But even though we revere that film, I don't think it was looked at generally as one of the big highlights of his career. Oh, I'm sure not by this time. He's Kitchy Sammy. Yeah. From what I understand, he was fine with that. As long as he was working, he was okay because I said earlier that he had a certain affiliation with that song, Mr. Bojangles. Yes. Where, if you listen to it, it's about an old performer who's washed up and been has washed up for years and he's still drinking and he's been reduced to doing basically sidewalk performances. And apparently Sammy was scared to death about that being his future. So even just doing what he was doing with Dean and Cannonball Run, I'm sure, was just fine in his mind because he was still working and performing. Yeah, of course. He looks around and there's Bertman. There's Adrian Barbeau. You're digging the Sammy now, aren't you? Yeah, dude. I think Sammy needs to be a recurring character from now on. We'll see. Okay. The new hippie, Rob. So in the 80s, he gets into some financial trouble, to say the least. Because I love how I put it. He'd been struggling with tax payments since the 1960s. I think it was a Willy Nelson sort of deal, from what I could gather. Yeah. Yeah. I think he wasn't really paying his taxes. Sure. And apparently he had also I don't know if he got bad tax advice or what but he had claimed some very extravagant stuff as a write off. And the IRS came back and said, no, that doesn't count. You also owe on that. And his estate was worth or his net assets were worth about 4 million. But he owed about 7 million. And he was a profligate spender of money. I saw one interview once where a guy said that he walked six blocks in New York with them. He even named the streets. So it seems like he really did just walk six blocks and dropped $50,000 along the way, stopping in different stores. I thought you dropped that out of his pocket on the street. No buying stuff. Just buy. Buy. He just spend it because he'd come from nothing, and he knew that thrill of spending money. He was terrible with his money. And so as he found out he owed $7 million, he started to organize some shows and specials to try to raise some money to help him pay off this debt. And after the first one, I think in 1989, he found that he had a sore throat. He went to the doctor and ultimately was diagnosed with throat cancer. Yeah. After that very first show, that's, like, such cruel irony to raise all this money, because when he passed away in 1990, on May 16 of cancer, he left that tax bill to his wife that carried over. Yeah. Altivist. Yeah. That really left her kind of destitute for the rest of her life as well. Oh, yeah, for sure. She basically owed $3 million, and his estate was sold off, like, basically at a yard sale auction. All of his stuff was the negative part of his legacy was that tax debt leaving that behind. Yeah. In one way, it's like kind of a sad ending with the financial stuff and obviously dying way too young of cancer. But, yeah, 65, man, he did accomplish everything he set out to accomplish. He showed everybody who said, this diminutive, little mixed race, kind of funny looking guy is never going to amount to anything. And he had a lifelong career from the age of three to 65 in show business. And one of the things Chuck is he did not really harbor regret. He apparently, whenever he talked about his life, he talked about it with great satisfaction, which is pretty reassuring. Yeah, that quote on that Letterman show was great. On the 85 episode, he's talking about the younger generation, and he said, I look at the young performers today and I go like this. Yes, man. Go ahead, Cook. I've been there. That's it, man. I have no envy. I did at all. Yeah, pretty great. Go ahead, Cook. That's great. Sammy Davis Jr. Everybody, round of applause. You got anything else? I got nothing else. If you want to know more about Sammy Davis Jr. Just start watching some of his old performances. They're pretty amazing. And while you're doing that, we're going to just move on ahead to listener mail. Yeah, this is about the 911 pizza thing. We heard from a lot of 911 people. Yeah. I'm glad that you picked one of these, ma'am. This is good. Hey, while we are not specifically trained to send EMS to calls where people pretend to order a pizza, most 911 dispatchers will in fact ask you, this is 911. Did you dial the wrong number? And if they respond, no, we will then say, are you in a situation where you can't ask for help and then they can say yes or no. Obviously, there are many stories of this working out, most in domestic violence or kidnapping situations. So even though it isn't a protocol necessarily, or set in stone as a way to ask for help, it could help many people in bad situations. We will not just hang up on you. Even if you keep ordering a pizza and do not acknowledge that you need help, most will still send out law enforcement for a welfare check due to the suspicious nature of the call. I'm glad to hear that. Yeah. Please let this be known, because in a last ditch effort, this may save someone's life. And that is from responder Brooke. Diane. Thanks, Brooke. And thank you also, not for being like, Josh was wrong, wrong, wrong. Oh, I don't remember. Did you say, that's not true? Yeah, I said specifically, it's an urban legend. Okay. I don't even remember that. Yeah, so I was really glad when people started writing. I'm glad you picked one to say, like, no, this is for real. Okay, great. Thanks again, Brooke. That was fantastic. If you want to get in touch with us like Brooke did, even if you do want to say, Josh was wrong, wrong. That's all right. We love to hear that kind of thing. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Erkart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
02cab1be-3b0e-11eb-947e-e3319052fd0d | John Muir: Outdoor Enthusiast | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/john-muir-outdoor-enthusiast | John Muir loved being outside. So much so that he dedicated his life to helping preserve it, but not without some controversy. Listen in to this decidedly nature-centric episode today! | John Muir loved being outside. So much so that he dedicated his life to helping preserve it, but not without some controversy. Listen in to this decidedly nature-centric episode today! | Thu, 03 Jun 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=154, tm_isdst=0) | 40792061 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there. And there's Jerry Rowland there. And this is Stuff You you Should Know, an outdoorsy edition if there ever was. That your American masters voice. Kind of. It's got a little Bob Ross to it. Happy birthday, Bob. Dylan, by the way. Happy 8th birthday to one of the great legends. Speaking of great, Bob's. Okay. I was like, how is that I propose anything? You said Bob. I don't there's a lot of online congratulations going around. That's good. So throw me in there. I know you don't care about Bob Dylan, but I do. That's fine. And apparently you don't care about John. You're boy, you're snotty about this. I have no problem with John Mur. Well, that's not exactly no, the only one. Not other people doing stuff. Whatever. Let's just get into this, shall we? So we're talking John here today, and that name might sound familiar if you're not a member of Sierra Club, if you're a member of Sierra Club, you probably just dropped to your knees and did the secret sign when I said John Muir. Sure. Just had to do it again because I said John Muir. And there it goes again. Every time we say John Muir, the Sierra Club members have to do something weird. Or if you've ever hiked any portion of the John Muir Trail that was named after him is that in Yosemite? It's in California. Okay. Yeah, part of it in Yosemite. I think I should have looked it up. Well, I asked that because he's basically synonymous with Yosemite. He was a huge driving force in getting Yosemite into national park status and then fully becoming the Yosemite that we understand it today. Have you ever been? No, I haven't, and I really want to because I saw some pictures online. It's really nice. I've been to quite a few amazing national parks in the United States. Not all of them. So I've been to Yellowstone, but I've been to a lot of them in Yosemite. It's really up there. It is one of the more special places like it. It's pretty incredible. He played a huge role in Yosemite becoming a national park, but also it's really kind of selling short the impact that he had on the creation of our national park system. But also, like, the idea of what a national park is, what wilderness is, what needs to be protected, how we protect it. He was certainly not working in a vacuum in that sense. He was kind of tapped into this larger way of thinking, for better or worse. But he was a huge driving force, and one of the reasons he was a huge driving force for getting America into preserving wild spaces in the face of the second Industrial Revolution that was minting money and building railroads and just turning America into a powerhouse because he walked the walk for sure. He was not just some Eastern greenhorn who had never set foot in the wilderness, but, like, the idea of it. Yeah. Right. He went and lived it, for sure. He did some really wild stuff while he was living in Yosemite at the time. Yeah. In fact, later, when he was in his late 30s, he was hooked up with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was older, and they really bonded. They went on a camping trip together. And I think Emerson was like, what you need to do is come back to Boston emerson or thorough Emerson. Okay. And he said, you need to come back to Boston and be among the intelligentsia advocating for this stuff. And at the time, John, you were like, no way, man. No way, dude. I got to be in the woods. I'm a rocker, dude, through and through. Yeah. And it would not be until later in his mid to late 40s, his life was kind of in two parts. It was the wild exploring and categorizing and botanical categorization of everything he could find. And then the mid forties on when he was very much a political advocate and kind of did that because he felt he had to. He had a T shirt on the whole time that said, I'd rather be camping. Right. But I also saw that he went back after a little bit of a hiatus, I think like a nine month hiatus toward the end when he finally left Yosemite for good and he felt like he was an intruder there. He felt like his time there was done, and he knew that he had to be out of there in the world to advocate for it, for the preservation of this area, but also that he felt like that chapter was closed. Interesting. Yeah. They always say no when it's time to leave, and I guess he did. You always say that. So let's talk about John. You're starting even younger than that. Yeah. Let's start with minute one. He was born April 21, 1838. Scottish heritage. He was born in Denver and came to the US. When he was eleven. He and his family settled in Wisconsin, eventually in Hickory Hill on an 80 acre farm near Portage. His father was a very stern Calvinist. Super religious. Yeah. If you ever seen the movie The Witch, sort of along those lines. Punishment was very heavy and strict. If you beat your child because they haven't memorized the Bible verse to your satisfaction, you may be over the line. I think. I'm not going to go so far as to say there was physical abuse. Oh, there was. Oh, there was. With his father, yes. For that reason. Okay. I mean, I saw, like, corporal punishment, but these days, spanking a kid is abuse. I don't know where it fell on the meter back then. Well, I can't say where it fell on the meter. I can't say either, but yes, he would be. But today he would be imprisoned, probably, yes. But one of the reasons John Muir became John Muir because of his father, because the wilderness in Wisconsin was his refuge and his literal escape to kind of get away from him. So who knows what would have happened had his father not been like that. Yeah. And I don't want to fully mischaracterize his father, just partially. He was very stern. But John Muir was convinced that his father loved him still and cared about him and was even maybe a little bit proud of him in the ways that he deviated from what his father wanted for him. And one of the main ways that he deviated from him was in book learning. Basically, all his father was concerned with was his boys working the land, farming, knowing farming and knowing the Bible. They didn't need to know anything else. But that wasn't enough for job Muir. He was basically a born tinkerer, a born engineer, but he did not have free time. His father was like, you're either working in the field or you're studying the Bible, or you're getting hit with the switch by me. Right. It's one of those three things, what you're doing for all of your waking hours. And so, John, you're hit upon the idea of expanding his waking hours. And so, as a youth, he started waking up at one in the morning so that he could have 5 hours to himself between 01:00 A.m. And 06:00 A.m., when he was expected to start working on the farm to just read or tinker or invent. And he actually used that to really great effect. Yeah. So he made a lot of little inventions. There was one called an early rising machine, which was basically an alarm clock attached to his bed that would quite literally tip his bed up and tip him out of it. Yeah. I don't get the feeling that he needed it because he's getting up at 01:00 A.m. Anyway. His father used it. Yeah. But he eventually would go to the state fair in Madison in 1860 with a lot of his inventions and was sort of a boy wonder inventor. Well, he was 22 at the time. Well, but I think he had invented a lot of stuff in his teen years, too, though. Right. But imagine at 22 in the 1880s or 60s retirement, imagine the middle aged guy showing up at the Four H fare, being like, Can I enter one of the things a big relationship in his life that would last? Throughout his life, he studied with a man named Ezra Carr, and his wife, Jean carr became a really big mentor for him and exposed him to botany, basically. Like, she was a scientist, and he loved the outdoors, but she was like, hey, but botany is like a real science to it, and was a really big influence in his life, introduced him to Emerson later literally picked out a wife for him that was like, this is who you need to marry. Yeah. The matchmaker then, too, it seems like it, because they loved each other very much, and she was totally fine with his comings and goings and all that. Sure. They were good together. Comings and goings is going to, like, Austria or Japan or something that made it sound a little bit like Dalliances. No, nothing like that. Now, as a matter of fact, I read that he left Yosemite at one point because of unwanted attention from a woman. Oh, really? He was camping, and this lady hiked by and looked at him, and he's like, I'm out of here. Well, he was an interesting dude, and he was a bit like a hermit, but apparently also really enjoyed these one on one conversations with people he would meet. Yeah. He was kind of billed as a wild man of the wilderness, but he very much craved and needed human interaction as well. Very odd. It's usually one way or the other in that sense. Yeah. So he's working eventually the industrial part of his life, because he was such a good tinker and engineer, he got work doing stuff like that. And in March of 1867, he's working at a carriage parts shop in Indianapolis. Literally went into his eye and pierced it. And for a while, he was blind in both eyes because of that. It was such a bad wound that his other eye was like, I'm out, too. Yeah. Just because I feel bad for my buddy over there. Sympathy blindness. And this was a very monumental injury because after this, he was like, you know what? Forget this stuff. I don't want to ever be around another machine with moving parts again. Right. And I just want to walk. He said that he Beta, due to all my mechanical inventions, determined to devote the rest of my life to the study of all the inventions of God. Yeah. He stayed religious. We should point out he was super religious. It's not like because of his dad he went to atheist or something. No. In all of his writings and talking about the natural world, it's all Ezekiel, Ezekiel, Ezekiel. Well, it was all very spiritual and God oriented. He was like, this is my church, though. Exactly. The outdoors, which I can respect on a certain level. Yeah. He loved creation with the capital C. Sure. When he's wandering, like, he really wandered. He was kind of a Johnny Applesee type, almost. He walked from Indiana, where I guess he recovered from his all injury all the way down to Cedar Key, Florida, on the Gulf Coast. It's like a thousand miles. He just walked down there and pretty quickly, too. Caught malaria and Cedar Key almost died. Recovered, sailed to Cuba from there, sailed on to Panama from there, and made it all the way to San Francisco. And apparently there's this story that may or may not be true where he got to San Francisco, was immediately overwhelmed by the hustle and bustle yeah, I think that's true. And said, what's the fastest way out of the city? Yeah, I think that's the deal. He got right out of there. And the guy he asked, said, well, where do you want to go? He said, Anywhere wild. And he pointed them in the direction of Yosemite and apparently walked 300 miles to Yosemite and fell in love. That's right. And on the way out of town, someone selled yell, don't forget the rice aroni, the San Francisco treat. And he went, what? Sure. Jerry likes disgusted by that joke. Yes. He split immediately to get out there and went to California. He was in California. We went to Yosemite. He went to Yosemite. But he walked. Right. And he walked because for a very specific reason. He walked because that was the most intimate way to see the Botanic and write about the Botanic world around him. Yes. Because this is a time when you could be like, remember our Bone Wars episode that you hooked us up with? Who? Bone wars. Oh, sure. Like, this is a time where, like, you or I could just start studying books and be like, okay, I'm a paleontologist. Okay, I'm a botanist. Okay, I'm a geologist. All this stuff. These fields were so young that anybody who had half a brain and a pencil and a piece of paper could basically contribute to the field. Sure. And that's why, I guess, he was doing along the way. He definitely did that in Yosemite. Oh, yeah. He did that everywhere he went. And it's a good lesson too. I remember when Emily and I lived in La. I had a couple of times where I had to drive to my mechanic and leave my car. And this was pre rideshare services and taxis were basically nonexistent in La. So I would walk these long distances home and you'd notice everything like, these neighborhoods that I drove around every day, all the time. And you would just notice and study every house, every mailbox, every driveway. And it's really just a lesson to people to walk places when you can. There's a group in the UK. I think, called Amblers. Yeah, we talked about them once. Okay. And basically, I think their motto is they're dedicated to the idea that human locomotion should be no more than, like, three and a half miles an hour. You walk, and then that's how you take in everything. It's absolutely true. Yeah. My two favorite speeds are two and a half miles an hour and, like, 95 on the expressway. Right. Yeah. What does it do? So job mirror makes it to yosemite. Have we taken a break yet? Let's take a break. I think this is a great place for a break, don't you? Sure. Entering Yosemite for the first time, everybody imagine it. Okay, so Job mirrors in Yosemite, and he decides that he needs a little bit of work. I think he stayed the first time for, like, ten days. And a lot of people who know something about John Muir and especially associated with Yosemite and the national parks basically think he showed up in Yosemite and never left and lived and died there. That's not true. No, he lived there for about a six year period, I think. Yeah. Out of 76 years of his life. Yeah. So 1868 to 1874, I believe. Yeah. And those were very like, California just totally rocked his world once he got out there. Yeah. Because he was living in Indianapolis, so, I mean, basically anywhere would rock your world. But imagine showing up in California in the mid 19th century or late 19th century and seeing it. Yeah. And especially if you've I remember when I did my big OutWest trip years ago with my best friend over, like, four months in the summer, driving through Utah and Arizona, and everywhere was just so blazing hot. And then when you drive over especially Southern California california. You drive over that mountain range, it's like someone turned on the air conditioning. Oh, yeah. And I just remember thinking, like, man, imagine what it must have been like for westward expansion when they finally got into the La Basin. We're just like, Whoa, this is where I'm staying, in the La Basin. Yeah, I mean, you go with that mountain range, and it's just the Pacific Ocean breezes are just kind of locked in there. Wow, it's really hot on the other side then, huh? Yeah, like, Death Valley is hotter than I'm not up on my California geography. I think Germany is landlocked. Give me a break. Yeah, it's very lovely and cool near the coast, so yeah, I can imagine what it must have been like, like, as a 19th century traveler or something like that. But when John Murray got there, as I was saying, he stayed for, like, ten days. I was like, I need some money. And he went back. I guess he hitched a ride or else walked back, got some more money, and then he came back to Yosemite. I'm staying here for a while. So he got work in Yosemite as a sheep herder. One of his first jobs was herding 2000 sheep up into the Sierras. So much fun. I bet he hated it. He learned to hate sheep. He called them hooved locusts. And he started to despise sheep because he thought that they had a disproportionately bad impact on the natural surroundings. They just ate everywhere. Well, they did. They kind of ravage Yosemite to a large degree. Right. So he came to kind of see livestock as an extension of human occupation, these wild lands, and how detrimental it was. And it really occurred to him during this first little few months period where he was a sheep burger. And I think also the horses that led people on expeditions and stuff. They also overgrazed, and the cattle overgrazed, and they were logging. And Yosemite was I think it was under the care of the state of California. It was a state park at this point because it had been gifted by well, not gifted, but it was a land grant from Abraham Lincoln in the middle of the Civil War to California. He said, I'll tell you what I'm going to do for you. You take Yosemite. But it was really mismanaged. And just compared to what they're doing now, it was in a pretty bad state. Yes. Which is one reason why John Muir was pushing for it to become a national park. So that it would be under the care of the federal government, who, hopefully would enforce the laws of preservation a lot more than California had. So he shows up in Yosemite, he starts shepherding. But more than anything, the thing that he became known for was these jaunts, where he would become, like, the first white man to scale Cathedral Rock. Right. He would know all these fossil formations or take samples of them and send them back to the newly forming University of California. He would submit botany descriptions. He was just basically exploring Yosemite and documenting the whole place, while at the same time taking notes for what would become a series of books, essays. He really made his name as a writer. He made a career for himself as a writer. We think of him as, like, this conservationist naturalist, and that's where he was coming from. But at the time, he was a successful writer. After he left Yosemite? Yeah. I mean, another big kind of central relationship for him was a man named Robert Underwood Johnson, who was the editor of Century magazine. And Century magazine was very much sort of a progressive naturalist rag. We should say that this is the most interesting part of his life. He also worked for a decade or more. Once he got married. He married a woman named Louie Louisa Wanda Strencil, in 1880, and her family had a couple of daughters, Wanda and Helen. And her family had a fruit farm, fruit ranch. And he lived there in Martinez, California, and kind of quit doing his adventuring for a full decade and ran this farm and worked as a farmer. So all this stuff was going on. And then Robert Underwood Johnson basically doggedly pursued Muir and said, Listen, man, we need you. You got to start writing again, because you're the foremost naturalist in the country right now, according to me and only me. Right. And we need you to start writing some stuff and start pushing for political change. And he was working on this farm this whole time, and eventually he was like, all right, what do you got for me? So the reason Johnson sought him out was because he made a name for himself even while he was still living in Yosemite. Yeah. You can kind of look at mirror's Life like he went and got all of the experience he could possibly need in these six years, living basically that whole stretch in Yosemite, living deliberately, and then went and used that experience. Is that like a nomad land reference? Living deliberately? Yeah. That wasn't that thorough. Oh, yeah, I went to the woods deliberately. Living deliciously is from the wicks. But it was basically like, imagine if you had a crazy six year period in your twenty s, and then you spent the rest of your life exploiting that, writing about it, talking about it, making a name for yourself, being a cause celeb from that experience. That's basically what he did. Yeah, I feel like there's a lot of people that did that. Sure. Who else? I don't know. I can't think of one. Well, Thoreau is a great example. He went and lived at Walden for about a year, and that was like, we're still talking about that guy today. Yeah, that's true. And I've even heard that Walden pond town was right there. Yeah, it's like the pizza hut next to the pyramids. That's right, kind of like that. So another big important relationship that he made was with a president named Theodore Roosevelt. And Theodore Roosevelt is known for the 280,000,000 acres of federal land that he protected, among other things. But Muir was a big reason why Roosevelt was in the preservation. Anyway. It's not like Muir came in and completely changed his mind about everything, but Roosevelt knew about him and quite literally said, I would like you to take me camping in Yosemite for four days. He said, just the two of us. Didn't they have to give the secret service the slip? Well, I think there was secret service there because apparently they just never shut up. And the secret service people in one of their journals said, these two won't shut up. All they're doing is just yammering at each other about the woods. So I don't know if they gave them a slip or not, but I know that originally the request was the Roosevelt like, I don't want anyone around, man. I just want you and I to get out there in the woods and talk about this stuff. Yeah, like wax mustache or wax mustache. That's right. So he works hand in hand with Roosevelt to do a lot of work. I think one of the first national monuments they established was petrified forest in Arizona, which he went out there and was like, oh, this place is kind of cool. He moved there for his daughter's health, apparently. And while he was there, he's like, oh, there's a petrified force. I'll just start submitting. Foster yeah, interesting. He just did the same thing there as an older man that he did earlier at Yosemite. Yeah, and I think the deal with Yosemite was, because it was a state park, the actual Yosemite valley wasn't part of the park boundaries. Mariposa grove of those giant sequoia trees wasn't actually part of the boundary, and Muir was like, man, this is what needs to be a part of the boundary more than anything. Yeah. So that was one of the first things that the Sierra Club took up. It was, like, basically their first initiative. And John Muir is synonymous with the Sierra Club because he was the first president. He was for, I think, his whole life, basically 20 years or something like that. Yeah. He died in 1914, and he became the president of Sierra Club in 1892. So he helped found this organization that's still around today. And one of the first initiatives, one of their first pushes was to get the Yosemite Valley and the what's the name of the forest? The Mariposa. Mariposa Forest. The sequoia grove included into the boundaries of the national park. And they were finally successful in from that success. They just started having more and more successes and eventually expanded because initially they were focused on the west, basically, because that's where all these people who founded the club lived, and that's what they cared about. They said, well, there's other places where this battle needs to be fought as well. That's nice stuff. And they became this national advocacy group that will sue your pants off if you try to mess with the national park. Yeah. They opened an office in DC in 63 and, like you said, went off. Alaska. Florida very key in trying to get things like the Clean Air Act, pass the Wilderness Act, the EPA created in 1970. And Alaska is kind of key to in mirrors life, because he gets engaged to Louie, and I think in those days, he kind of just got engaged and got married pretty quickly. Like, there weren't these long drawn out engagements. Okay. But there wasn't his case because he was like, all right, we're engaged. You are a good match. Thank you, Jean Carr. But I'm going to go to Alaska now. And he did. He went to Alaska for a period. And if you think Alaska is, like, unchartered and wild now, imagine what it was like back then. I will. I'm sure his diary was like, what? No snakes? Amazing. What the heck is this place? But like I said, they eventually did get married and have those daughters, and she very sadly passed away in 19 five of cancer. Oh, yeah. And he had to go home to be with her when she died. Like, he was away when she was partially for part of the time when she was sick. It's very sad. I guess that explains why he and his daughters were the only ones that moved to Arizona for his daughter's health then, I guess. I think so. Okay. That's sad because she supposedly was well known for her. I saw that she was a very gentle person and very sweet person. Yes. And very supportive of his efforts. Was truly a good match. She loved the wilderness in nature and God and all those things. Oh, she loved God. Don't get her started on God. Should we take her second break? I think so. All right, so we were talking about John Muir in the Sierra Club, Chuck, and it's really hard to understand what your impact no, okay. Yes. What impact he had, because, like I said, he was a successful writer. He was really good at writing, and also he did really crazy stuff like riding an avalanche. There's a very famous essay that he wrote called The Windstorm in the Forest that he describes what it was like to climb up the top of a pine tree and hang on for hours during a storm in the Sierras and how awesome nuts it was, just basically saying, like, this is real. This is nature. If you go out to these places, you could do this stuff, but this is not going to be around. If we keep building railroads through these places, or we build dams, or we let livestock just grade wherever we can't, just not do something about it. It has to be preserved and protected. And he inspired people during his lifetime and long after his lifetime as well. Yeah, I think I watched a pretty cool American Masters documentary on this, and this one guy with historian was like there was a little bit of macho involved. He was a great naturalist. Not to take anything away, but riding the avalanche and climbing a tree during a snowstorm at the top or brainstorm at the top of a mountain. He said there was a little, like, machismo involved in that. Like, sure, yes. Or Bodi from Point Break. Wait, was that Patrick Waze? Yes. Or was it Keanu? Ken Rees? That was Johnny Utah, my friend. Oh, that's right. So bodies? Or was that flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers? That's right. But it was actually Anthony Keita that was in Point Break. Sure. Flee may have been in it, but Ketos was one of the ruffians that got his foot shot off. No, I know. He was the leader of the bad guys surfer club. Yeah, but I think Flee was in that club, I think. Why was he naked except for a sock on him? Genitalia, probably pants made of teddy bears. Do we take our second break? Yeah, we just did, and we sure did. But I was leading up to something. So we've been talking about what a great guy John Muir was, and that's how he was looked at and respected for decades and decades. A century, actually more. He was looked at a great man. Maybe a little macho. Sure. But that's forgivable if that machismo is directed towards riding a tree in a storm rather than picking bar fights in Lisbon or something like that. Yeah, good point. Thank you. So when we did our episode on Girl Scouts, I talked about how, like, Juliet Gordon Low is one of those rare historic figures from a century or so ago that you were like and actually she holds up today. Right. Jeanmir is not that same way. There's a real, I guess, a Mia Culpa sort of a reckoning. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. That's exactly what it was, a reckoning by the Sierra Club not too many years ago, where they basically said, hey, John Mirror was great in all these ways. He was also pretty racist. And, yeah, he was a product of his time and the way of thinking, which we'll talk about, but he was still pretty racist. And, in fact, the whole basis of the national park system was built on this racist ideology, and we're still basically looking at it the same way today. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because the Sierra Club even acknowledged that our first years as a group was based on the notion of white people trying to protect the land that white people wanted to hike through and enjoy as campers and recreationalists. And in his earlier years. I think kind of through his 30s. Up until his 30s. He had sort of bad things to say about people of color. Whether it was indigenous peoples in the United States or black people and use disparaging language toward them. Which the whole thing with the indigenous people is really counterintuitive because they were so aligned with his philosophies of how you and have it a land and share a land and use it and don't abuse it. It really doesn't make much sense. And supposedly, I think, in his 40s, he started to come around, especially when he went to Alaska, because indigenous people served as his guides, and he started to learn more from them. And I think things turned around a bit at that point. Yeah. But the Sierra Club spent a lot of time over the past few years trying to sort of bring this delight and not whitewash it and say, hey, this is what it was. And they did a very good job of it. I think so. Yeah. So I was saying that he was a product of his time, and he very much was. There was an idea before his time, say the 1820s, 1830s, when the west was like the frontier and the United States didn't really need it at the time, where there is this view of the Native American as this noble race that was being encroached upon by humanity and that we needed to preserve this wild area. This was decades before John Muir came around, this idea that we needed to preserve the stuff, but we also needed preserve Native Americans and their culture in this land that we're preserving. Right. So the initial idea for national parks is that the Native Americans would live on this land just as they always had, and it would be their land, but it would also be America's national parks. It would be protected. And then the railroad came, and all of a sudden the US. Started expanding further and further west, faster and faster. And now the Native Americans weren't this group of people over there that you could kind of idealized. They were now in the way of this westward expansion. So racism toward them went through the roof. And now there was this idea that Native American culture was already dead, that the best of the culture had died in the last decades and centuries, and that it was all the white man's fault. But what's done is done. And so let's just make this decline into extinction as comfortable as possible and preserve Native Americans. Not on our national parkland, but we'll just make reservations for them to go over there and just die off. And it's sad, but that's just the way it is. And that is the mentality that John Muir became a conservationist within the larger Zeitgeist, right? That no human should be on the land, but in particular, Native Americans shouldn't be there anyway because this is our white people land. Yeah. And you know what? I'm glad the Sierra Club and people in general are more comfortable calling this stuff what it is. Now, even in that American Masters, there was one line where they said, like, early on I don't remember what they said. I don't even think they said disparaging. But he said some things weren't so nice for Native American Indians, is what they said. Did he, like, cough it while he's saying it? Yeah, and it was just very quickly. Like, they wouldn't dare say that he had racist points of view. He just didn't say stuff like that. But I think now people are more comfortable with saying using that word and saying this is how he was for a time in his life. And we got to reckon with that because it's part of our history of a foundation, for sure, and not just him. Like the national parks where they evicted people, and not just Native Americans, depending on where you were out west, Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, Yosemite, Yellowstone, all of them required forced evictions to basically create this pristine area that was never pristine and free of human settlement or occupation or use. They created that to create the national parks, and they used this idea. I've read this really interesting article, dude, from 2007, so it would have been groundbreaking at the time. It's called ethnic Cleansing in America's. Creation of National Parks by Isaac Canter. And Cantor points out that the people who are setting up and promoting these first national parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite would say there were never Native Americans here anyway. They were afraid of spirits in this canyon, so they never hung out here anyway. But by the way, can you send some military to protect us from Native American attacks while we're setting up this national park? Yeah. Which is it? Yeah, basically. But that's a really interesting it was a really good read and it was very eye opening, especially for 2007. So I guess in closing, we want to quickly mention one of his last what he was actually trying to do when he died and failed at doing was preventing the damning of the Hetch Hetchee Valley in Yosemite. And basically what happened in 19 six was there was a devastating earthquake and fire that destroyed San Francisco, which I'd love to cover that as its own episode at some point. Yeah. Basically completely destroyed it. It was erroneous everywhere. And one of the reasons that the fire destroyed it was because their water what do you call them? Water people? Their water system. I'll just say that sure was destroyed by the earthquake. So San Francisco said, we need a better, more reliable water supply and we can get it in Yosemite with a hedgehetchy valley if we damn that thing up. And he was like, you can't do this. It's in a national park. And he lost that effort. But he made such a stink. He was basically like, there are a lot of other ways you can get water. You're just doing this because it's easiest and cheapest, but you can get water to San Francisco in other ways. And like I said, he was not successful. He did lose that battle and then passed away of pneumonia at the age of 76. But there hasn't been a dam built on national park land since then. Yeah, because that battle, even though he lost it, it really raised awareness and it also kind of set a certain mindset and people in the public's mind that you don't really mess with national parks. And I guess we had to lose one to get to that point. That's right. You got anything else? I got nothing else. So that's John mirror for you. Everybody go check out his writings and read about them and see what you think. And also don't forget ethnic cleansing and the creation of America's national parks. Good stuff. And since I said good stuff, of course it's time for listening to me. This is on cleft palates from Malcolm, that's new in Calgary that came out today. Alberta. Okay. Canada. USA. No. North America. Earth. Hey, guys. Been an avid listener since my friend introduced me on a very hungover car ride home from an Iron Maiden concert about five years ago. Nice. It's a great way to get turned onto the show. Yeah. I thought I'd write in to share my experience with my son's Cliff ballot after listening to the episode. My son was born with a midwife in June 2019 and had a ton of trouble breastfeeding, which in hindsight was because he couldn't get any suction. A couple of days later, the midwife noticed what she thought was a cleft and the soft palate. We took our newborn to the hospital and she was right. We became regulars at the Alberta Children's hospital's cleft clinic in Calgary, Alberta. And two years later, my son has had his surgery to repair his cleft palate and another to put tubes in his eardrums, parentheses, Socialized healthcare is the best. The tubes are common with clefts because the muscles that drain the ear canals don't form properly, so the tubes allow fluid to leave the ear canals. One thing you didn't mention was the bifid uvula, which I have. It's related to clefs that the muscles don't quite form properly and it makes your uvula look more like a w than a teardrop. I saw that in research I forgot to mention. I did too. I can't believe I forgot that. We are currently visiting a geneticist at the hospital, see if cleft and my fiduvilla are genetically related, but I think the answer is probably yes. Love listening to you guys. Look for each of them. That is Malcolm. Nice thing, Malcolm. That's great. Thank you very much for sharing. And also, rock on, maiden. Yeah. That's your name. Welcome. Yeah, it's my middle name. It's a great name. Sure. Me and my friends the other night, we're hanging out, me and Emily and Justin and Melissa. We were having a few drinks and we decided to start only going by our middle names. Oh, yeah. So it was Alex, Don, Renee and Wayne Way hanging out for the rest of the night. We were just cracking jokes, like someone would say something and be like, that is so Alex. It's a fun thing. I don't know if it's going to stick, but it was really weird to think of myself as a Wayne. That could be a one night thing. I think having that one night, if it sticks, I will be really surprised. I think we determined I determined that you don't have a relation to your middle name. Like an emotional connection. If when you hear that name out loud, you don't have any reaction, like, if I hear someone say a Chuck or someone else's Chuck, I go, oh. But if I hear someone say Wayne or whatever, it doesn't even register. That name is dead to me. Yeah, sure. That sounds about right, right? Sure. All right, so, Malcolm. Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Malcolm did not me, the other Malcolm, the one in the middle, you can send us an email like Malcolm did to stuffpodcast iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
437dd54c-53a3-11e8-bdec-9379e7ae7da8 | How Spiritualism Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-spiritualism-works | Something spooky was born on the American frontier in the mid-19th century: the idea that people’s personalities survive death and that some gifted individuals can communicate with them. It developed into a religion that some still practice today. | Something spooky was born on the American frontier in the mid-19th century: the idea that people’s personalities survive death and that some gifted individuals can communicate with them. It developed into a religion that some still practice today. | Tue, 19 May 2020 10:57:04 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=10, tm_min=57, tm_sec=4, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=140, tm_isdst=0) | 58498895 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer, school's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. Hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself with no must, no fuss. Turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, a simple checkout process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to squarespace. Comsysk and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code s YSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of. Iheartradios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there somewhere in the heart of darkness. I'm in the office, dude. I hear your voice, Chuck, but I can't see you. Yeah, I mean, I don't know why people need to know the behind the scenes things, but home recording provides some challenges, and I was getting pretty frustrated, so I was like, you know what? I'm going to go to the studio. Yeah. Because I know it'll sound great in here. Yeah. And I know there won't be dogs and children and everyone should feel good about it because I have not seen another human being in the building. Didn't a security guard try to run you off the road when you're parking? He stopped me literally in the parking lot and was like, what are you doing here? I was like, I'm going to my job. And he said, okay. He said, Stay home, save lives. But before we left, apparently since I left, there's a bottle of microphone sanitizer. Woah. There are headphones or not sanitized, but just disposable headphone covers. Sweet. And I feel more safe here than I do at my house. Microphone sanitizer. That sounds really made up. Yeah, go ahead and buzz market. No, I won't, because it smells bad, and I didn't want to buzz market and then say it smells bad. It's apple flavor, which would make Emily just like turnover in her bed. It's a good Jolly Rancher flavor. Not the best scent, though. I hate it when they add scent to stuff that doesn't need scent. Yeah, I agreed. Try finding an unscented garbage bag these days. Is it tough, too? Yeah, man, every single one of them. I even got some that said Unscented, and it still smells like you've missed it in parentheses. Underneath, it says mostly yeah. 99% unfairly, right? We can't help ourselves. 1% rosemary well, I don't have my over the ear headphones right now. I just have earbuds, so I'm sorry. Look, one of Yumi's long scarves wrapped around my head twice to keep from your audio believing onto the track through my microphone, you either look like Lawrence of Arabia or like you just wandered in with a headed tree. Yeah, it kept slipping off with the Lawrence of Arabia look, so I had to do it the other way around. So now it looks like I have a 19th century toothache. Oh, man. Give me another picture. It's not very comfortable. My Adam's apple is being pressed toward the back of my throat right now. Yeah. What was the deal with that whole toothache thing? Like, was there ice in there or something? Or was it just like, I just died their chin shut? And it'll help knowing that era, there were probably some sort of, like, razor blade and heroin concoction that would just scrape the area where the tooth was and inject you with dope to keep you from complaining. Doctor Payne's new chin wrap now with more leeches, right? From the makers of Microphone Sanitizer. All right, let's get into this. We've already been goofing around for too long. Just get this over with. Let's get serious and talk about spiritualism, shall we? It's a great job by Grabster, great idea by you, and it'll be a great episode. Yeah. Grabster. We asked them to help us out with this, so we put together a world class article for us, and when we asked him, we said, hey, how about spiritualism? He goes, My brother wrote his dissertation on that. Should be simple. He just forwarded us that, right. He didn't even, like, erase his brother's first name. He just did a strikethrough and wrote Ed after easy money. So it is, like, a really interesting phenomenon and something I think we kind of take for granted because it pops up everywhere in our world in pop culture. I mean, it's just a part of everything from crystal balls to seances to Ouija boards to Tarot card movies, all of this stuff. Movies, yes. As a matter of fact, I ran across so you know Dan Ackroyd's huge into UFOs, right? I did know that, actually. He's also enormous into spirits and ghosts. It's actually one of the impetuses yeah, I think so. Of him writing Ghostbusters. He's actually a fourth generation spiritualist with a capital S, like the church spiritualism. He was raised that way. His father, grandfather, and great grandfather were all spiritualists, and that's how he was raised as well. So it permeated our culture. It's weird to think of a time when it wasn't there, but there actually was this period starting in right about in the middle of the 19th century, going well into the 20th century, where there was a movement that basically said, the spirit world is there. It exists. When you die, your personality survives. And some people actually have a talent for communicating with the spirits in the spirit world, and we're going to start doing that. And that was spiritualism, the spiritualist movement. Yeah. And Ed pointed out which we should as well, that ghosts and things like that and ghost stories. They had been around since people have been around everyone since the dawn of humankind has tried to figure out what happens after you die. Do people visit? Do they take on other forms or whatever? So that's different than what we're talking about. What we're talking about is spiritualism in that it became a big scam way to get money out of people who are in pain from friends or loved ones deaths. Sadly, yeah, for sure. But there is like a thread through there where the same era. The same period. And this belief in communicating with the spirits and the idea that you could go to a seance and talk to your dead loved one or whatever. It produced this other group of people who said. Yes. There are tons of fraudsters and hucksters out there who are taking advantage of this. But there's also this real version of it actually does exist. And we're going to apply this newfangled thing called science to investigate it. And that produced that era of people like Charles Fort or Harry Price, who visited the Borley rectory, the most haunted place in England. Or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I know. I'm trying out a new person. I like it. These guys, though, they believed in this stuff and the possibility of it, and they also believed in the possibility of applying science to it. And even if science couldn't explain it, it didn't mean that it didn't exist. And then there was another group who we would recognize today is like pure skeptics, like the James Randy's of the day, who all followed in the footsteps of Harry Houdini, as we'll see, who kind of created this. So you had hucksters believers who were skeptical and genuine pure skeptics who believed none of it was correct. Yeah. And what I mentioned before, like all the previous attempts to do stuff like this, premier 1018 hundreds and largely the northeast United States, it was more religious, like prophets and shaman and stuff like that. Spiritualism was the birth of the Madame Clos of the world. It refers to it as a democratization, and that's one way to look at it. But it was the idea that, hey, if you are chosen and you are special, it's not like you have to be some religious leader. You can just be a regular person with the gift. Exactly. Yeah. Which was a huge sea change. And there are basically a few things that kind of came together for this mentality, this fertile kind of imagination of this pocket of America in western New York where all this began to kind of take shape. And one of those things was the frontier, this frontier mentality. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner called it the significance of the frontier in American history. And he basically said, man, the people who are living out there on the frontier, they're living on the edge of civilization, the leading edge, right beyond that what they're coming up against. And this is highly debatable because part of what they were coming up against was Native America. It just wasn't a civilization in the form that any European had ever encountered before. But the idea was that the people who are living on the frontier and expanding westward were basically being forced just by virtue of having to survive under these weird conditions outside of culture and civilization in the European sense, that they were having to abandon that culture and basically make it up as they went along and recreate a new culture from the frontier. And that just kind of threw the rules out the window. Yeah, this is one of my favorite things when we do topics that when you can look back at a movement and point to factors that at any other time in history, if just one of these might not have influenced it, then it might not have happened at all. There's something about that that I've always really loved. And this is a perfect example. The frontier life is one, religious fervor is another. And specifically in New York in the 18 hundreds, people were really caught up on this religious fervor, and it kind of went from town to town. And there was no big religious authorities in the area. They were out on the frontier. They had no structured hierarchy of religion. And so, again, they could just make up stuff. And I'm not saying that's not tied to this next sentence because I don't want to turn anyone off, but a lot of religions sprang out from this region during that time, like Millerism and Mormonism and Quakers and Shakers kind of had a resurgence, basically a shot in the arm, just because of this fervor going on at the time. And I couldn't quite put where Miller is and why it seems so familiar. And then I remember that that was the woman who gave birth eventually to 7th day Adventist, and that popped up in the Kellogg episode, remember? Yeah. Milarism was where it all started. And that really kind of indicates I love it when things we talked about before, like, have even more context from something else. But that just kind of goes to show you, like, this is the kind of place where somebody could be like, I'm in contact with the spirits, or Jesus came and hung out with me, or whatever. And this is what I know and what I've been told. So let's start a religion based on it. And not even necessarily just religions too, but also like social movements, like utopian societies where you chew your food 20 times so you'll poopies here. Exactly. Or women have equal rights as men, which is just completely radical. Or how about 50 of us live together and just by the fact that we all live together, we're married according to this utopian society. Just whatever you wanted to do, you kind of could because the frontier threw the rules out the window. Or at the very least, cultural traditions that most people are raised into. When that's not there, people make up their own. Yeah, for sure. And the third big factor that you mentioned we haven't talked about yet was science. And you talked a little bit about science at the beginning, but the idea that in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, when we're really learning a lot more than we ever have about science and things like electromagnetism and things that you can't see, but science is saying, oh, it's there. This kind of fed the spiritualist movement because that's something else that you can't see that other people are saying is there. So they're like, well, hey, if science is saying there are things out there that we can't quite explain, but trust me, it's real, then why shouldn't I believe this stuff, too? Yeah. Or, well, this like electromagnetism maybe that actually explains how spirits survive after death. It was a really wide open time as far as acceptance of possibilities rather than no, science has said this is not possible, or it can't explain this, or you can't see it with your own eyes, so it doesn't jive. Like, there was a lot more willingness among people who were scientifically minded to say, well, maybe this is a good explanation of that. Let's investigate. Yeah, the birth of science and medicine was a really crazy time. It really was. So should we take a break? Yes. Come on, man. Yes. I think your beard holster is on too tight. I haven't been able to feel my nose for about 15 minutes. All right, well, go rub your nose and bring some feeling back and we'll talk about some of the furry virtualists you know you're a pet mom when you growl back during playtime and you insist on feeding them the highest quality food you can find. Enter Halo Holistic, made with only whole meat, no meat meals and probiotics. For digestive health, our first ingredient is always responsibly sourced protein raised with no antibiotics. And bonus, our fruits and veggies contain no GMOs. It's a lifestyle and a pet mom thing. Find halo. Holistic at Chewy. Amazonandhalopets.com hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but we're pretty excited about summer. I mean, what's not to like? School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's right. And that's where True Crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. Yeah. And with so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. Prepare to go deep and become your own detective in the world of serial crimes and unsolved mysteries. Get lost hearing spooky stories with a combination of detailed research and lighthearted analysis. Whether you're a lifetime fan of true crime or you just feel like being entertained while doing the dishes at night, there's a podcast out there for you. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. Okay, I'm going to say it's spiritualist nice. There's a bunch of factors that led to the beginning of all of this, including there was one that I also came across that we need to mention, a guy named Andrew Jackson Davis, who combined the ideas of the German hypnotist Franz Mesmer with the Swedish philosopher of the soul, Emmanuel Swedenborg. They were both 18th century. He kind of brought them together. He was a bit of a nobody, but he emerged very soon after the Fox Sisters became celebrities as a founder of the spiritualist movement. Almost like he was doing it off in isolation at the same time that all of this began. Yes. So the Fox Sisters figure into this really quite largely, and you can even pinpoint a date to what you might consider the birth of the modern American spiritualist movement is March 31, 1848, in Hydesville, New York, near Rochester, at a farm. This Fox family lived there. Real people, not a family of cute little red, fuzzy creatures voiced by George Clooney. Yeah, exactly. Mr. And Mrs. Fox had three daughters, actually, one was much older. Her name was Leia. She was 19 and 23 years older. Why was that funny? Because I saw a picture of her and she's like the spitting image of Jeffrey Ross. You got to look her up. That's what Leia Fox looked like. I saw the picture of the three of them and I didn't get a good closeup. That's an unfortunate look for him and her. Yeah. Anybody, really. And I think he would admit that, too. Oh, yeah. He's doing all right, though. What if he had really thin skin? He couldn't take a joke against himself. Have you seen that Bump and Mike show? It's pretty good. No. Is that the rose competition thing? Yeah, he and David just sit there and roast people. It's really good. Man. I used to love David back in the day. He has just turned into the weird comedy genius friend that Jeffrey Ross has, and it shines through in this awesome I'll check it out. So the Fox family older daughter, Leia, was 19 and 23 years older than younger kate and Maggie, or I guess Maggie and Kate, if you're going in that order and on that night on March 31 they heard these rapping knocking sounds and they didn't know where it was coming from and that kind of kickstarted this whole thing. In a weird way this led and we'll talk about the more specifics but in a weird way this led to them eventually saying wait a minute, we can make some money if we convince people that young Kate and Maggie are a conduit to the other side. Yeah, the thing is it went from there's a ghost wrapping or knocking, like a poltergeist kind of thing to this ghost will respond to questions from the sisters through wrapping and knocking like how old is Maggie? And it would wrap like 15 times or something like that and that really caught a lot of people's attention and Maggie and Kate moved in with Leah and apparently from what I read it was Leah whose idea was to take the show on the road tried to scam people out of money. It was not a super great person from what I read. Yeah, sorry, I was thinking of a rapping ghost and got sidetracked. I'm a ghost in George Washington and I'm here to say I love Fruity Pebbles and a mate your way you know it's funny, I was going to do that exact same thing but for the Fox family that's like the go to rap for guys like us. Oh, it totally is. Guys who can't rap. Yeah. I'm here to say something something in a something way. The Zack Morris method, I think is what that is. I wonder if that's based on an actual wrap. I guess there was one at some point that really did that, right? Yeah, I think Blondie was the one popular my name is Blondie I'm here to say I'm going to try rap because it's popular today. Exactly. So what were you saying? I was laughing, I didn't even notice, I'm sorry. Oh, just that it was basically I was laying at Leah's feet for corrupting the younger sisters. Yeah she ended up managing them as a unit I think later on if I'm not mistaken. But there aren't great records of everything going on at the time. But the idea was that Kate and Maggie were the ones it wasn't really her parents but they're the ones who could actually communicate with this barn spirit and so they said, you know what? They not only can talk to this spirit media starts getting a hold of these stories and obviously back then it was a very big deal with something like this coming out in the media with not a lot else going on but they moved and would go away to other places and said wherever they go ghosts are talking to them. So you guys, my daughters are talented and gifted. They're not just talking to what we think is a murder victim from our previous house right. Which just changed everything and also, rather suspiciously, leah suddenly realized that she was able to communicate with spirits, too. So all three of the sisters were able to. But, yeah, not just that one murder victim in their house. That had been the original ghost, but just about any ghost. And this was the beginning of the spiritualist movement. Basically a prank by a couple of teenage girls that got way out of hand really fast. Yeah. And so what do they do? They start having these private sessions where people would pay money and they would wear these big, long dresses that were in fashion at the time. And no one's exactly sure the exact mechanism, but they would do some sort of toe knocking or something where they couldn't be seen. And that was the Morse code that they said was the ghost speaking to them. So they had, like, a little wooden stool under the table with them and they would take off their shoes surreptitiously. And from what I can gather, they could pop their knuckle of their toe up and down with enough force that it would make a thud on that wooden stool. That's creepy in and of itself. It was. Yeah. They should have just been like, Forget all this spirit stuff. What's this weird thing? But that was the phantom knocking. And we know that because Maggie later on confessed to the New York Tribune, maybe, or the Post, one of them, and said, this is how we did it, actually, in an effort to take her sister Leah down. But it ended up taking the spiritualist movement down in large part, but that was it like thumping your knuckle on a wooden stool. They did this for 40 years. They made a living around the world doing that and created a new religion from it. Yeah, and by the time the spiritualism fad sort of died away, the two younger sisters were and she recanted that confession, by the way, but everyone's like, yeah, you already said it to try. But the two younger sisters, and Maggie especially, were in pretty bad shape with alcoholism. And they died sort of in a Collar Brothers esque way, very quietly and fairly destitute in New York City in the 1890s. Trapped under newspapers, maybe. But no, they had very interesting but also very sad lives. Like, I think Maggie married a skeptic and he died. Not a good move, right? He died. He talked her out of doing spiritualism, but she went back. After he died, Kate married another spiritualist, and she had a huge career touring the world as a spiritualist. Made a lot of money, but apparently lost it all. And Leah, again, was just kind of, I guess, a bit of a villain in this story. Where's that movie man? I was wondering the exact same thing. It's crazy it hasn't been made 50 times already. Yeah, that would be pretty cool. I couldn't even find a good documentary on it. Yeah, on them at least there are plenty that they're featured in Gimme. Those fox sisters. No matter how you look at it. Too. Whether you look at it from the aspect of a believer who thinks like. This is where it all started. These two sisters. And there's plenty of reasons to believe if you're a credulous person or confiding. As Mark Twain would put it. The Andrew Jackson Davis guy who kind of started this thing on his own. Supposedly wrote on March 31. 1848. That spirit came to him and said. The work has begun. We just started something over here. And then later found out about the foxes. Like, there's all sorts of stuff you can believe, and so it's interesting from that respect. But also, if you're just a pure, dyed in the wool skeptic who do not believe in any kind of afterlife or soul or anything like that, it's equally interesting in a totally different way that this whole almost century long movement started from that. Yeah, it's crazy. I love this whole story. So it's sweeping the nation at this point by the 1850s, and we're going to go over some of the different things that they would do, some of the methods that they would use to communicate with the other side, to fake communicate with the other side. The first one is channeling, and these would be trance mediums. So this is like when you've seen in a movie when someone is just talking like I am in my regular voice and I'm entering the trance and I'm doing a lot of showy things to kind of get people pretty pumped up, feel like they're spending their money. Well, you're getting me pumped up, I'll tell you that. And all of a sudden I go into this other voice and I'm like a small child. Maybe the parents lost a child or I'm a woman, or I'm Sammy Davis, Jr. Hey, babe, I just came back to say that don't worry about me, this cat is doing just fine. I came back to say I love Fruity Pebbles in a major way. Invented rap. That's right. So if you were a good, talented medium, that meant that you were probably a pretty good actor. You could probably do good voices sometimes. In the case of Core Scott, I know we've talked about her before, her name sounds familiar, but I have no recollection of talking about her. Yeah, she sounds super familiar, but she was one of the top mediums because she was this very sort of demure, attractive young lady and her whole demeanor was about that. And then she was apparently a great actor because she would go into these big, heavy, gruff voices and the gulf between who she was and who she was imitating was so great that everyone was just like, fantastic. Cora scott, you're a genius. Well, also, yes, she was like a little twelve year old girl when she started, and supposedly she would take the stage and confidently discuss like physics and philosophy and all that stuff because there was some authoritative spirit who had basically taken possession of her. Yeah. And I looked up her picture and Kate Winslet, I think, is from my casting couch, is who I would throw in that movie. Okay. Not as the twelve year old. That would be weird. Unless they do some sort of bad Irishman de aging. But she looked enough like her and she's a great actor. So channeling is what you kind of think of where somebody becomes possessed. The medium becomes possessed. Right. Yeah. There's also one where, like, they're just saying, like, oh, I can hear what they're saying. But you can't because they're speaking to me through telepathy. Right, okay. That reminds me of John Edwards. Remember him crossing over with John Edwards? Yeah, I can't picture him. I think if I saw a picture, I would totally remember, though. You would? What a weird time the 90s were, as far as stuff like that goes. Although I think his show ran from 2000 to 2004. Yeah. But that can sort of coincided with the Reverend Bob Dobbs and the televangelism and all that good stuff. Yeah, it was a crazy time. So then there's automatic writing was another big one, too. And all of this should sound familiar again, because the stuff just is so permeated in the pop culture. It's crazy. But automatic writing is instead of the medium's voice being taken over the medium being possessed and speaking as the spirit, the spirit took over their hand and they would start writing. And so, in just the same way, Cora Scott would have a completely different personality or a different voice or different accent or something like that, like the handwriting or the word usage or anything like that would be different than the medium's. Normal handwriting. This is automatic writing. I'm trying to decide if I could do that. Well, sometimes they would use their nondominant hand. So if you want to change your handwriting, just do that to start. Yeah, I can't wait. And then there was a woman named Pearl Curran who wrote at least 5000 poems, novels and plays through automatic writing, all channeling the spirit of the 17th century woman from England named Patienceworth. Nice. That's prolific. That's a lot of words. And then what about direct voice? Yeah, direct voice is when you are a medium, you contact a spirit and the spirit is so powerful that they just speak to you directly. Like the medium is just sitting there with their mouth closed. And this happens usually in a dark room where they would have a business partner just behind the curtain. Obviously use talking. Or maybe they were just doing a bad ventriloquist kind of deal where it's dark enough, where you can't really see their lips moving, throwing their voice. There was a woman named Leslie Flint. She's a medium. Oh, really? He looked like the old man from. Up. Did it make you cry when you looked at them? It did. My daughter. Dick watched that. Here, have these balloons. Yeah. Leslie, I actually love that name for a man. I don't know why I assumed, but he would recreate famous people like Sammy Davis Jr. But wasn't very good at it, apparently, which is kind of funny. That makes us all a little bit more ridiculous and fun. Well, I was reading an obituary about him that was written by somebody who attended one of his couple, I think, of his seances. And they said things like a lot of times you could tell what the trickery was or whatever, but there are other times where he would be speaking over the voice, which is tough to do with ventriloquism. Or one time he was tested. He was made to hold colored water in his mouth while the spirit voice was speaking. And you're like, wow, that's pretty interesting. And then you just think, well, there's always an explanation for it. Yeah. And maybe there's another person who is a confederate in the room. Who knows? But it just goes to show that even still. Even today. And this guy's obituary that was written in the that they were like he was largely considered a trickster of fraud. But they'll still hedge and say but there were a couple of things. And at the very least. It's unexplained. Which is pretty interesting and neat. But that doesn't necessarily mean that no. There really was a spirit that was talking in the room. Thanks to him. Amazing. So we had table turning. This isn't like a theatrical performance. This is in a small room, everyone and this kind of thing, Ouija board with this, it's the same sort of thing, except the Ouija board would be the actual table that you're sitting at. Everyone would put their hands on the table, and then the table would move or tilt or something when you're asking questions. So it's inhabiting the furniture. Of course, what's going on here is either like knee movements or sometimes they had these rings on the medium's finger that were slotted and could move the table around without anyone noticing. Just another little parlor trick, basically. Yeah. Or, you know, the idea that you're moving the table yourself, like a Ouija board I can't remember what it's called, but basically your body is moving without your brain being aware of it. And then there's also just the straight up power of suggestion. And this applies to table turning and a lot of other stuff. But if you're saying, like, if you're the medium at a seance and you said the table is rising, it's rising, people who are willing to believe a lot of people who went to seans wanted to believe or already believed in this stuff, just the power of suggestion could be like, oh, it is raising a little bit, I can feel it, I can tell kind of thing. Yeah. My favorite, and I bet your favorite too, is ectoplasmic manifestations. It's a good one. Yeah, it's pretty good. This is when you would actually, as a spiritualist, produce something physical, something would manifest itself, an actual substance. And they called it ectoplasm and they could pull it from their body and it was just basically something that they would make beforehand out of whatever they would make it out of all kinds of things. It was one story about someone who was actually gluing cut out faces from a magazine onto dolls. And those were ectoplasm spirits. But they would hide these things sometimes, like up their butt or in their other body cavities and they would pull these things out. And some of the pictures that you see online, if you look up Ectoplasm 1800 seance is just the pictures themselves are hysterical and frightening all at the same time. Yeah, especially now when you look back and see them, you're like, how did anybody fall for that? And it's really important to keep in mind, one, they wanted to believe, but two, these seances would be carried out in dark rooms to where you couldn't see much at all. You just suddenly see some luminous cloth or something that you were led to believe was ectoplasm. Kind of what looked like floating in the middle of the table or something like that. It's stuff that's really easy to explain, but in a darkened room that you've been sitting in for 3 hours communicating with spirits, you might be a lot more prone to buy into it than under normal circumstances. Yeah, for sure. Maybe you're a little drunk, right? Tipsy on China levitation was another big one. Nice little party trick. I actually could sort of do this for a little while. The David Blaine method. I don't know if you ever saw when he made himself levitate. It's just kind of hopping up and down in air, right? No, you're thinking of trampolines. That's not the same thing. No, people can see those. Okay. No, it's all about the angle with the David Blaine method of getting them to see you from the right angle to where what you're really doing is you're rising your body up with just one, like just your first three toes on your right foot. And you're hiding that with your other foot so it looks like you're just sort of levitating a few inches off the ground. And then you act like you're unsteady and then you land back down and go, oh boy, that was a good one. That was pretty powerful. So wait a minute, david Blaine can raise his entire body weight with three toes? Well, I mean, he's on his toes. I could do it at the time too. This is in the 90s. That's impressive. I don't think I ever had the kind of toe strength that is required to do that. You can raise yourself up with 1ft in a seated position. No, you're standing yeah. So what you're doing is you're standing there. I got you. And then you raise yourself off the ground with just the toes on your right foot, let's say. And you're keeping your left foot is shielding that so you can't quite see it. Yeah, no, I've got it. And it just creates if you got someone at the right angle. And I got pretty good at it. My roommate Justin was like, you're getting better, mate. Right? Well, I'm getting drunk. Well, both of those things were happening. I thought you were talking about like a fake ear or something like that, where they're sitting cross legged and they're hesitating. I was like, to do that with just three toes, that in and of itself is pretty impressive, but no one does that. All right, what are the other couple of things they did, too? Photography, pretty straightforward stuff where this is the very beginnings of photography. So people didn't understand double exposures, unless you're a photographer, but if you were, you could do all sorts of neat stuff, like double expose something to put a ghostly face in the background over someone's shoulder. That's great. I saw one I saw a spirit photograph where it was a ghostly arm. It also could have been a genie coming out of a bottle. One of the two. It looks exactly the same, but it was on a table. So they were like, this is a spirit arm, levitating table. So they're like tying three things together, table turning, levitating and spirit photography. Those are great. I think the spirit photography, just because they were taking advantage of this new technology, people did not even understand, right? It was like the deep fake of the time. And they were probably like, everybody, we got maybe three years. Yes, we better get prolific. And then everyone's going to be like, oh, that's just double exposure. Right? And then people, like I said earlier, too, a lot of the New Age stuff that's tied into spiritualism today, like tarot readings or, I don't know, astrology, that kind of stuff, that had nothing to do with this, because spiritualist, all of it, grew out of Christianity. So there was some Christian basis to all of the spiritualist practices. And even though in a lot of ways it was extraordinarily heretical, there was no religious leader in charge of anything. There was no scripture doctrine or anything like that. It was still very much tied into and born out of Christianity. So stuff like occult things would have been very much frowned upon by spiritualists. Totally. Should we take another break? I think we should. All right, we'll take another break and tell you about what the Civil War had to do with all of this right after this. You know you're a pet mom when your camera roll is all pics of your pet at Halo, we get it because we are pet moms too. And just like you, we know their nutrition is one of the most important decisions you'll make. Halo is natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science and thoughtfully sourced. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Find Halo at specialty pet stores and online. Hey, summer is here, my friend. Which means school is out, the sun is shining bright, the days are longer. And best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. Yeah. Whether you're road tripping or you're relaxing by the pool, you can tune into the podcast here. It's on Amazon Music that's so good, it's criminal. Morbid. That's right. It's part true crime and part comedy. Morbid takes you on a journey through murderous mysteries and major laughs, all in the same week. Yeah. From the paranormal to the pretty spooky and everything in between, hosts Selena Erkhart and Ash Kelly cover it all. And with two episodes released each week, you'll be hooked on this chart topping series before you know it. You can listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. All right, so precivil war in the United States, spiritualism was popular. It was booming, but it was more like the kind of thing that you did in a theater, and you would go see it as a curiosity, or you might just maybe even knew it was fake and it was just entertainment. There wasn't a lot going on back then. Kind of like looking at penguins and a zoo today. Like, you know, they're fake, but it's still fun to look at, right? Why not go pay a nickel to see Madam Whatever do her little erotic? Because we'll get into that. He's got a little sexy at times, too. A little ghost shimmy. This is part of the draw, the ghost shimmy. But you need to talk about a couple of things here. The Civil War for sure, but one of the things that was going on, we've been talking about a lot about the northeastern United States, and there's a very good reason it didn't take hold in the south. It's because the way Christianity was, and some might argue still is in the south didn't leave a lot of room, the hierarchy didn't leave a lot of room for other schools of thought. And it was basically, even though it wasn't necessarily a cult, it was just shut down kind of from the beginning. In the south, they're like, we'll stick to our voodoo, thank you very much. Yeah, exactly. Keep that spiritualism stuff out. Yeah. So it was just not a big thing in the south. The mediums at the time would move off the stage sometimes and have these private seances. Yeah. Sometimes they would get in touch with a family member, but oftentimes it would just be kind of the same as the stage show. They would say, I'm going to get in touch with Sammy Davis. Jr. Or whatever the popular dead figure at the time was, sure. But that was for like, pre Civil War. It was an entertainment, it was an amusement. But when the Civil War came, a lot of people died in the Civil War. And that means that a lot of people who survived the Civil War lost a loved one. And this might have been people who went off to fight and just never came back, never heard from again, nothing. Have no idea where they died, where they were buried. And so that kind of grief, that transcends any kind of time or place, and it created a lot of people, a large population of people who are very interested in getting in touch with their dead relative. And it just so happened that at the time, there was a movement afoot that said, oh, well, this guy over here is actually really good at getting in touch with the dead. Why don't you have a seance with him? You just have to pay him to do this work. Because it is a lot of work, whether you are a believer and a skeptic. It's a lot of work to have been a medium during this time. And so they would be paid and they would make a living like this. And so these seances, these performances were decreased in size, but vastly increased in frequency. Yeah, a lot more spiritualist doing. Smaller mediums for families or smaller seances for families. And the same thing happened after World War One as well. So it's kind of all fun and games until it gets to this level. If it's a big theater show, fine, whatever. Go pay your money and get entertained for an hour. But when you are taking people's money who have lost loved ones in battle, then that's when it gets kind of really ugly, if you ask me, right? And that's where I think a lot of the genuine skeptics who beat this kind of stuff to a pulp, that's the place that they're coming from. Not necessarily that it's like an affront of science or reason or common sense or anything like that, but that there are a lot of people who have parted money from people who are bereaved at the time. And you don't take advantage of people who are undergoing grief. That's a pretty shoddy thing to do. That's a life lesson right there for everybody listening, especially youngsters. Not only that, not only taking their money, but I imagine in a lot of cases, people made real life decisions based on things that would happen in these seances, right? Like sell the family farm, stuff like that. Oh, God. I hadn't thought about that. And not only sell the family farm, sell it to me, the medium. That's what your dead brother wants you to do. For what? Something's coming through. They're saying pennies on the dollar. Yeah. That's terrible. So by the end of the 20th century, things started to decline a bit. One was just pure greed. There were too many of them out there. They were all trying to outdo one another. They were trying to draw bigger crowds and more money, and they were getting more outrageous by doing so. And that meant just like anything, when you try and do that, the bigger you try to force something to be, sometimes that can lead to its kind of early death, I guess. Yeah. Go big or go home, but eventually you're going to go home anyway. That's the end of that saying. I love it. Right? So part of it was that they were making more and more audacious claims, but also there were more and more scientists like those that open minded scientific approach had become a lot more hardened toward spiritualism and mediums because so many had been investigated and found it just be total frauds. Most of the time. The outcome was the medium couldn't reproduce this ectoplasm or get in touch with the spirit when they were under controlled conditions or they went for it and they were found to be a fraud. Like the knuckle of their toe was found to be wrapping on a stool or something like that. And so as these reports kept coming out more and more these scientific investigators were like, I don't think any of this is real. And they would be interviewed in newspapers, and the papers would run these articles. And so over time, just the general public kind of turned away from spiritualism as hokummb and bunk. But the thing is, not everyone did. And even still today go as Dan Ackroyd, there is a group of people who adhere to spiritualism as a religion. No, for sure. And one of the big reasons that it didn't completely go away was spiritualists were very smart and that they would use influencers of the day in their act. They would seek out these well known people. They would tour the world, sometimes tour Europe and do seances with, like, royal families of various countries. The newspapers write about this. They would get a quote or maybe demand a quote from someone like well known, and they would say, all right, I'll come to a sans, but you got to give me a quote that I can use on my flyer or whatever. What's it called? Pull quote. No, that fallacy, the logical fallacy. Appeal to authority, I think. Yeah, the appeal to authority. Sure. Okay. Yeah. Which makes a lot of sense. If people say, oh, well, they did a stance for the Prince of Monaco right. Or Sammy Davis Jr. Then it's got to be good enough for me. It's not pseudoscience at all because why would Sammy Davis Jr. Believe in pseudoscience? Right? He's just a Satanist. He doesn't care about pseudoscience. That's right. So one of the other authorities that they would appeal to, chuck was there's an expose written in 1897, and by God, I can't find it anywhere. In my tabs. But it was basically revelations of a spirit medium is what it was called. And it was written anonymously by a medium, a hux or a fraud. And I'm pretty sure it was published in 1897, and it is like, 400 pages, exposing all the tips and all that stuff, all the tricks. But there's a glossary of 19th century slang words among hoaxers. It's amazing. But one of them was the Top Heavy, and that was a scientist who was overcredentialed. They had all these PhDs and everything like that. So they were bookmarked, but they were super gullible. And if you could get a Top Heavy to basically say, like, I can't explain it, science can't explain it, that would go a very long way to bolstering your career. Yes. Even if you talk to 100 scientists, and one of them was a top heavy who said something valuable to you, that's the only one. You're the 10th dentist of the nine out of ten dentists. Right, exactly. And that's all you need. Especially if the other nine dentists just keep their traps shut because they have better things to do. But there were a bunch of people who would not keep their traps shut, I guess, actually, one of legendary Top Heavy, even though it wasn't a scientist, credential or otherwise, was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm sorry. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. By the way, before I forget, if there's not a band called the 10th Dentist out there, then I don't know what to think anymore. It's a good one. Remember those Trident commercials? I think it was four out of five dentists. One of them was it four out of five. He was bit on the testicles by a squirrel before he could pronounce, before he could recommend dentine or Trident or something like that. Maybe it should be the fifth. It is four out of five. It's not nine out of ten. Do you remember that, though? No, it was great. Was that we make holes and teeth? Yeah. Remember that? The cartoon? That was Crest. Okay. Do you want to hear the pinnacle of 80s marketing to kids? My third grade, maybe fourth grade class, put on a play about toothpaste. Yes. And Cavities, sponsored by Crest. Yes. They had a big push back then for taking over the minds of American children. Well, it works. What's funny is, I now use Aquafresh, the orange tube. Oh, man. If there is a favorite toothpaste that any boy in America has ever had, that is it in its mind. That was from the 80s. No, it is now, but I'm saying the Crest takeover of my mind doesn't work. Got you. I'm an Aqua Fish Boy now. Is that the one with the tricolor? Yes, which is another very appealing part of it. Man, you'd buy it all, don't you? I do. Gullible. Yeah. I am a little gullible. You're like an Arthur Conan Doyle. So if you recognize his name, he was the author of Sherlock Holmes. Of course. He was super into this. He joined the Society for Psychical Research, which was an early skepticalbeliever society, and he bought into this. He was just convinced. But on the other side of the equation were skeptics who were not convinced, who basically didn't keep their mouth shut. They were the other four who would say, like, no, everybody, actually. This guy's wrong. My esteemed colleague has been taken. But then the head of those guys was Harry Houdini, amazingly enough. Yeah, Houdini. Which makes it super ironic that at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles, they have long had Harry Houdini seance nights oh, yeah. Where you can go into the Harry Houdini room and do a seance, which is all for fun. It is kind of funny that he was very much against this stuff. Although supposedly if you go to the Magic Castle, they'll tell you that he did and he may have really done this. He told his wife before he died that, hey, listen, if I was wrong, I'll come back and I'll contact you and let you know. Right. He came back and he said, I've got good news and I've got bad news. The good news is there is a heaven. The bad news is you're scheduled to pitch there tonight. Do you remember that? Scary stories to tell in the Dark book. Yeah. Is that what that was from? It was like, two friends who played baseball together. We had a pack to carry Houdini and his wife, apparently. I think there are different versions of that joke, though, man. The illustrations in that book were just bar none. Yeah, that was great stuff. And by the way, we should give a big rest in peace to Mr. Mort Drucker, who passed away oh, yeah. A couple of weeks ago in real time. But that was a big one. We talk about Mad magazine a lot, and Mort Drucker was my number one with a bullet. Favorite artist. And he passed on. And he was one of the greats. He definitely shaped my childhood in a very large way. Yeah, big time. With his drawings. All right, peace, sir. Yeah. Nice. We'll hear from you soon. Right? He's like, you guys are pitching tonight? Oh, no, both of us. So Harry Houdini, he's like, yes, josh is going to float it, and Chuck's going to have to be brought in for the safe. So Harry Houdini created this long standing tradition of stage magicians exposing the fraud of spiritualism, basically. Yeah, because they're like, they're stealing our tricks. Yeah. And it's pretty cool. He would incorporate into his stage shows a lot of these things that spiritualists were doing to show how they did it. And he was relentless at it. Yeah, he was very relentless, but it was very cool. And the fact that it's still going on today, richard Wiseman, who's come up a few times. He was in the Sheldrick episode, he was in the ghosts episode. And I think we somehow misconstrued his research in the ghost episode to suggest that he had proven ghosts exist. I don't remember exactly the details of it, but we got that one wrong. But in this case, he has recreated sciences from the 19th century and has shown how willing people are to totally misreport the events that went on in the sea to say that, yes, the table did levitate, or all the stuff they studying under these controlled conditions. And it's basically shown not just that the medium himself, or more often herself, as we'll see, was engaging in fraud, but also that the audience had a willing suspension of disbelief and were part of this, too, by saying, like, I felt the phantom arm tapped me on the shoulder. The medium didn't have anything to do with that. That was just something that kind of came out of the environment that was produced in the seats. Yeah. Pretty interesting. It is pretty interesting. So we'll finish up here with this. I thought this is very interesting, actually, the social implications of this. Not all, but a lot of the spiritualists were women in the 19th century for some practical reasons. They could wear these long dresses that could hide talented toe knuckles. They would not because of the time. They wouldn't get searched too closely, obviously, because you wouldn't do that if you were a scientist trying to examine whether or not a spiritualist was real or not. And there were men for sure, but that led to this kind of interesting side note. One is that women could make their own money. And so it's easy to poopoo something like this, but I'm sure those Fox sisters made a lot more dough than they ever could have as doing anything else offered and available to them at the time. Sure. So that's a good thing. That gave them some agency. But it was no coincidence that sometimes the voice from the other side would champion sort of progressive views, because this turned out to be a chance to sort of reshape policy in a way. If you were a woman and you were a spiritualist, it would be very easy to say, they're saying that women should have more rights, and if not, they will come back and haunt you. All right. And that kind of ended up happening in some ways. Yeah. There was a huge connection between spiritualism and spiritualist movement and abolitionism, the women's suffrage movement, the temperance movement, a lot of these progressive movements, workers rights. And if you're an abolitionist and you didn't believe in this kind of thing, you might be like, I'm not really happy about that. But at the same time, it kind of whipped up this fervor and that some people would like their spirits that were being channeled by the medium. We're saying things like, you guys better get on the train of abolitionism, you better get rid of slavery. And it actually did, especially in these theatrical settings, have a widespread influence on getting the message out there through the spirit communication. Weirdly enough. Yeah. It's almost like one could say anything at all at something like, oh, I don't know, a campaign rally. And people would believe it if they were an ardent enough believer in the speaker. Exactly. Especially if they attach their ego to you and your success. Very strange. So I just want to give two shouts out, one to probably the greatest ghost movie that involves Seances ever. Ghost? No. Whippy Goldberg. No. All right. The others with Nicole. Yeah, that was good. So good. Spoiler the greatest short story involving Seances and the spiritualist movement, written by arguably the greatest American writer of all time, joyce Carol Oates. It's called My Side. It's a short story. It's the same title as a collection of her short stories from the Think Night Side. Look it up and thank me later. It's seriously just bone chilling how good it is. I wonder if we could get in touch with her and read that for our Halloween episode. I tweeted to her once, kind of crassly, and never heard anything back. Even though she like, Twitter, I know she saw that tweet. Hey, at Joyce Carol Loads, you think you're so cool, right? I would love to read that one. There's another one, too. She's probably not just the greatest American writer, but the greatest American horror writer, too. She's great. She's so wonderful. I would read any of her stories. So if you out there know Joyce Carol Loads, we're in contact with her publisher. Please. We would love to read in our ad free episode one of her short stories for Halloween. That's right. So I think she might like that aspect. Okay, one last thing. Chuck. There's a place called Lilydale in New York, appropriately enough, which is basically a spiritualist community where you can go basically be among spiritualists as a religion. Today. Wonderful. Since I said today, it's time for listening to mail. I'm going to call this we haven't gotten emails in two weeks from people because something's wrong with our email server. Yeah. So it's on bidets again. You're going to get a couple on Bidets, I think. All right. Hey, guys. Listening to your recent episode on Bidets reminded me of a funny story I thought you might like. 2004, my family bought a new house in the suburbs of Detroit, designed and built by an exceptionally pragmatic, efficient, yet lacking in aesthetic appreciation engineer. To our surprise, my husband's delight as he is from Spain, the master bathroom included a separate Bidet unit. And remember, this is 2004, and people were not as familiar in this country. Most people that visited our home had no idea what it was. And we also made the decision to not give advance notice when they went to the bathroom. Invariably, people. Would emerge from the bathroom trip either a little wet or with an embarrassed look on their face as they confess having explored the contraption and released a stream of water onto themselves and into our bathroom. It was always good for a laugh. I sure appreciate you guys. When we moved from Michigan to the South Carolina, what was she once missed South Carolina? Because that would explain that last bit. No, I thought she met the south and I didn't see on the next line it said Carolina, so that was just me. Oh, okay. Your voices accompanied us as we made many twelve hour trips back and forth. We enjoyed the knowledge and the tangents. Even the tangents. And now you continue to soothe and educate me as I go on my four to five mile recreational walks during the pandemic quarantine and temporary, hopefully furlough. And that is from Michelle Salzodo. Nice. Thanks a lot, Michelle. We're glad to know that you're doing okay there. Hanging out, waiting for things to get back to normal in the South Carolina. That's right, Chuck. And as it will eventually go back to normal. And in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, like Michelle did, to let us know some silly story about a bidet or what have you, you can get in touch with us. Send us an email to stuffpodcast@howtofworks.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn More@halopeet.com 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." | |
How Wine Fraud Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-wine-fraud-works | Wine fraud may be a case of rich con artists tricking wealthy people into parting with money, but it's still a crime. Learn all about this weird, widespread practice in today's episode. | Wine fraud may be a case of rich con artists tricking wealthy people into parting with money, but it's still a crime. Learn all about this weird, widespread practice in today's episode. | Thu, 15 Oct 2015 13:48:40 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=15, tm_hour=13, tm_min=48, tm_sec=40, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=288, tm_isdst=0) | 45897005 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. And no, you should know man that coffee smells good, my son. Have a sip. No, I'm fine. But I just love that smell. So nice. Even though I don't drink much coffee. Oh, yeah, I'm with you. It's just a delicious smell. Sometimes I'll go to a department store and just walk through the fragrance aisle and just smell the coffee samples they have there. I thought you were going to say you go through the lingerie and just brush up against things after the coffee after the coffee sniffing is done and I can't smell anything anymore. Right. How are you? Thanks for outing me. And that's creepy. I'm sure there's weirdos out there who do that. Are you kidding me? There's probably websites dedicated to it. I'm fine. Good. You like wine? I love wine. How do you know, chuck, the wine you're drinking is actually the wine you think it is? Because nobody bothers to fraudulently rip off a $15 bottle of wine. Not true. Yeah, there's a famous fish in the world of wine fraud. Watch people. Okay. From Tesco, which is, I think it's just a straight up, like, supermarket in Britain. I saw that, actually. Yeah, you're right. And there is a Louisian Doe, which normally goes for about \u00a315. He was selling on sale for \u00a35. That's good deal. But one of the guys who purchased it contacted some people who are into wine and said, I think this is phony, because the label looks like it's a photocopy. So somebody was doing knock off Louisianot, which normally goes for not that much, and sold it to Tesco, who was in turn selling it. And this is a huge thing. Man there's a big debate even still on just how widespread wine fraud is. And it's really difficult to get to the bottom of because there's so many people who have their fingers in this fraudulent pot. Whether or unwittingly in either way are unwilling to admit that it's as extensive as it is. Or the people who are burned are making a bigger deal out of it than they are. Than it really is. Because they have the money and the context to get CBS to do a story on how they got burned by buying some fake wine. So it's not entirely clear how widespread it is, but there have been some really great, very famous, almost proven stories of outright wine fraud. But it's a pretty new phenomenon. Well, if you think ancient Rome is pretty new, let's hear it. Man well, ever since there was wine, people were making fake wine or trumping it up as something other than it was. So the newer practice, you can divide it into two things. It was an ancient Rome. They were doing stuff like this and adding, like, lead to wine to sweeten it while they were killing people. But then there's the new practice of, like, hey, this is a Thomas Jefferson bottle of wine, and you can buy to the Christie's auction for $100,000. And it's really not that at all. Do you remember back in the think Ryan was adding, like, windshield wiper fluid or something? Yeah. It was, at the very least, an urban legend. More recently, there was something added to wine to make it sweeter that was really bad for you. But I don't know. I can't confirm if it was that case or not. This is specifically reunited in the again, it could have just been an urban legend, because at the same time that there were spiders eggs in bubble. Yum. Sure. Yeah. There was a lot of, like, consumer panic, I think. Yeah. It was a golden age for urban legends. Yeah, agreed. And you know what? We need to do one on wine, period. Yes. This is so us. Yeah. We'll do episodes on everything but the actual thing, and then we'll finally get to the thing. And we could also probably do a completely separate podcast on wine tasting because, man, that's a really bitter pill. Because there are some people who say there really is no difference in these wines, and there have been numerous occasions over the years where jerks have set up wine tasters to fail by just switching out wines and saying, this is a really nice bottle. What's? Really crappy. And they say, this is lovely. The tannins are really coming in. It's jammy and full. And they're like, you're drinking two buck chuck. People love that stuff. It's a big bone of contention with wine drinkers and also people who like to poopoo that right. And say it's all subjective and you're all just snooting. There really is no difference. But there really is a difference. Well, okay, like you say, there's a big debate over that, right? Yeah. But if you dive into the world of high end vintage wine collecting yes. It's like an aura boras, right. That snake that eats its own tail. Right. In that the people who are in charge of judging whether something is real or not are basing that on their previous experiences, which may or may not have been an experience with the fraudulent wine. So even if you can tell the difference, if you've only been exposed to, say, fraudulent 18th century wine, then when you are asked to judge a bottle of 18th century wine, you're going to compare it to that, and if it's ultimately coming from the same counterfeiter, you will be like, yes, this is the real thing, because I've had that before, and it tastes like that. Well, yeah. And here's the other thing is. There is vintage, appropriately aged wine that tastes great because it has aged in such a way. And then there are these super old bottles that apparently taste like canned, asparagus is the note that it brings out. And these don't even taste that good. It's just the fact that you can own it and show people you don't even drink it in most cases. Yes. You don't drink a Jefferson wine. No. You have it in your collection. You say, oh, look at my collection. Exactly. That's the whole point for a lot of people. That's the whole point. It's just own this bottle. It's like owning a piece of Thomas Jefferson. You get to show off and tell people how great you are. Right, yeah, exactly. So that's how a lot of wine counterfeiting has gotten away with, because people are never going to open the wine. Exactly. So whatever tampering you did with the seal is never going to be discovered. They're never going to taste the wine inside. So it could be two buck chuck or whatever. Won't see the quirk. Yes. And they're just happy to have this thing and their status to be elevated to the point where they don't really want to know if it's a counterfeit, so long as they can walk around and tell people, this is Thomas Jefferson. Right. Well, we should go ahead and start talking about Bill Coke. He is one of the other brothers. He is not Charles or David Koch of the famous Republican Koch brothers fame. Billionaire supporters of the Republican Party. Yeah, sure. Are you saying that's, like, the nicest way to describe them? It really is. Yeah, it is. He is the brother, one of the brothers who got out along with another brother. Not another brother from another mother. No, they all the same mother. Right, right. Okay. Yeah. He got out of the family business and said, you know what? I'm a billionaire. What I'm going to do is I'm going to start collecting really rare and expensive things. One thing he has is a gun collection. He owns Custard's rifle, billy the Kids pistol. Does he? Yeah, he owns the gun that killed Jesse James. Oh, I'm sorry. He has Jesse James pistol and that gun. What was his name? Robert Ford. Yes. And that was a good movie. Oh, boy, was it really good. Beautifully shot as well. Wyatt Earp's rifle. Doc holidays rifle. He owns a lot of vintage guns. He has a lot of very famous works of art, like original Picassos and Monets. Right. It's hardly enough. Exactly. He sounds like a big sucker to me. And he also owns, as this article says, several hundred bottles of what he calls moose pits. Yeah, that's what he calls it. Well, he's saying that for all he knows, that's what's inside. He got duped very famously, many times. Yeah. And he has had many lawsuits over the years that have come out. This guy loves suing people. Sure. He does what he calls dropping subpoenas on people. Oh, yeah. He sues people almost recreationally. He drops a subpoena on their head. Yeah. What a guy. So Bill Coke, again, very famously, he's probably the most famous victim of wine fraud because he sues everybody he possibly can who may or may not have sold him a fake, really takes it personally and he really goes after people. And he did a lot of media about this, too. So he's very famous for this. And he brought in some wine experts and said, here are 30,040 thousand bottles of wine that I have in my sellers. How many are fake? And they just took a random sample of 3000 bottles. Are you're kidding me? No. They said, what are you paying me again? Yeah, exactly. They're like, we'll bill you for this. They took a random sample of 3000 bottles and it yielded 130 fakes. So, I mean, he has hundreds and hundreds and hundreds by extension of fake bottles of wine in the cellar. And that was actually about on par with what the average, not necessarily uninitiated or uneducated wine buyer, but fervent vintage wine buyer would have that about $4 million seller. About a million of it will be on fakes. Yeah. And he supposedly spent close to $5 million on fake wine over the past quarter century, including some of those Jefferson that we'll talk about. And a lot of this wine came from a man named Rudy Keniawan. That's good stuff. Yeah, it's even better than I had in my head. What did you have? Kearnyawanawan. I like that. I think kernelan is good. And this guy was one of the most famous really? Alongside another guy that we'll talk about, one of the most famous wine fraudists. Fraudsters. Fraudster. Counterfeiters. Counterfeiters of all time. And he was sentenced to ten years in prison and supposedly was to pay close to $50 million in damages, which is easily what he made by selling fake wine. Sure. In two sales in 2006, he made $36 million selling fake wine. What a jerk. And it's easy to sit back and the defense team even used this in court to say, these are rich guys. Like, no harm, no foul. Who cares if you're ripping off the rich? Yes, very easy. And I even found myself kind of thinking that, but at the end of the day, it's wrong. It's wrong. It's wrong. Sure. I mean, like, I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't sell a counterfeit bottle of wine. Yeah, it's wrong. It's illegal and it's gross. And just because you're ripping off the rich, it's not like he's Robin Hood and giving that vin to the poor. He was having rich himself. I didn't have the idea that he was doing that. No. Plus Dave Rugs, who wrote this point, but I take issue with it that ultimately vintage counterfeit wine fraud affects all wine drinkers because that stuff trickles down. I don't think that's true because from reading this, there were two really great long form articles that this article was partially based on. One was in the New Yorker and one was on Vanity Fair. And both of them were totally worth reading. Yeah, agreed. But just from reading those, you get the impression that those are two very different worlds, that the world of just regular wine appreciation and vintage wine collection form, a Venn diagram that just barely overlaps, and that one really does not affect the economics of the other. So if there's a bunch of counterfeit stuff going on in the vintage wine world, it probably wouldn't drive up prices for the wine that you're buying. That's ten years old, tops. Yeah. So I don't think that that's necessarily true. His point that we all shoulder the burden that counterfeiters do because these two worlds are so divorced, but even still, like, if you were people are losing money and reputations are being built up and lost. Yes, I get that. All right, well, let's take a little break and we'll come back and we'll talk about the two ways that you can generally go about trying to fake a wine. All right, we're back. We're drunk on wine. So drunk. I wish. What's your favorite wine? My favorite wines are big bodied California cabernets. Generally, like, not a specific, like, winemaker, if that's what you were asking. I'm not going to like yeah, there's no wrong answer. Yeah. Funny, because it made me think of Fat Bottom Girls, that Queen song. Big Bodied California Saturday's. Yes. It just popped into my head and I laughed like a goon. Yeah. I like really full bodied wines. Zinfandel's and Cabernets. I think California is just they're doing it right. You know, they say petitesura is the Rodney Dangerfield of the wine world. I've heard that. Yeah. So if you're going to go about faking a wine, there are two things you can do. You can either fake the wine inside a real bottle or you can fake the bottle with real wine. Yeah. And it's all real wine, but it's just different vintage, maybe. Yeah. But it could be like a really nice 19 seven wine that you say it's actually from 1914 or even 1941. I mean, it could be within a couple of years. It depends on whether it was a good year. Yeah, good point. Or if there's a scarcity of it, that kind of stuff. And actually, Bill Cook makes a pretty good point. His whole thing is he wants to have, I think, 150 years of lafitte or somehow, like, every single vintage that they released, of every single variety over the course of 150 years, which is extremely ambitious. Sure. And he said it's easy to get the really prized ones, because those are the ones that people saved and all that. He said it's the mediocre years that are old that nobody bothered to save this drank and threw away the bottle or just didn't keep it. Those are the ones that he has the most trouble finding. Or they did skeet shooting. They just had the servants throw it up in the air and they shot them with shotguns. Yeah, that's what they do. Ritchie riches. Well, you make a good point too, because Kearny Allen, although he dealt in the super high echelon, he would also take a 200 bottle of wine and fake it to be like $1000 bottle of wine. Yeah, he did it both ways. He would take an old bottle, legitimate real bottle, put in his own mix of wine and cork it again and make it look like it had never been opened. Or like you said, he would take just say, 47 la ft and mess with the label to make it look like a 41 la Ft, which would be worth ten times what the 47 la Ft would be worth. Right. And clearly I also want to point out lafitte is obviously the only fancy wine that I'm familiar with because that's my go to. So if you guys are out there and you're getting the impression that I know what I'm talking about, as far as wine goes, you have been duped. Well, you're not a big wine guy. You're on record as such. I like wine. I'm definitely not a wine guy. Yeah, exactly. And I'm not wine guy either. I'm wine guy in the bare sense of the word. I like really good wines. I like going to wineries, but I'm certainly not like I'm not saying I have some amazing palette. I can't pick out vanilla notes and things like that. I'm just like, man, this tastes really good. When will you pour up a bottle of it? And I tend to fall into that camp where I'm certain that there are people out there, literal taste makers, who can tell the difference between wine. Sure. And I've had wine that I didn't like before I've had wine that I do like, but I fall into the camp where I'm ultimately like it's. Whatever you appreciate, there's no hierarchy. There doesn't need to be. A $2,000 bottle is not necessarily going to taste as good as a $20 bottle. The whole thing is just about individual enjoyment and it's kind of snobbery associated with it to me just misses the point. Yeah. Here's my deal. I can really tell the difference between what I would consider cheap wine and like, a decent bottle or a good bottle, but that's where my taste level maxes out. I can't tell the difference between a $200 bottle and a $40 bottle. Okay. But if you gave me like a six dollar bottle, you can taste the difference between that and like, a $20 bottle. Yeah, but even then, if that's what you like, that's what you like. I'm not really scooping. It's just not what I want. Oh, man. A lot of caveats there. So we were talking about Rudy K. Yeah. And how he faked wines. He got real bottles. Correct. In general. And made his own wine concoctions. Here's what this dude did, right. To get to the point where he could even counterfeit. Yes. He got his hands on real stuff and he ran up some serious bar tabs while he was doing it. There's a very legendary story of him hooking up with this guy who was the head of wine sales at an auction house called acker merrill. They factor in big time into this guy's assent. Yeah. Rudy k's counterfeit ascent. Not wittingly, necessarily, but they let him use their reputation to build his own. But he did it by duping them, by throwing these crazy parties at restaurants and having, like $250,000 tabs, picking up the tab himself. But then after everybody left, going to the staff at the restaurant, being like, mail me every single one of those bottles, right? And they go, okay, it's your wine. But that's weird. Not enough to make mention of it, but it was odd to them. His big thing was that he did it at the same place over and over again. So they did start to notice. But while he was doing this, he was also collecting wine, too. Really expensive vintage wine. And there was already a market for it, but it didn't look anything like the market that he built almost himself. He drove the value of vintage wine up almost single handedly by buying up as many bottles of old stuff as he could. And while he's doing that, he was building his reputation. He was making connections, and he was getting his hands on legitimate wine that he could use to resell now that the market was up at a higher price after he had already consumed it. It's like a party. Yeah. And one thing he was doing that tipped off some people early on was like you were saying, he was buying off years of good vintages, great vintages to where? There was one guy, jeffrey troy was his name. He was a wine merchant, and he said he was buying these good bottles of french burgundy, but they weren't great. They were off years. And if he was a collector, it was just weird to buy these and to be adamant about buying these, because he could get them for cheaper and fake them easier. Exactly. Like, he could just kind of smudge the year, and all of a sudden, it's a much more expensive vintage. Yeah. So he's driving the market up. He's buying legitimate wine. Apparently. He's taking out loans that he's defaulted on to build his reputation. And so when the market hits, he starts counterfeiting. And there was one story that actually was pretty prominent in the vanity fair article where he was apparently confused. He thought and there's no way that any of us would have ever thought this, but he thought that a ponzo closed st. Denis was the same thing as the christine ponzo CLO st. Denis. Right. He was way off. So it turns out that he figured that ponzo made this wine in burgundy in the 40s because christine Ponson, denise made this wine in the 40s. Turns out that the regular ponso, the very famous Ponso family made their close end starting in the 80s. So he actually got found out because of this one mistake. This led to his unraveling, and he was going to auction or sell about, like, 95 bottles of this stuff that was overtly counterfeit. It had never existed. Which also said a lot about the collectors at the time, too, because they were coving and paying for wine that they'd never even heard of. Yeah, it didn't exist strictly because these people were attached to it. Yeah. It's pretty amazing. It really is. And that's how he was able to get away with it for so long, because that dinner, the guy Ponsel himself, the guy who was the proprietor of the vineyard, showed up at that dinner, flew from Paris to, I think, New York to be at the dinner to make sure that they didn't auction off those things because he knew they were counterfeit. And Rudy K still was left to just keep going for years after that because of reputation. Well, and like you said, he had built up this reputation, which is a big part of it. You have to be a true con artist. You can't just go in there and say, hey, I've got all these Jefferson wines, I'm chuck. Right. You have to be known in the community, and it takes a long time. And they have to build that rep. Right. Yeah. They have to think you have money, real money. Which he did. No, he borrowed it all. Well, I thought he came for money. No, that was well, he had money at one point, he borrowed it. Oh, I know, but then he made a lot. Right. So think about this. I think he defaulted on a three or $4 million loan and then another one or $2 million loan, and then he also borrowed privately from other, like, wine collectors that he knew. Yeah, but even still, let's say he borrowed $10 million that he defaulted. He made tens and tens and tens more millions. $34 million in one year, just from two sales. Yeah. And he currently is appealing his conviction on the grounds that when he was arrested, he was arrested on his front porch. Then they searched his house and they said, you can't do that. They got the search warrant afterward, and he said, you can't do that. I should have never been searched. Yes. Really? And it's looking like they're saying, no. You know what? They had reasonable doubt. Yeah, exactly. So I don't think that appeal is going to go anywhere. But this is as recently as, like, this year, I think he sold appeal. Yeah, but he got ten years, right? Yeah, ten years. He got caught red handed, it sounds like. And the people who were attached to him that helped build up this market definitely suffered some dings to their reputation, but are saying, like, we had no idea we trusted this guy. We were duped too. And to their merit, acker merrill offered money back guarantees on anything that was going considered or found to be fake and paid up on it after one auction. Well, one of the guys Coke is suing, I can't remember his name, but he supposedly is like, I didn't know I was selling you fake wine. Like, I got duped, and he's saying, no, you knew. So they're trying to prove whether or not this guy actually knew. And so that's another part of that debate where how widespread is this? Who knows what? Yeah. How far do you go back before you find the person who did it? Right. So we'll talk about one other person who allegedly did it right after this break. So, Chuck, there's another man, very famous man in the wine world. His name is Hardy Rodenstock, but I don't believe that's his real name. His real name is what Minehart? Gurker. That's right. What a name. That's his given name. But he goes by Hardy Roadenstock and has since the he to be a truly great wine counterfeiter. Not only do you have to build up a reputation as rich and willing to crack bottles of ridiculously expensive, historically valuable wine at parties sure. Where there's wine critics and auctioneers and wine experts, but you also have to have a certain love for wine. I think Rudy K definitely loved wine. Yes, but they all have. Yeah. And Hardy Rodenbock definitely does, too. And apparently there's a big question about whether he is one of the better wine mixers on the planet. Who? Rodentsock? Yeah. Because that's a real job where someone will work at a winery and they'll take a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and then all of a sudden you've got their blend. Yeah, they're blend. Some blends are better than others. Apparently, Rodentstock is a master blender if he is, in fact a counterfeiter. This article on how stuff works makes it sound like bill Coke's hired FBI gun, closed the book, and it's done. But it's never been proven in a court of law that Rodentsock actually was this counterfeiter. And he still denies the allegations. The circumstantial evidence is pretty substantial. Yeah. I mean, I think the only reason is because he refuses to come to America to go to court, but there's no criminal prosecution. It's all civil, as far as I understand. Yeah, I think that's the case. So he was a former music manager, and I think there's a book called the Billionaires Vinegar about this, about the Jefferson wines so interesting that they're making to a movie with McConaughey, of course. Oh, yeah. Does he play Bill Coke or Hardy rodent Stock? I don't know who he's playing, or does he just kind of like, wander around days in the background? He's the wine maker man. Yes. I'm not sure who he's playing, actually, but it was a big book, and it was about the famous jefferson wines. And basically, the deal is Thomas Jefferson, as we all know, was way into wine, way into France, a big Franco file, and he had either bottles in his collection where he had his own vintage as well, thomas Jefferson wines. And very famously, Hardenstock was rooted out, allegedly, I guess. Do we have to say that as faking these Jefferson bottles? Yeah, he would force you're supposed to spit out when you're drinking wine tasting I don't know about force, but highly encourage his guests to swallow so they would be drunker by the time he got to the real good stuff at the end. Again, so it's unusual to force your guests to drink rather than spit out the wine at a tasting party. And then it's also unusual to bring out your best stuff at the end, because everybody knows your palate is saturated, and you can't really tell the difference anyway. Well, if you've ever been on a wine tour and go to, like, several wineries, you definitely at the last winery. You're like, Give me a case. Right? This is great. Yeah. So when he's throwing these parties in these tastings, again, he's invited and they're very smart to invite wine experts, wine critics, wine journalists. It's an event. It is an event. And again, all these people think that this dude is just this eccentric, extraordinarily rich dude who is literally opening to drink and share with them these wonderful these people who are peons compared to this man. He's such a great man because he's open to 1787 bottle of Thomas Jefferson's wine, and he's given me a glass. I've got to go write about it. I got to talk about how good Hardy Rodent stock is. So he's very smart to have surrounded himself with the people he did. Yeah. So his story was that he claimed that he found a batch of Jefferson bottles behind a brick wall in a Paris Parisian basement that he still hasn't revealed where. This is a little suspicious at all, especially if you already got all the wine out of there. Yeah, exactly. And then he and he went and sold a lot of these to people like Coke and Christopher Forbes and other billionaires for hundreds of thousands of dollars per bottle. I think they were, like, about 120 a bottle. Yeah, it's a ton of money. Sure. And they were fakes. And it all came down to a little matter of punctuation, which is hysterical to me. The Thomas Jefferson bottles. Well, first of all, he kept really meticulous records because he's so into wine. Jefferson TJ did. Yeah. So on the bottles, Chuck, it said it was engraved Thapital J, period. Right. Supposedly, Jefferson, when he wrote his initials, it would be Thapital J, period. So that fatal flaw of the matter of punctuation is what gave him away, basically. Yeah. There's a larger question, too. So the idea that Thomas Jefferson would have his bottles engraved was based on. A letter, a verified letter. It was an order that Jefferson placed for French wine on behalf of himself and George Washington, which makes these bottles even more amazingly awesome, because they think, well, these came from an order that Jefferson placed that were also in George Washington's shipment as well, and that they needed to be separated out by initials. But if you step back and you think they wouldn't go in and grave all the bottles, they just mark the crates that the bottles came in. This crate goes to George. This crate goes to Jefferson, because he was ordering it by the case, not by the bottle. So the idea that the bottles would be engraved is also dubious in and of itself. Sure. But Monticello historians are like, number one, this is wrong, the way that this is engraved. It's not how he would have done it. And secondly, there's no records in all of we have the records for this era, and there's nothing in there about these vintages being in Monticello or being ordered by Jefferson. And then also, once Bill Coke put his FBI dude on the case, it turns out that it's likely that this engraving was done by Modern Instruments. Yeah, he hired a guy named an ex Fed named Jim Elroy. I know. I kept telling McElroy too. Really? I guess because of the McElroy brothers. So he hired this guy, pay him a lot of money, I imagine, to try and do some digging on this. And one of their first lines of defense was, there's something called 137, and that is a radioactive isotope that exists because it's a product of nuclear fission of uranium. So it didn't exist until we started doing that before we started launching nuclear bomb explosion tests. Yeah, exactly. Now it exists, and you can actually test for this stuff. So if you find it basically can date something back to however, in the case of Hardenstock, he was smart enough at least to use wine older than 1945, so that didn't really help him much. Yes. And I wonder if he just surely he just lucked out. I don't know. Because I wonder if that Cesium test was around when he did this, because he supposedly found him in 85 and started selling them immediately. Yeah, who knows? Maybe he got lucky, or maybe he just was like, I need to use some really old, nice wine to at least try and get away with it. So again and then one other part of the case against him was that he had a tenant once at his family's house who had an apartment near his in the house and in the basement. The tenant said that he saw basically tons of empty bottles and stacks of labels and all this stuff, which to the tenant meant, well, this guy's forging wine. Right. That's a little more that's probably what I would think. I hope you don't go by my recycling every Wednesday. Pure wine counterfeiter. It could be. There's nothing you can do about these old I mean you can have people inspect them and try and verify them but there's really nothing you can do as a foolproof method. But really nice wineries now are doing there are a lot of methods you can do now for future generations of wine fraud. Yeah. For the vintage stuff you're sol. Basically, yes. You just have to really trust where it's coming from. Probably hire an expert and maybe stay away from rodent stock if you're Bill Coke, right? That's right. Yeah. Like you said, the modern guys are using things like RFID tags, QR codes that you scan and it takes you to a website or something microchips like you have in your dog. Yes. So you can track the actual bottle. There's also like tamper proof capsules that the wine is encased in the bottle's neck that when that's open it changes color if it's ever been opened. And some actually alert the Internet, I guess, back home at headquarters. Yes, they alert the Internet once it's been open. And there's another one that's pretty cool. There's this company that inserts a specific DNA marker into the ink on the label that can't be counterfeited and that they can go back in later and be like no, this is real. At the very least we know the label is real. Yeah, in Rudy case case he had a bunch of credit card charges for glue and labels and ink. He had a pretty nice trail of evidence behind him. He was not very smart with it. Well, I mean if his apartment was just a counterfeiting factor and then lastly, check one of the pieces of evidence that a lot of people point to when they say that wine fraud is a big deal is ebay bottles. Yeah, you can go on ebay and spend $100 on an empty bottle that if it weren't empty, would go for 1000 or 10,000 or whatever. And the idea behind it of course is that somebody is filling it up and putting it back on the market as a counterfeit. Why would someone sell that? That reason to make $100 on a $10,000 bottle of wine. Sure, some people love money. I know. It just seems like a lot of people who buy that kind of wine. I don't picture them going on ebay and running auctions over. It makes you wonder also if those are people who like they're just working at a restaurant. Well, that's what it sounds like to me. You can take that home and put it on anybody. The servant cleans up after the dinner party. That's what I figure is going on. And apparently a lot of restaurants now because of guys like Rudy K and Hardy Road and Stock now smash vintage bottles once the wine has been ordered and junk. Well, with the shotgun and the skeet shooting I got one last thing. Supposedly there were only five Magnums of 1947 La Floor produced okay. Between 2005 and 2000 and 718 Magnums of 1947 La Flora were sold at auction. Wow. That's so easy to how can that happen? That's so easy to check when there's only five of something. The argument is that either the guy who works at La Fleur and did in 1947 and says, no, there was only five Magnums, doesn't remember. Right. Because the record keeping in Burgundy is terrible back in the day. Sure. Or that there's just no will. There's so much of a market for counterfeit wine, and there's not enough pressure being put on the people who are actually selling it or allowing it to happen. That it's just whatever. And supposedly, now that America has gotten more and more savvy, this counterfeit market is moving over to China, to where there's, like, a lot of wealth coming up and not a lot of wine education, and people are just getting taken for rides. Man good stuff. Yeah, this is a good one. Man good pick. If you want to know more about wine fraud, you can type those words in the search bar houseofworks.com. And I said, search bar show. Chuck, what is the time for Facebook questions? All right. Sometimes we pull questions from Facebook to answer them. That's what we're doing now. This is from Diane Martin. Diane F. Martin, since your podcasts are essentially what would be called literature reviews and research lingo, how do you decide which references to include and exclude? Use any kind of quality indicators to decide what you will and won't include, especially when they're deeply debated. This is a good question. We've talked about our research process. I think we tried and use peer reviewed journals. And if we find something on the Internet, we try and double and triple check that information. I know a big giveaway you always talk about is if it's the same exact thing, printed a bunch. That's usually a sign that it could be bogus. Like Rodney Dangerfield being in the scout. Yeah. In the movie the Scout. But it still bears mentioning. Sure. You just have to mention it with the caveat. We don't find it credible, but it's out there because it exists in some form or fashion. Scientific journals, medical journals. Sure. I mean, peer reviewed is just a great way to go if you can get your hands on it. I remember this great article called, like, Why Is Science Behind a Paywall? About basically the science publishing cartel. But if you can get your hands on peer reviewed stuff, that's the best stuff to work with. Agreed. Go ahead. Another question? Yeah, Chuck. For me. This is from Shane Elliott. I knew I think you might know this question will find a special place in Chuck's heart. What are your favorite types and kinds of beers, and why do you brew your own beer? And somebody else said recently on Twitter that you said in the beer episode that you're going to get into, homebrewing. Did you ever? So that's a two part question for you, Chuck from Twitter and Facebook. Well, you're a beer guy too. Sure, I like beer. I do not brew my beer, but on the Record is really liking IPAs. I know there's a backlash going on now. Why? Because there's so many of them and people are like, there's other kinds of beers in the world. IPAs taste like soap. I love anything that's super hoppy. Yeah, I do. That's what I like. Our friend Dave dropped by Sweetwater and brought us some hop hash. I haven't tried it yet, have you? No, but all that stuff is good. Yeah, Sweetwater does a great job and we've always both kind of agreed that Sierra Nevada Paleo is one of the great all time pale oil, for sure. But there's so many great ones. Bell's, two hearted I love. Oh, man, that might be the best ever. Yeah. And that planet, the Elder, we got sent some of that. That was delicious. Oh, here in Athens, Georgia. Creature Comforts tropicalia. I've not had that one. Delicious. Orpheus brewing is here in Atlanta and they make a sour that I tried. That was really good. I'm not into the sours. Have you tried it? Sours? Yeah. You seem like it. I loved it. It was weird that I was like, this is kind of good. Yeah, it was weird in a good way because sometimes weird can just be novel and you're like, okay, I tried that, it's done. I like it. Yeah. I don't like wheat beers. I don't either. Belgian whites. No, not a fan. All right, there's your answer. Fishbowl. I'm thirsty. Jackson Bly. Other than Atlanta, what are your top five favorite cities each? New York, San Francisco, seattle. Does that have to be American city? Okay, in that case, then I'll throw in Paris and Wendon. Look at me. Well, fancy things. I know. Let's see. I love Hiroshima. Japan is a really neat city. So it's Toyota. I'm going to make those tied for one though. Of course. New York. Sure. Let's see, where else? I like DC a lot too. Yeah, that's a great town. Rome, italy is surprisingly neat. Surprisingly? What? Are you kidding? I mean, it's a major city and it's packed with people. So you would think, like, it's a city. Sure. But it also has I mean, like you're just walking along the street and all of a sudden you're walking next to like a 3000 year old wall. Yeah. That's not even part of a museum. This city just built up around it. Yeah, dude, there'd be like a fountain on a corner that believes like somebody's peeing in. That's 1000 years old. Right. It's a very neat city in that regard. That's all I can come up with right now. Oh, you know what? I don't have to go all fancy pants like Charleston, South Carolina. One of my favorite places. It's a great place for food. Savannah. Yeah. I like Charleston and Savannah. Yeah. They're similar to me. Yeah. Charleston is a little more refined, but also a little more modern. Yeah. It's not fancy pants to like cities overseas. No, I know, but when someone says Paris, you're like, yeah, the Paris is awesome. It is a great time in London. When's the last time you're in London? Like 20 years ago. Okay. You should go back because London is like a brand new city. Yeah, I bet there is something to do at all times. Now they have cabs, which is apparently the big thing that changed there. And it's just an awesome little town. Beautiful. Well, maybe we can go there on a tour. Yes. Well, that's your turn for the question. This is from Gus M. Parker. Why did Josh grow his hair? Gus, there's a simple answer to that. That's a good question. Because I can't. Because I realized that I have hair, and I'm going to live it up while I got it. I'm going to go with Gary. Rickleman, what is the best flavor of poptart? Hint there is only one correct answer that is not true. Gary, I think what the answer you're looking for is brown sugar and cinnamon. It's a good one. There's nothing wrong with blueberry or strawberry. Strawberry is really good. Frosted strawberries. As long as it's frosted. That's the key. Well, here's another key, and here's the tip for you that don't mind clogging your arteries. Pop it out of the toaster. I know where you're going with this. Get a stick of butter and rub it on the back, the dry side and then around the edges of the other side and just thank me later. I have not tried that. And I actually heard of that before from Jessica Simpson when she was pregnant. Oh, really? Apparently just went berserk on the buttered pop part. Never heard of that. You got time for one more? Yeah, we got time for a couple of more. This is an unusual one. From Michael snively or snively? One of the two probably snively. If the Bryant and Clark were units of measure, what would they measure? Oh, man. Mine would probably oh, I know what mine would be. Some sweat level, like, units of sweat per square inch or something. That's a good one. Yeah. Mine would measure the distance between any one place and awesome. Wow. How's that? It's good. Thank you. I got one more. Chelsea Hamilton, what's the most rewarding thing that stuff you should know has brought to you or allowed you to do? We've done a lot of really neat things that we're very thankful for, but I'm going to just say the live shows, because they're so much fun. They're a lot of fun. And it's fun to go to cities I've never been to, and it's fun to meet people and get out of this little room. So it's very rewarding and very fun. I'm going with Chuck Manson as well. All right, well, thanks, everybody, for those Facebook questions. If you ever want to get in touch with us on Facebook, you can go to facebook. Comsteno. You can also tweet to us at syskpodcast. That's our handle. You can send us a good old fashioned email to stuffpodcastlehouseofworks.com and as always, join us at our homeonthewebushtnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseupworks.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 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." | ||
How Cult Deprogramming Worked | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-cult-deprogramming-worked | The fear of cults in the 1970s drove Americans to look the other way on kidnappings, abuse and torture of cult members by deprogrammers - but did it even work? | The fear of cults in the 1970s drove Americans to look the other way on kidnappings, abuse and torture of cult members by deprogrammers - but did it even work? | Tue, 22 Sep 2015 12:53:06 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=12, tm_min=53, tm_sec=6, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=265, tm_isdst=0) | 36135578 | 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. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Chuck Bryant and I always Wacky Jerry. So this is stuff you should know. Once again, 60 seconds proceeding. The record button being pressed is the gold. I wish we could sell that stuff. Yeah, sell it on the street. People be hooked on it. You know what the street value of that minute is? What? About $5? That's not bad. Yeah. Chuck? Yes? Have you ever been in a cult? No, not technically. Not at all. Remember we've done episodes on Colts, on Brainwashing. This is pretty much the natural extension of that progression. Yes. We talked a little bit about Deprogramming and the cults one and watching, probably. But this one, it turns out, has a lot of interesting history I didn't know about. Yes. Man, it is crazy. A dark spot on America's recent past. Yeah. Yet again. Yet another one. Because apparently the powers that be really got everybody so scared over things like the communist threat or nuclear weapons or what have you, that America is basically like a herd of spooked cattle for many decades and we channeled our anxieties out on anything other or different. And this is a great case of that. Yeah. And courts will get to this. But they said roundly that you can kidnap and torture and rape people as long as it's out of love. As long as those people are weirdos. Yeah. As long as it's a parent loving their child in the harshest, extreme way. Man, it's going to imagine crazy what people went through. Unbelievable. So the whole thing, we should say, like, America did lose its mind collectively for many years. Yes. And it happens from time to time. Started in good old Salem before there wasn't even in America. It's a long tradition here in this country of everybody yeah. Going crazy. And like I said, this is the case of it. But this case did coalesce around certain things. It wasn't just out of the blue. It wasn't out of nowhere to start off with. In the late 60s, early 70s, there was a real division between generations in the United States. Sure. Huge. There was the parents who still remember the 50s, were raised in the 50s, born in the 50s, maybe, but definitely were a little more buttoned up and up with Ike than their kids were. Yes. Okay. So imagine if you have kids and they're going through this rebellious phase, and they're smoking pod and they're, like, wearing motorcycle boots and rocking out to the Beatles and flipping you off every time you look at them. And then all of a sudden this weird tranquility comes over them and they start wearing robes and they shave their head, except for there's a long ponytail in the back and they're still wearing boots and smoking pot and listening to the Beatles. Right. Or they start wearing bow ties and quoting scripture to you. Wouldn't you be like, well, that's a little weird. This is a little odd. Something's going on here with my kid. My kid, who's 20, underwent, like, a serious religious conversion that has never been seen before in our family. That's a little weird. That's not one I approve of. Yeah. So there's these groups that at the time were called cults. But today, if you read sociology texts or studies or whatever, they're called new religious movements. Yeah. Sex. Right. With CT. Sex. And these groups are basically, at the time, they were all termed cults. Sure. And usually when you think cult, especially United States, it's like some sort of Eastern religion or something like that. But it turns out the cult movement of the early 70s, late sixty s and into the 80s were actually, for the most part, Bible based. Like Christian cults. Sure. But they took Christian beliefs and teachings and went really far out there with them. Or there was a huge influx of Eastern thought and Eastern religion into the United States, too. And anybody who joined this group joined a cult. But today, if you call them a cult, it's not very nice. You call them a new religious movement or a sect. Right. Yeah. Or in the case of The Source family, which I've talked about as being my favorite cult. Yeah. They just like to have sex and do drugs a lot. The Source, they were a cult, though. Well, yeah, sure. By those definitions right. At the time. Yeah. I'd call them a commune now. Okay. Probably that had a band and a charismatic hang gliding frontman. Right. The charismatic thing is a huge thing. Yeah. That's usually the one thing that is the commonality in all new religious movements. They are centered around a central figure. But as the guy who wrote this article, which is a pretty good article, I have to say. This is not the Grabster, was it? No, it was a newbie Mad. A newbie this newbie is taking the Grabster's stuff. Yeah, it should have been the Grabster. Well, the Grabster's gotten a serious focus on all things Dungeons and Dragons these days over at IO Nine. Oh, well, good for him. Yeah, he's moved on and up. But anyway, the author of this article points out that Cole is a very slippery word. It has an in group, out group kind of sentimentality attached to it. Sure. The point is. Over the years. This whole idea of your kid undergoing a religious conversion and then just kind of becoming different. It was bothersome and worrisome to the parents. But then Jones Town happened and all of a sudden. Any kind of semblance of law or religious freedom or anything like that went right out the window because it was shown. And even before that. Thanks to the Manson Family. But really with Jonestown. It was shown that these colts that supposedly up to that point. People thought were harmless or even helpful could be very destructive. Over 900 people died. So I get it. I get why people would be upset about perhaps their children joining something that in any way, shape or form resembles Jonestown. Right. So what do you do? Well, you could hire someone to kidnap and torture and beat them and yell at them into submission, aka Deprogramming, aka brainwashing, or I guess they would call it reverse brainwashing. Right. That's kind of the key, is this idea that you are combating this conversion to a new religious movement or a cult group or whatever, based on the idea that your kid couldn't possibly have undergone this conversion and joined this group based on his or her own free will. That's right. So thanks to that mindset and a guy named Ted Patrick, who we'll talk about right now, the Cult Awareness Network was formed. And Ted. There were many D programmers. Well, I don't know about many, but there were a handful of D programmers in this time period. But Mr. Patrick sort of led the way. He was born in the Red Light district of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and apparently had a really bad speech impediment such that he couldn't even communicate with people. Right. So he dove into religion and what he said was, quote, it wasn't long before I could think of was hellfire and damnation. And so he had a bad experience with religion growing up and then had an opportunity in the early seventy s to go and save somebody's kid who fell into what they called a cult. He's offered a job. Yes. So there was a scriptural based Christian group called the Children of God, now called the International Family. And apparently they had tried to recruit Ted's son and nephew out on the beach in San Diego. And Ted was like, what do you mean some group tried to recruit you? I guess I'll just go infiltrate this group. Yeah, well, he was also approached by parents whose children were in this what they call the cult. So, yeah, he infiltrated it and said, you know what? They were brainwashed, and I'm the guy that can fix it for a fee. Yeah, which is weird because Ted Patrick, somebody named Mia Donovan, came out with a documentary recently called Deprogrammed. I'd like to see that. Yeah. Apparently it's very tough to find and get your hands on. But it's out there somewhere, and it's all about Ted Patrick. Ted Black Lightning. Patrick is his name. Yeah. And he was an unlikely candidate to become the face and the leader of what was an anti cult movement that had arisen in the United States, thanks to Jonestown and thanks to the fact that kids were joining cults left and right. Yeah. He was a high school dropout, like you said. He had had his own experiences with scripture and Bible beating and all of that kind of stuff. And I guess his heart was in the right place, from what I understand. But he did some really questionable stuff over the years after he formed the Cult Action or Awareness Network. You think his heart was in the right place? That's how Mia Donovan puts it. Really? I think he's trying to make money. So that was another thing, too. Supposedly, he was working not for profit that his expenses were paid, and he wasn't really pocketing the money himself. He went the other way pretty quickly because at one point, he was charging up to 25 grand, which would be the equivalent of about $120,000 for each case today to kidnap and reprogram your child. Yeah. A lot of money. Right. So he basically, at the very beginning, said, you know what? How do we get away with this? And he said, I think if we are working with the parents, then we won't be prosecuted for kidnapping because it's their own kid. So I won't, by proxy, be affiliated as an accomplice because it's their children. And you can't kidnap your own child in 1971. No, you can't. And so that worked. At the time, 21 was the federal age for minors. Right. Or for an adult, anything below 21, you are a minor. Unless the state had gone in and rewritten law and said, no, it's actually 18 or 19 or whatever. Yeah. So that covers, like, a pretty decent amount of the emerging cult population. Yeah. And he also figured that I won't get in trouble because once we have freed these people and deprogram them, they won't press charges, so they'll be delighted. Right. Exactly. They're brainwashed. Right. All we have to do is unbrainwash them. The other way that he figured out they could be protected by law was if the cult member was an adult, they could apply for what's called a conservatorship. Yes. And this is basically based on that old kind of law where a husband could have his hysterical wife committed if he didn't like her attitude, that kind of thing, where there's a very loose burden of proof on demonstrating that the person was out of their mind. So much so that in this point in time in America, if you hired a cult deprogrammer yes. All you had to do was also shell out $500 or something for a psychologist who would come in and say, the very fact that they're a member of this cult demonstrates that they are mentally ill, and therefore power over them should be granted to their parent, even though this person is an adult. And once that power was granted to the parent, the parent could extend that power to the cult deprogrammers, who would then go and kidnap the cult member and then begin the process of deprogramming. Yeah, and they wouldn't even make any attempts to assess their mental state. It was just sort of I don't know about grandfathered in, but it was just sort of lumped in under the umbrella of the conservatorship. Yeah. Thank you again. Psychology. Where to go. Well, should we talk about some of his greatest hits? Well, let's take a break first. Okay. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? 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, Patrick, the first thing he did when he first started doing this was because he didn't really have a shop set up or a staff at this point. He hired street thugs to do the kidnapping. He would just pay dudes that were tough ruffians, as they were called, to abduct these kids. Whenever you hear of a private investigator making air quotes is also involved in, like, a jewel heist or something like that, where there's a real gray area that's occupied by some people who are maybe working on the side of the law, but really they're doing really unlawful things to achieve those ends. Sure. These are the kind of people that were hired by the cult awareness network. That's right. And he eventually was joined by someone named Sandra Sachs, who is a housewife whose son was deprogrammed and from, I believe, Harry Krishna's. And then he got, I think, a guy named goose. I'm not sure of goose's real name, but he became ultimately his big henchman. Right. So they were sort of the three heading up the network early on at least. So one of the things he did, it wasn't always religious cults, even. He was hired. Basically, any time a parent didn't like what their kid was doing, they could hire him to kidnap them and scream at them and handcuff them to a bed for a week until they said they didn't want to do what they were doing, whether it was being a lesbian or just being a converted Catholic. Yeah. There was one case that he got in trouble for false imprisonment, I believe, out in Denver, where a woman had left the Greek Orthodox Church to go live her own life. And her parents didn't like that, so they hired Ted and his company to reprogram her or reprogram her back into the Greek Orthodox Church. It was two girls, two daughters, and their quote at the end of this ordeal was there was nothing to deprogram. Right. We just left the church for another one. Yeah. There's another woman, an English professor out in California, in San Francisco named Sarah Worth, and she had become an anti nuke activist, civil rights activist as well. Yeah. Her mother back in Pennsylvania thought that just was very unbecoming. So she hired the Cult Awareness Network to deprogram her daughter. That's right. This is going on. And it was legal. Well, not about legal, but it was protected. Here's the thing, so let's talk about why this was legal or quasilegal at the time. Again, America is really scared that there's this cult movement going on that the youth of America is losing its free will. This is what the whole thing is based on. There are insidious groups out there who are recruiting and brainwashing our kids. What's to become of America if all of our kids are running around it's Hari Krishna's or Bible thumpers or what have you. They're the future. So we have to fight this. And if they're being brainwashed, you need to de brainwash them. So not only was it groups like the Colt Awareness Network who are thinking these things, they were also, like, drumming up a lot of publicity as well. Yeah, they thought it was a big conspiracy. Yeah, a communist conspiracy is what a lot of people said too, that ultimately the communists were behind it. So not only is it this obscure fringe group that knows how to work the media who believes this, it's also the people reading the newspaper, like parents, cops, judges, juries. And if you take someone to court for kidnapping you and beating you up until you agree to stop being a Hari Krishna, and the judge is convinced that you have been brainwashed by the Hari Krishna, the judge is not going to rule in your favor. And therefore, this whole technique, this whole method that was used for more than a decade was quasilegal for as many times as he was dragged into court. Ted Patrick was only in prison twice. One time for like ten days and another time for 60. Yeah. There was one famous case. Stephanie Wright Miller in Ohio. Her parents hired Patrick and his crew because she was a lesbian. Well, they suspected she was a lesbian, yes. Was she, in fact? Yes. Okay. So they paid $8,000, which would be 21 grand today, to kidnap her. She was 19 years old. She was walking on the street with her friend on the sidewalk. They pull up in a van, they mace her friend, and they throw her in the back of the van and subdue her. She was driven to Alabama from Ohio and over the course of the next seven days was raped once a day by a guy named James Rowe, who was one of the henchmen that worked with Patrick right. In order to get her back into the heterosexual mindset. Right. Yeah. Which we're going to do a whole podcast on KD programming at some point. Okay. Because that's a whole different thing. Yeah. But that has its roots in something like this, obviously, because it did go to trial. The defense attacked her roommate, who was gay, and said, look at her boots and her pickup truck, and she has a Doberman pinscher like this is very unbecoming. She has a very overbearing style. What they were trying to prove was that the roommate had brainwashed her into becoming a lesbian. Right. And just look at her with her boots in her pickup truck. Right. So eventually it goes to trial, and the judge, hamilton County Judge Simon Lease, L-E-I-S. He was not very sympathetic at all of her lifestyle. Of course, he said homosexuality was immoral, and he told the jury that the lifestyle wasn't an issue, but I'm not going to represent to you that I approve of the sexual preference, and he called it unnatural. So eventually he said what the parents said was wrong, but I don't think there's any question that they did was totally done out of love for their daughter. And he described the tactics, even the rape, to detract, like you said, from her lesbianism and attract her to heterosexual activity. So he got off with that one, huh? Yeah. And I don't think he was actually in the room. There was a lot of back and forth on what he knew and what he didn't know about this case. But the guy who raped her got away with it again. He was dragged into court over and over again, and a lot of the cult groups did not fight back in some cases because they didn't want to open their books, from what I understand. Right. Which they may have had to, had they fought anything like this in court, but also because America as a whole was against them. Like, have you remember Airplane, the original one? I just watched it the other day where he just beats up a bunch of moonies in the airport who are trying to offer them a free flower yeah, one of them is Joe Azuzu, for God's sake. I know. He's America's sweetheart. Well, he should have been beaten up for that. It was a joke, obviously, but it definitely pointed out this whole sentiment that America had toward cults at the time, which was like, it was open season, man. They were fair game inside and outside of court. There's an indictment in New York where they indicted some hari Krishna leaders for using mind control. In an indictment in a court of law, the words mind control were used to indict somebody for a crime, which has never been proven. Like, how do you mind control somebody? It's crazy. But this is like, the kind of sentiment that was going on at the time, right? Yes. And so you could be, if you were a member of what was considered a cult group, and your parents were well healed enough to afford the cult awareness network, you could be sitting there hanging out in the commune one day, playing your acoustic guitar, what have you, thinking about consciousness and the universality of it. And all of a sudden, the door gets kicked in, and Ted Patrick and some of his henchmen enter, grab you. Your buddy stands up to be like, hey, man, you can't do that. And they mace him. And they take you, throw you in a van, drive you several states over, maybe, to your parents house. I think they frequently use the parents house because they added, like, an extra sense of legality to it. Right. And then they would keep you there for as long as they wanted to. They would beat you, they would abuse you physically, emotionally, verbally. They would starve you. They would deprive you of sleep, and you weren't allowed to leave. You were berated constantly. They would take shifts. They would have your family come in and berate you. And all of this was completely made up out of whole cloth by Ted Patrick. He had no training whatsoever in any kind of brainwash techniques. No, there is no training. Right. But he just kind of intuitively got that, like, if you deprive someone of sleep or food, they'll start to do what you want them to. And the whole goal of it, as far as he was concerned, was to snap somebody out of it, right? And when somebody snapped, they basically gave into your will and that they were no longer resisting. They were no longer saying, my right to be a Hari Krishna is protected by the first amendment. You have kidnapped me. I want to go. Please leave. Please leave me alone. They just said, fine, you're right. I don't want to be a hard Christian anymore. That could be snapping. It could also be something that was a lot closer in complexion to something like that religious conversion, but it would be like a conversion back where they'd start crying and weeping. And these are the ones that were frequently pointed to as proof positive that reprogramming actually worked. Because there are a lot of people who are deprogramming said. This is a great thing for me. But it has been explained time and time again as basically a lot of kids who join cults did so because they felt like they weren't accepted at home or by their families or whatever. And they would see, once they were kidnapped and taken back to their parents'house, that maybe their parents actually did care about them more than they realized. They were willing to spend some money and hire black lightning to come beat me up until I agreed to come back home. So maybe that was the reason for this snapping. Yeah, and sometimes they would fake it altogether to get out of that prison, which is the case, which we'll talk about right after this break of Jason Scott. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? Then you could be using stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses, because stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and ups shipping services you need right from your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. All right, so Jason Scott, this was not a Patrick affair. This was a guy named Rick Ross and another guy, two guys named Mark workman and Charles Simpson. Yes. But they were referred by the Colt awareness network. That's right. C-A-N was involved. Well, yeah, they were referred, but this wasn't Patrick heading out this operation. And this is a guy named Jason Scott. And he was kidnapped and brought to out in the boonies in Washington state. And he was held there for days against his will, physically abused all the stuff that we've been going over because they wanted him to leave this pentecostal church that he was in with his brothers. I think his mom was in it at one point, but she left. The sons decided to stay, and she was like, I don't like what's going on over there. So she hired them to deprogram him. It failed in that. Scott eventually faked that. After four days of torture, he faked it and said, I don't believe that stuff anymore. He broke down in tears and said he completely rebuked everything that he had stood for. And so they said, well, this is great. It worked. Let's go out for a celebration dinner with your family. And he was allowed to use the bathroom at the restaurant by himself for the first time in a week. And he ran to the police, and the police arrested these guys. There was a civil suit filed this is where it gets really interesting. There was a civil suit filed on Jason Scott's behalf by counselor for the lead council by the Church of Scientology. So now Scientology is getting involved. They end up bankrupting through this court case. They awarded $875,000 in compensatory damages, a million in damages of punitive nature against the Cult Awareness Network, and 2.5 million against Ross himself. It ended up bankrupting them. And then the Church of Scientology buys out the Cult Awareness Network in bankruptcy court, buys their assets, buys their logo, buys their name, renames it the new Cult Awareness Network, and now it's run by the Church of Scientology. Right. So if you're looking for help to get your kid out of a cult, including Scientology, the helpful people there will explain to you how great Scientology is. What's funny, though, is that this Jason Scott case was one of about 50 that were brought at the time through Scientology lawyers. This just happened to be the one that stuck. Yeah. It went all the way to the Supreme Court, where they denied the appeal, and in the end, Scott only got about $5,000 and 200 hours of professional services from Ross, which I didn't understand. I'll explain it to you. They became buddies, apparently. They did become buddies. So apparently, Jason Scott, he forgave his mother, he also forgave Rick Ross. He broke from the Scientology lawyer. Yeah. He had a different lawyer after that. I guess he felt a little fleeced, maybe by the Scientologist, or used, I should say, and ended up being chummy with Rick Ross. So he sold Rick Ross his settlement, which should have been $3 million for five grand and 200 hours of his services of deprogramming services. Right. To deprogram, I think, his daughter or something like that. No, that's what I couldn't find. Yeah. So Rick Ross is still at it. He's an exit counselor, and if you listen to him talk, it's really weird, man, approaching this from the outside. There was a war that was going on that is still being fought here there, but the average person wouldn't know about it in the media. Between the anti cult movement, which is headed up by people like Ted Patrick and Rick Ross, and the Cult Awareness Network, the old version of it, and the, I guess, cult movement, which has as disparate members as the Church of Scientology, the Catholic League, first Amendment, people like the ACLU on another side. So there's this weird, like, This battle that went on, and Scientology ultimately won just because they bled the anti cult movement out in the courts. But like I said, Rick Ross is still at it. What he's doing now is exit counseling. And if before deprogramming was coercive brainwashing, then exit counseling is the opposite of that. It's basically like a drug intervention. But as far as cults are concerned, yeah. The idea is that you get the whole family involved. You get the person who you're trying to counsel, I guess, involved, and they all agree to meet and they talk to them about what they were doing, and they explained to them about the harmful practices of that cult or not cult, depending on what it is. And essentially it's a really intensive therapy, group therapy with your family. Right. But again, not coerced, supposedly voluntary. And the proper way to go about it. Still expensive, though. Right. But like a normal intervention or like a drug related intervention. It'll probably be a surprise to the cult member, but in an exit counseling seminar session or whatever, that person has to agree to stick around and listen. They can leave at any point in time. There's no more kidnapping and duct taping. Right. So that's the state of affairs now. And it's really weird, again, because this is the remnants of this info war that went on between the anticult movement and the cult movement or the new religious movement movement. And the whole thing is muddy, morally speaking, because there are people walking around, including ones that were abducted and beaten up or mistreated or abused or tortured by Cult Awareness Network or other D programmers who say, if it weren't for those guys, I'd probably still be in a cult right now. Sure. And I'm really grateful to my parents for shelling out the money to have these guys kidnapped because I was lost in life and very vulnerable at the time, and this really helped get me back on track. Well, yeah, cults can be destructive and destroy people's lives and kill people. Right. But what you can't do is I think the problem came when everything was lumped together in under one big umbrella called cult. Exactly. That's exactly right. Because who was Ted Patrick or anybody else, the great decider of what made acceptable religious beliefs and non acceptable religious beliefs? Like, where was that dividing line and who gave him the right to do it? Man, can you imagine if this is going on today with the way things are? Well, it kept going until 1995 was when the judgment came down that bankruptcy called Awareness Network. I'm talking about 2015 with the way things are. I could see wackos left and right hiring people to abduct their children and set them straight. Yeah, well, supposedly they made out pretty well in the satanic panic of the 80s, too. That documentary deprogrammed is largely about the director's step brother, who was deprogrammed by Ted Patrick because their parents thought that he was a satanist or whatever because he listened to heavy metal. We should do one on the PMRC and back masking that whole just call it like 80s Satanic panic or something. Let's do it. That'd be a good one. Okay, there's a book. Ted Patrick wrote a book called Let our children go. There's an exclamation point in the title. That's right, because you're better in 1976. And here was one quote that's something he bragged a lot about some of these things. He said he somehow wes one of the people he deprogrammed. He said west had taken up a position facing the car with his hands on the roof and his legs spread eagled. There was no way to let him inside while he was braced like that. I had to make a quick decision. I reached down between Wes's legs, grabbed him by the crotch and squeezed hard. He let out a howl and doubled up, grabbing for his groin with both hands. Then I hit, shoving him headfirst into the back seat of the car and piling in on top of him. And then Jason Scott, I think was duct tape, put face down in the van and like this 300 pound guys sat on him. And that can kill you. Yes, it can. Pretty kooky stuff, man. Yeah. How to combat brainwashing by brainwashing. I love looking back in America's recent past to see how crazy it's been. From time to time, every once in a while it just goes nuts. We just go crazy. Yeah. Let's see. You got anything else? I got nothing else. If you want to know more about debrogramming, you can type those words in the search barhowstuffords.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. Hey, guys, just finished listening to your hot air balloons podcast. I'm calling this hot air balloon email. I jumped the gun. Having worked for a hot air balloon company for two years in Napa valley, where I grew up, I worked on the ground crew, the chase crew, as we called it. The company I worked for, Napa Valley balloons, has balloons that can fit two people all the way up to 20 people. The envelope, although it looks like, can weigh in excess of \u00a3600. And the basket is easily twice that, if not more. He wrote a lot about getting all the hot air out. And what an arduous process that was, I can imagine. And then he has another good little story here. One day after we launched the balloons from just north of Napa, the wind picked up and one of the pilots couldn't find a safe place to land. I'm going to call this Josh's worst nightmare fortune. The balloon kept going south and what was supposed to be an hour flight was getting close to 2 hours. The balloon got so far south that it was approaching the San Francisco bay. And if it got over the bay, the balloon wouldn't have enough fuel to make it to land again. So the pilot made an emergency landing in a wheat field that was the last land before the bay. We try not to land somewhere without permission, but in this case it was an emergency. The pilot left with the customer, so we had to contact the owner of the land and had to be let onto the property to get our balloon. Understandably, the owner was angry, but we gave him a bottle of champagne as he said, they still do that and offered to pay for the damages to his crops. While most flights had no issues whatsoever, this one sticks out of my mind because it was a particularly exciting day. Nice. That is Ryan from Washington, DC. The Napa Valley. I like the part about champagne. Sure. I like the part where the pilot left with the customers really quickly after he landed. Right. Exactly. Who is that? Ryan. Thanks, Ryan. That was a good story. Again, I like the champagne parts. Yes. If you want to get in touch with us and tell us all of your champagne wishes and caviar dreams, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyhea. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. And, as always, trying to set our home on the web stuffyouw.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this 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? 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? 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8a3c1d9e-4a58-11e8-a49f-237b641af0d5 | SYSK Selects: How Ponzi Schemes Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-ponzi-schemes-work | Ponzi schemes. How do they work? And who's Ponzi? Join Josh and Chuck in this classic episode to discover how an Italian immigrant created a classic con that's still fleecing investors today. | Ponzi schemes. How do they work? And who's Ponzi? Join Josh and Chuck in this classic episode to discover how an Italian immigrant created a classic con that's still fleecing investors today. | Sat, 30 Jun 2018 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=181, tm_isdst=0) | 27153642 | audio/mpeg | "Howdy, everybody. This is Chuck here on the ranch and House Stuff Works Studios. And welcome to Saturday selects. April 9, 2009. We're going way back into the archive for this one how upon Schemes of Work. And honestly, I picked this one because I believe this is the very first instance of me doing my bad Italian accent. I think it started with this episode, if I'm not mistaken, and it has since become such a part of the show. And I thought I might as well repost this select episode from where it all began. And not only that, but it's really interesting. It's really interesting. I'm falling into it right now. Upon Sea Scheme is a very interesting topic, and we get into it here. We let you know how to be aware of them and the history behind it. There was a real ponce. You know that? All right. Learning all about it right now, everyone. How Poncy schemes work. Welcome to stuff you should know from howstoughforkscom? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Chuck. Say hi. Hi. Welcome, people. This is stuff you should know. Indeed. Chuck's got his little jug of vodka, I got my Fresca, and we are ready to go. Right, Chuck? No, I don't drink, but liar. Chuck. Chuck, do you know how we have these web logs now? There's, like, a stuff you should know. Weblog aka. Blog. Yes, sure. Yeah, if you want to be all hit or whatever. I do know how we have that because I write on it every day. I know. I was just starting a conversation. Chuckle. Sorry. Remember that post I put up yesterday that you said, like, you read three times and still couldn't make heads or tails of? Yeah. I didn't get it. Well, there's a part of it kind of the crux of the whole thing. I don't know if that's the case or not, but anyway, there's an aspect of it, and it was about these two artists. One of them just goes by the name Arakawa. Okay. Right. And his partner and I don't think just artistic partner, I think that they're life partners, maybe. Got you. Her name is Madeline Gins. Right, okay. And they have been quite successful at creating this architecture that's intended to achieve immortality. Right. How so? Well, the way these two have done it is by through surprising, disturbing architectural choices. Right. Okay. Basically, their theory is that if you create or if you live in an uncomfortable dwelling, discomfort or comfort leads to laziness and sedentariness, and then that's ultimately what kills you wholly unproven. Okay. But they design their architecture based on that theory, so they keep you uncomfortable. Right. And it's unfamiliar. I think I know this. I think we actually have an article on this. Like the floors are undulating. Undulating floors? Yeah, I've heard of that. They also, like, kind of moonscape floors, right angled, like ceilings. It doesn't sound like a very pleasant place to live. Yeah. Pretty interesting, though, this one guy. And these things go for just to build them. They cost millions of dollars, but they have built several. Most of them are lost in Tokyo. And this one guy who lives in one with his family said that he's lost, like, \u00a320 and doesn't have hay fever any longer, really? Since he moved in there. But their whole firm is basically in jeopardy because they were heavily invested with one Bernard Madoff, who you may have heard of. Yes. This guy's reach extends everywhere. We're talking Kevin Bacon. Right. And there's a six degrees joke in there somewhere. Sure. I imagine Kira Sedgewick since Kevin Bacon is in there. Jacques Gabor. Spielberg. Spielberg. And that's just like, the tip of the iceberg. Right. I mean, thousands and thousands of people were invested with this guy, and it turned out he was a Ponzi schemer. That's right. It's a Ponzi scheme. Yeah. Chuck likes to say it like that in a tribute to the Italian immigrant Mr. Charles Ponzi, who was running around in the you want to talk a little bit about Mr. Ponzi? Yeah. I didn't know this until I read the article. It's pretty interesting. And Ponzi is all over the news, so it's kind of cool to get some background. Yeah. And also, we should probably say thanks to all the people who wrote in and requested that we do this podcast. This one's for you. Right. Bernie madeoff excuse me, himself wrote in? Yeah, he did. He's like, hey, can you tell everybody what I did? So, yeah, in the 1920s, Charles Ponsi, what he did was, at the time, if you want to send mail overseas, you would include what was called an international reply coupon. Well, if you wanted to reply. Right. But it's basically sort of like when you get something from magazine and the postage just prepaid to return the card. Right. It's prepaid. So that you get that back to say, hey, these people got that exactly right. So this is what you did back then. He had an idea. He said, hey, if I go over and buy these in a different country where they're cheaper, I can come back and sell them in the United States. Right. And he could do this because these things were internationally recognized. They were the same in any country. Exactly. But apparently they went for different prices in different countries. Right. It's not a bad business model. Right, right. I would say so. Things went pretty well at first. He got a lot of investors and made some pretty good money. But the return that he promised, which what was it again? It was a ridiculous promise. It was, I think, 50% return in 45 to 90 days. Right. So, yes, that should have been a red flag right there. We'll talk about that later. But yeah, that didn't go as well as he thought. But he kept getting investors and he just kind of kept us all quiet. So what he would do is he would pay back some to the initial investors based on the money that the current investors were giving him, and just kind of kept going in a cyclical way until he started taking a little money for himself too. Yeah. And ended up having millions of bucks off this in the 1920s before it finally crumbled as a big scam. Well, the reason he was found out was because somebody apparently calculated that they would have had to have been about 160,000,000 of these things exist for him to be making the money he was making. Right. And the problem is, there was only $27,000. Exactly. That's kind of what found him out. But what I got from this, what I got from reading about Ponzi schemes, is that Charles Ponzi didn't appear to be huckster from the outset, which is actually in a legitimate business that he was trying to run. Can I do it? I think sure. I think it was an act of desperation. Right. We should probably talk about exactly how Ponzi schemes work. Right. They're pretty straightforward and simple, but I can't imagine that as they just get bigger and bigger, you start to eat a lot of roll AIDS. Right. I bet that was the original Ponzi scheme and I'm sure he was nervous as it was going. What kind of scheme? A Ponzi scheme. Very nice, Chuck. Thanks. So do you want to give some detailed explanation on how Ponzi schemes work? Yeah, it's actually pretty simple. What you do is you come up with an investment, a shell, sort of, and you get people to invest in whatever you're saying you're going to invest in. In this case, in the original Ponzi scheme, it was the reply coupons, but nowadays it's usually like a stock thing. So you get these folks to invest and you take their money and essentially use that first rung of people to attract other people to invest. And once you start getting other investors, you can pay back those initial folks and they can go on record and say, oh, yeah, I made a great return. That's exactly right. And then you get more investors, right? Yes. And more rungs. And it's sort of like robbing Peter to pay Paul sure. The entire time. Right, but you're pocketing like Ponzi did some for himself. Right. At a certain point, you can start skimming off the top. Right. But it's not like you take the money and run proposition, it's a take of the money. Stick around and pay people off as much as you can. The problem is, people don't divest very easily when they get an unbelievable return on something. Right. They want to keep investing. So if you're like, no, you can't invest anymore, people are going to start to get suspicious. So you've got your first wrong, you got your second wrong, and then so on and so on and so on. But to sustain it, you have to keep adding more and more rungs. But the more rungs you add, the more difficult it is to pay everybody back. Right. So it's inevitable that collapses. But some people will know they're investing in a Ponzi scheme. Some of those first rung people, yeah. From what I understand, people can actually make money off Ponzi schemes to get in early enough and you're smart enough to get out while it gets good. Right. Because those are the people are going to get paid first, so they can vouch and say, this is a really great deal. Right, exactly. That's pretty much a pine scheme. And if it sounds a lot like a pyramid scheme to you, you would be right. It's virtually the same structure. The one big difference is that in a pondy scheme, you're not asked to do anything. Right? You're just an investor, they just want your money. In a pyramid scheme, generally, you have to do something like you are buying in to sell something. Amway. No, sorry. Well, no, actually, on Amway site, they have like on the FAQ section, it's like, is Amway a pyramid scheme? Right. And they're like, we're a pyramid model. Schemes the wrong word to use. And actually, the pyramid model has worked for legitimate businesses. Amway. Mary Kay. Mary Kay. Avon. Pampered Chef. Pampered Chef. That's another one. Yeah, it can work. And it doesn't necessarily have to be illegal. That's the other distinction between Ponzi schemes and pyramids models, is that Ponzi schemes are always fraud, completely false, because it's an investment, but the money is never invested. It's so simple. When I read this, I was just like, the beauty is in its simplicity. Just like, give me a bunch of money and I will keep it and get more people to give me money. I'll give you a little bit. And it's just amazing how that works. Can you imagine being such an edgy, savvy investor that you actually knowingly invest in Ponzi schemes? Yeah, who does that? I don't know. I bet there's some names on the Madoff List. Yeah, I'll bet. But no, he did everything alone. We'll get to him in a minute. Allegedly. No, not anymore. He confessed, buddy. Well, certain things are still alleged at this point. All right, well, we'll just go with you're such a COA dude. But I appreciate the o because that includes me. Okay, so Ponzi wasn't the guy who came up with the scheme. He did it so well that they named it after him. But the earliest one we know about goes back to early 1880s in Boston with a woman named Sarah Howe. I don't think I know about this one. Okay, so she actually actively and purposefully built a Ponzi scheme, although with it being 40 years before Charles Ponzi showed up, she probably didn't call it that to herself. What's her name? How. Sarah how. The how scheme? Yeah, if she were, if she did have enough foresight to know that it would eventually be called a Ponzi scheme, how would it sound in her head when she said, this is the kind of scheme that I'm carrying out? It's a Ponzi scheme. That's right, Chuck. Anyway, Ms. Howell basically put together a group of thousands of women investors and invested in women's Liberty bonds, I think is what they were called. That's supposedly what the investment was for. But no, it wasn't. She just basically carried out a Ponzi scheme. Right. And she managed to rake in about half a million bucks before she was caught. And then another guy shortly after, about the turn of the century, his name was William Franklin Miller, and he also built investors for about another half a million. And this is substantial enough to be remembered 100 years plus later. But Ponzi was the first one, right? Ponzi was the first big one, I should say. Sure. And then you don't really hear about anybody in the world of Ponzi schemes. I'm sure you can, but nobody huge doing it right now. Right. Lou Perlman. Is that where you're going? I was going to go to the Balkans first, but let's do Mr. Perlman. Okay. Yeah. This is one of my favorites, just because his associations are kind of funny. Lou Perlman. Who? I think you have to say his name like Lou Perlman. That's how I got that impression as well. And he kind of looks like that kind of guy, too. Yeah, he kind of funded the boy band Craze in the know. You remember the Backstreet Boys because of the tattoo you have on your neck. Why? And NSYNC was the other one. I don't know if you have a tattoo of NSYNC. Okay. I was covering all my bases. So he funded these bands, and it turned out in 2006 that he was running a big Poncy scheme. He had been for like 20 years. Right. And a lot in sync. And the Backstreet Boys were kind of funded on this Poncy scheme. I don't think funded kind of at all. I think they were fully funded. Fully funded. Right. Yeah. And this guy created the Backstreet Boys and in sync and funded them with illegal money. So those yahoos kind of owe Ponzi with their careers. Yes, they do. I think so, yeah. Well, their careers, past tense. Sure. Timberlake has done well for himself. Was he in one of those who JT. I don't know who that is. Shut up. All right, back to Albania. Yes, Albania. Basically, a whole bunch of people were working this big Ponzi scheme, which, from what I understand, also can extend the life of a Ponzi scheme. Lou Perlman is an unusual animal in that he could carry it out single handedly for 20 years. Right. But in Albania for a while, a group of Ponzi schemers had one set up that built these investors out of $2 billion before it collapsed, which is in Albania. That is 30% of their gross domestic product. That's huge. Like how to cripple the country, basically. Yeah. I think Albania is probably Second World, so I think a hit like that is just ginormous. And that was a big problem when it happened. It was because when people found out, they started riding in the streets and fires broke out and people died. Yeah. So that's the old Albania Ponzi scheme. Right. And we should note that lou Parliament, he went to jail or received a sentence of 25 years for conning $300 million. And apparently every million he paid back, they cut a month off his sentence. Which seems really fair. I think so. But perlman $300 million sounds like a lot. It ain't. It was. And then 2008 came along. The big daddy dude, this guy, Bernard Madoff. Right. One of the founders of Nasdaq. Yes. Which is one reason why it works so well. Because he was beyond legit. He was beyond legit. Although one of the other reasons he was so successful was that he was smart. First of all, like Sarah, he used affinity fraud. And affinity fraud is where you're using the inclusiveness of a group against themselves. Right, right. So he used his membership in a uber wealthy, very exclusive Jewish country club down in Florida to prey on investors at first. Right. And the affinity fraud happens a lot, and usually it happens with religious groups. Somebody comes in like, hey, I'm a Lutheran too, and I've got this great investment. Since he's a Lutheran, he comes from Upstanding. You trust him and then that's that. Right. But Madoff very much used affinity fraud, at least at first, and then news of his amazing returns got out. But as I was saying, the reason he was so successful is he didn't pull up Ponzi and say, I'll get you 50% return in 45 days. He offered reasonable I think 11% was the average returns over the long haul. Right. That was the key. It was very believable. Well, to an extent. Have you ever looked at our perspectives? The t row price prospectus. Yes. Have you ever noticed, if you look at it, it's like one year, three years, five years, ten years, it'll be up at one year down, three years down, five years up. He was offering, like, a straight, even keel 11% return. You couldn't lose. Right. So that actually should have been a red flag. But it wasn't. Right. And in 2001, Barons, the financial rag, they published an article on him specifically saying his plan was saying, Madoff can't be offering these returns. Mathematically speaking, this isn't possible, and no one listened. But chief among the people who weren't listening was the SEC. Yes. And they've been under a lot of fire lately because they did not listen. They did not investigate, even when it was kind of handed to them, like, hey, several times, actually. What's going on here? There are like two or three formal complaints to them and they never followed up. Well, one reason why and this is even another reason why he was successful, as he was also running a legit business alongside it, so he could sort of defer when he needed to pay people back and things were getting tight. He could pull a little money out of his legit business and do that and apparently did so promptly if somebody wanted to withdraw. Yeah. They got a check like that, no questions asked. Like when Kevin Bacon was like, we're heading to Barbados and I need a million dollars because I'm going to buy a hut on the beach. Right. I'm trying to hide my wife from her shame for being in The Closer. Yeah. It Made Off was very successful to the tune of $20 to $50 billion. Yeah. He made off with I know he's got the perfect name for it now. I'm sure have been like, Wait, what's your last name? No, I'm not investing. I bet every headline has already used that, so it's probably stale by now. Yeah. Thanks for that, Chuck. Sure. So what can you do, Chuck? How do you stay out of a Ponzi scheme unless you're a very savvy investor who's totally unconscionable? Well, there's a few things you can look for. And it also should be noted that a Ponzi scheme is pretty much a one way street to collapse. There's really no way to pull it off in the long run, sustainable, unless I think a lot of people might start these and think, well, I can get out at a certain point, pay everyone back and make a lot of money. But, yeah, it's not a good working model in the end. Well, apparently the point to a Ponzi scheme is to keep it going until they die. Yeah. Which is considered a big success because you live like a billionaire. Right. And then at the end, you die or you off yourself with the top three in your door. Speaking of that, did you know that after he was found out, Made Off was spending 160 grand a month on personal security at his 10th house? Wow. Yeah. In Manhattan. Do you know how many bodyguards that buys you? That's like Delta Force money. Yeah. Some things you can look for. The obvious, of course, is if it sounds too good to be true, it is. That's the oldest adage in the book, and it's true across the board. So if someone's making you promises on big returns, then you should probably turn around and walk away. Right. Don't let anyone pressure you into doing that. Well, pressure, that's another point, too. It's usually going to be a high pressure pitch. Like, you have a very limited time window, maybe for as long as the person standing there and you're made to feel like a jackass if you don't take them up on it. But, yeah, pressure is definitely one of the factors as well. And even one like you said, that made off scam where he would not promise huge returns. That might make it a little more believable, but everything, like you said, fluctuates. Even if it's a consistent, like, 5% growth for years, then that should be a red flag right there. And also, you should ask questions and demand answers as well, because if you have a friend who has a friend that has this great investment and you cut them a check and it turns out to be a Ponzi scheme, well, TS for you, that was a stupid thing to do. Sure. You should know what your money is being invested in. You should know who's investing it. And even if it's legitimate, you should be asking these questions. If it's through any of the major brokerages, find out how many fees there are. That's a good habit no matter what. Sure. And the other thing is, even if you're involved in a Ponzi scheme, even if you get sucked in, it should never break you and leave you bankrupt. Right. Excellent point, Chuck. Okay. This is probably the important point. Well, now, I say diversification is the key to a good portfolio. And this is definitely true here. You should not invest all your money in one thing. You're just setting yourself up for bankruptcy. And whether it's a pondy scheme or not yeah, exactly. You do all real estate, and you were just totally invested in real estate in 2007. You're in big trouble. I mean, even Donald Trump hit the lowest of the lows at one point. We all forget. I think he's lost a lot of his old edge that he used to have. He's made some bad decisions. Yeah. Like the TV show. Sure. No one needs to see that guy. Yeah. And if you do find yourself in a Ponzi scheme and you're not the type to take the law into your own hands with, like, a tire iron or anything like that, you can always contact the SEC. I don't know that they'll do anything, and they probably won't, but it's worth a shot anyway, right? Right. We should just as a sidebar here, I know that Madoff did confess, but the SEC is still coming under fire because he's claiming that he acted alone and didn't have any help with this, which is really hard to believe just because paperwork alone for a scheme of this size would be huge. And some people think out there that he probably had his family involved and then did everything he could to cover for them and take the hit right. Yet to come out. Well, also, even if they weren't involved, their salary came directly from the building of other people. Even if they somehow were just totally unaware of it. I don't know. It puts their own wealth in question. Right. So that's the Ponzi schemes. That was very good, Chuck. Thank you, Chuck. The last time I'll say that? Are we going to talk about our spoken word album? Yes. And then maybe we'll talk about blogs and then listen to mail. Yes. Stick around for me. All right, so we do have a spoken word album, our first one, and it is about the economy and economics. Everyone knows that we are in the Second Great Depression, and we just kind of decided to make a spoken word album about that. That's such a slightly off kilter description. It's more like a guide, right? Possibly a guide to the economy. That's what it's called. But it's very big, right? Like, there's a lot of stuff in it, right? Yes. It's called The Stuff you Should Know super Stuffed Guide to the Economy. And it's got expert interviews. Josh and I get out of the studio, we go in around the world. Chicken Farm. Chicken Farm. Don't spoil it. And Jerry, our awesome producer, she did excellent sound design, and it's got more bells and whistles, and it's definitely a cut above the silliness we do here each week. Yeah. And you can find it by typing Superstit in the search bar at itunes. It's 399. Frankly, Chucking, I think it's worth it. I think. So if you want to get it, knock yourself out. Get it a couple of times if you like. Support us. Yeah, because it blows up your computer after 48 hours unless you keep downloading it fresh each time. Right. I'm paying for it over and over again. Not true at all. All right, so there was that plug. Now let's plug the blog. Yes, we've been plugging the blog. Now, I hope you guys aren't sick of it yet, but Josh and I blog a couple of times a day. He posts once, I post once, and it's called stuff you should know. You can find it on the right hand side of our homepage@households.com. And we just cherry pick interesting news items and kind of like what we do here, except it may not be enough to flesh out a full show. Yeah. And a couple of times we've posted on listener suggestions, like, why don't you guys do this? Absolutely. So, yeah, keep the ideas coming. We love them. We do. It keeps us from having to do any real research. It's true. And do you know what that leads us to? Listener mail time. Okay, josh, this is an installment of stuff we should know. Stuff. We should have known. No, it's not, because sometimes it's additional things. Okay, this one is from Sarah, and Sarah wrote in about the word theory versus hypotheses. Sarah is a teacher, and we say all the time someone's theory, and she says we've been misusing it. She says, in the Thinking Cap podcast, you repeatedly referenced theories about savantism and left hemisphere damage. And scientifically speaking, these are not theories, they're hypotheses. So her basic point is that a theory is not just an educated guess. It's something that a lot of detail and research has gone into to get to the point where you can call it a theory, like the theory of evolution, which is often dismissed as, oh, it's just a theory, but a theory has actually got a lot to it. So Sarah wanted to set the record straight, so we did that. Another little minor correction here. Josh said at one point we were the only country that uses the imperial system. I thought we got this out of the way with the bodies on Everest. Pogba. We did not. Officially, us. Burma, Liberia, and Myanmar. Myanmar and Burma are the same place. Okay? Ever since the junta, it's now Myanmar. Wow. So Rich from Omaha, joshua from Euclair, Wisconsin, stefan from Newark, Delaware and Jeanne or Jean jean. They all wrote in and told us that And I have one more, and I like this one. Stephanie wrote in and told us that on our Aphrodisiac podcast, we're talking about phallic, symbol and fallacies. And we were talking about an oyster. Apparently, there is a word for something that resembles the female genitalia. Yeah, I was interested to hear that because we kept saying female genitalia, and I wish that she had written in before then. And we knew that phallus only represented the male genitalia, but I did not realize there was one for female yonic yonic. And she said yani is Sanskrit for the word womb vulva in place of origin. And she said she just wanted to tell us this because for one of the first times in her life, she actually knew something. Yannick. So thank you, Stephanie, for that. Yeah, thanks, Stephanie. Yannick getting it. I'm processing it right now. So yannick. No, I remember the famous tennis player. Yeah. Reference to female gentlemen. Odd. I wonder if he knows that. I'm sure it's heard of the time or two, surely, but now so if you want to point out that there are other words chuck and I are unfamiliar with, basically, let me know that I shouldn't call my crackpot theories, but hypotheses instead. Or just say hi. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun'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 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. 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c33cd374-5460-11e8-b38c-6b1e3a833c3b | SYSK Selects: How Lie Detectors Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-lie-detectors-work | Instead of actually detecting lies, polygraph machines sense physiological variations, ostensibly brought on by guilt. The results are subject to interpretation, and therefore controversial. Join Josh and Chuck as they investigate the polygraph. | Instead of actually detecting lies, polygraph machines sense physiological variations, ostensibly brought on by guilt. The results are subject to interpretation, and therefore controversial. Join Josh and Chuck as they investigate the polygraph. | Sat, 11 May 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=131, tm_isdst=0) | 27307869 | audio/mpeg | "Hello there. It's me, Josh. And for this week's, SYSK Selects, I've chosen our classic episode on lie detectors. It's a pretty nifty little episode about a pretty dodgy piece of forensic science with a wild of a backstory. It is classic stuff you should know. So I hope you enjoy welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, as Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Liar. You could tell. There's a way you can find out, Chuck. Sure. We'll get to that in a minute. This is stuff you should know. Let me finish. Okay. And it's you lie. Remember that guy? Yeah. Joey Pants or whatever the congressman's name was. Yeah. Saturday Night Live had a funny skit that he had gotten a whole group of people to all stand up at once. Wasn't it the deal? Tell it. Well, yeah. And he supposedly had a whole group of senators that were going to all stand up and yell, you lie. And then he was the only one that did it because he was out of the room when they were like, no, we can't do that. Yeah, I think they'll do that. That's funny. Yeah. So we're talking about lie detectors, but let me take you back, all right, to a little place in time and space called the Jazz Age, early 1920s. No, that's the beat, Nick. That did that. Okay. I'm sure a jazz person snapped their fingers at one point. Sure. Okay. But not like that. It was more like Coltrane style. Just like that. Got you. Anyway, this is 1921. Chuck in Berkeley, California, at UCLA. Berkeley. And there is a place there called the College Hall, which is a women's dorm. And in that year, there was a string of thefts, cash rings. Pretty much anything of value went missing for a little while there. And there is a man working at the Berkeley Police Department this is in the girls dorm. Yeah. Okay. Called College Hall. Got you. There's a man working in the Berkeley Police Department. His name is John Larson, and John Larson was the first cop ever to have a PhD. And he had gotten interested in this device called a cardio pneumonocychograph, which had been invented just a few years before by another guy named William Marston. And William Marston was a lawyer and a Harvard shrink, and he also, as an aside, a creative Wonder Woman with her lasso of truth. Really? He's the guy who invented what's now called the polygraph. But what about the Wonder Woman? He created Wonder Woman. The character. Yes. He was kind of a Renaissance man, but that's William Larson. John Larson works at the Berkeley Police Department, and he's become interested in this thing, the cardio pneumo psychograph, and he realizes, okay, this is a perfect chance to apply it. So he rounds up some suspects, he does some normal police work, and finds out who the suspects are in this hall right. And he rounds them up, brings them down to the station and he starts hooking people up to this machine. And he gets to this one woman. Her name is Helen Graham. And guilty, yes, pretty much is what he does. He goes, Ms. Graham, this machine is saying that you took this, that you took the money. Did you? And he said that he noted on the machine a sharp drop in blood pressure followed by a sudden rise. And then after that, this woman flew into a rage. She tried to attack the machine. She went crazy. So they basically string her along for a few days and then finally she confesses. And it's the first time that a polygraph was ever used to solve a crime, ever. That was probably the heyday because before the people knew what it was they could just say, this machine says that you're guilty. And they would be like, oh my God, how's it now? That's exactly right. Very early on, some of the early proponents, specifically a guy named Leonard Keilar recognized the placebo effect value before anyone knew there was a placebo effect. But the placebo effect value of a polygraph, that just the idea. If you believed in this machine and that it could rude out lies, then it could force you to confess just being hooked up to it. Right. You weren't going to pass it. They should have called it the guilt box. They called it the magic lie detector is one of the things that they call it. Yeah, leonard Keeler called it that. He worked with John Larson at the Berkeley Police Department. And eventually, over time, John Larson saw what he considered the truth behind the lie detector and the fact that it kept being cold. Lie detector which is driving them crazy. Sure. And he eventually distanced himself from it later on in his career. But Leonard Keilar ran around marketing it to anyone and everyone saying, just having this is going to not only help you hire more truthful forthright people, but it's going to keep them in line while they're working for you because they know you've got access to this thing and you can strap them to it at any time. So that's where the polygraph came from. Yeah. There's a little pre history too, just to give them their due. In 1895. Cesare Lamboro. He's an Italian criminologist. He measured changes in blood pressure for police cases. Okay. And in 19 four a device by Vittorio Binosi measured breathing. And so they were early 1009 hundreds, late 18 hundreds. They were kind of on the scene of measuring these things. And Dr. James McKenzie in 19 six first mentioned the word polygraph with his instrument that he didn't use to root out the truth. But he did use it when giving medical examinations though. And then right before the polygraph was the Unigraph, which was part of what's still used today in the polygraph. It measured respiration. Pretty cool. Yeah. But then you add to it a couple of other things and you get the polygraph. We could stop here. This is interesting enough right now. Really? No. There's no one walking the planet who has anything to do with polygraphs that call them lie detectors. And anyone, even the most ardent defender of polygraph technology, would correct you if you called it a lie detector. They would be like, it's not a lie detector because you can't detect a lie. It's possible. The whole basis of a polygraph is that it is a set of medical instruments that are used to measure changes in things like your heart rate, your respiration and sweatiness. Basically. I would fail. Well, a lot of people do fail, and we'll get to that. Because you're sweat. Yeah. Okay. They wouldn't even hook me up. They just thought, dude, you look so good. You're so sweaty right now. So when you're hooked up to this machine, the whole point is that it measures these physiological changes. And the idea that you're going to undergo a physiological change is based on the concept that a person hooked this machine who is guilty will experience fear that they're going to be detected. Right. So this machine is designed to detect that fear. That's right. Which is really roundabout, but for a century, almost, these things were used and abused, and it took a while for people to kind of catch on that. There's a lot to criticize here with polygraphs. Yeah, for sure. All right, so let's get into this. First of all, we need to point out that analog polygraphs are what you have long seen in movies and TV. When they have the little jittery, looks like a seismograph on the paper scrolling by, and you're hooked up to all these different things on your chest and your forehead and your fingertips. These days they do that digitally, but it's basically still the same technique. Yeah. They just don't use the little scrolling needle. Do they have a name for that? It's called an ink filled pen. It is, yeah. Okay. But the three things that they do, Josh, they measure your respiratory rate, as you said. They take pneumographs, which are rubber tubes filled with air time around your chest and your abdomen. And that is going to measure whether or not you start breathing heavy. Essentially, when you get nervous, it monitors your breathing pattern and any changes to it. And it does it pretty cleverly, right? Yeah. With bellows, they're filled with air, so when you breathe in real deeply or have a change, it's going to displace that into the bellows. And originally that was attached the bellows were literally attached to the mechanical arm. Right. That showed the change. These days, it's a transducer that converts it digitally. Electronically. Right. It converts it to an electrical pattern. Right. Yeah. It probably just says the same thing. Yeah. No, I think it looks a lot like it. If you look, there's a picture of a modern one and the graph, same thing. But yeah, it's not a paper read out any longer. Right. Which is kind of interesting. Like this technology hasn't changed on a very fundamental basis for like 100 years, almost. Yeah. The early one from McKinsey in 19 six, they say that a lot of the same components are still very similar today. Right. So you're going to have two tubes, one around your chest, one around your abdomen that's keeping an eye on your breathing. You're going to have a blood pressure cuff, which keeps an eye on your heart rate and your blood pressure. And it does it through sound. Right. Yeah. I didn't realize this. So when the blood comes in and out of your veins, it creates sound. And sound can also be used to displace air, causing a bellows to contract, which again, move the arm on the scroll and now is created or turned into an electrical pattern. But it's the same thing, but it's sound, which I just think is very neat. Well, and what's also neat is the sweat one. I figured they would have some sort of like a moisturometer just to detect moisture, but it's called galvanic skin resistance or GSR or electrodermal activity. That's right. And they hook up these finger plates to galvanometers and they are basically measuring the skin's ability to conduct electricity. And if your skin is moist, it's going to be able to conduct electricity easier. And that's what they're measuring there. It's like the ones, the little heart rate monitors that they clip to your fingertips in the hospital. But these things measure electricity instead. Yes. Which if you are dry, you're going to conduct less electricity. If you're wet, you're going to conduct more. So since you have so many pores on the end of your fingers and you sweat when you're nervous, there you go. Done. So you put all this together and it paints this picture. The ACLU, among other people, have decried as just what are you doing here, basically is what the ACLU says. Right. What you have is a picture of a person who is undergoing stress, maybe feeling embarrassment is maybe just scared to be there, maybe doesn't like having things wrapped around his or her chest. Maybe doesn't really like the person asking the questions. The results of these changes in pattern, the data is totally subjective. That's right. Which makes polygraph totally subjective, which takes it in large part out of the realm of science. Yeah, voodoo science is what they call it. And although proponents will say that a well trained forensic psychophysiologist, which is the examiner, can get through all that to still get a good result, they're like, yeah, they know all this stuff. And if you're good, then you can factor that in and still get a good result. So let's talk about what the forensics psychophysiologist does, apparently. I've seen anywhere between 5010 thousand of them in the US at any given time. And some of them belong to professional organizations, I think probably maybe half or a third, depending on where you are in that estimate, belong to any number of professional organizations. Some have no accreditation whatsoever, but are still able to open up shops depending on the state they're in. Some states have zero laws about being a forensic psychophysiologist, aka a polygraph examiner. That's right. But there are programs out there who wrote this article, kevin Bonzer? No. I think so. He interviewed a guy who founded the Axodon Academy. Exodon is a manufacturer of polygraphs. Right. And they founded this academy as well, where you go through a certain amount of training to become a forensic psychophysiologist. And he actually interviewed that guy? Yeah. His name is Bob Lee. That's Lee. Lee and Lee says that if you come to their academy, you have to have baccalaureate degree. Bachelor's. Right. Or you have to have at least five years investigative experience and an associate's degree. You have to take a ten week course, and after you complete the ten week course, you have to carry out 25 polygraph examinations and submit them to be reviewed. So these are like real life ones, I guess. You're working with your local police department or whatever, maybe you're already a cop and you have to submit it to the accident Academy board for review. And then once they're all reviewed and everybody's all thumbs up, you are a licensed, I guess, but you're not licensed because there's no licensing body. You graduate, I guess is what they call it. Right. So that's as accredited as it gets, I guess. And like you said, proponents of polygraph testing say that if you're a good FP, you're going to be able to structure everything correctly so that you can see past somebody who sweats a lot, like you, or who gets stressed out easily like me, and design your questions appropriately. And you're going to be able to figure out whether this person is deceptive or not. Yeah. So how would you do that, Chuck? Well, we should talk about the test itself, I guess. You're going to go in and you're going to get a pretest before you get strapped up to anything. It could take about an hour. This is just you and those are the only two people in the room. You're not surrounded by folks like in the movies and stuff, although the movies sometimes it's just two people, I guess. But the pretest, you're just going to get an interview basically about why you're being investigated. They're also going to be profiling you and checking you out and just seeing what kind of questions you respond to and what might make you nervous, just so they'll be better informed about how to properly question you once you're all strapped in. Right. And the pretest where you're just kind of hanging out with them casually. The examiner's also kind of getting info out of you that you might not be aware of. Like if you talk leisurely about your favorite beer at one point and how you like it a lot and then later on it also comes up that you have to drive a lot. They might use that for a control question, which could be something like have you ever driven under the influence of alcohol? And a control question is something where you would have to admit guilt and you may not want to, but it's such a broad question that just about anybody is guilty of it. Like have you ever lied to somebody? Have you ever stolen anything? That kind of thing to where if you say no, they now have a baseline for what it looks like when you lie, that they can make a reasonable assumption that you have just lied and any of the data captured on the polygraph they're going to use to analyze everything else off of that's pretty much it. That's the test. And afterward you have the post test where they look at all the data and chart out whether or not they think you're deceptive and aware. Like on this question you were deceptive, on this question you may have been deceptive. It's kind of hard to tell on this one. You definitely were deceptive it's all in relation to that control question. That baseline, right? Yeah. So if your deception on questions where they're going to have to talk to the police as well too, and say, what do you want to know out of this person? So they'll design questions around that as well. So they may have a question like are you wearing a blue shirt? That may be question one. That's irrelevant, right? Right. Question two is have you ever lied to your boss? That's the control question. And then question three is something like did you steal the cookie from the cookie jar? Like that's the one that the cops want them to ask. Right. They'll compare the results of Q Three against Q two and if they're the same or you can't really tell, that's an inconclusive test. Right. So that's it. Like you said, that's polygraph, it's pretty easy. It is. It's jarringly easy considering that it's used in legal cases a lot, right? Yes, that's true. People try to battle the lie detector in various ways. There are little tricks that the internet says works like taking a sedative or putting any perspiration on your fingers, which seems like it would make you wash your hands, putting attack in your shoe. And anytime you get asked a question every single time, you stomp on the tag. And the idea is that you're just going to skew the test so they all look the same. So your body has the same reaction no matter what's going on. I guess if you press on the tack, your physiological response could overwhelm any response to the question. Right, exactly. Like I said, these things are used in legal cases, but with caveats. Right. If you undergo a polygraph, whether you fail or pass, it doesn't really matter, legally speaking. Right. Because unless you're in New Mexico. Yeah. This is the only state that allows it just openly. If you take a polygraph, it's admissible in court. Yeah. Every other state, usually both sides have to agree on it being admitted or the judge has to say, yeah, we're going to admit this one. Right. Yeah. And federally, the judge decides whether or not they're going to admit it. Right. And I guess state judges kind of follow that federal ruling of polygraphing. Yeah. And it's sort of a crapshoot if a federal judge is going to allow it or not. There's no precedent, really, to where they say, we have to or we don't have to. Right. So what are the problems with this? The problems with a polygraph or that it's subjective. Right, that's a big one. But also, because it's subjective, you can get what they call false positives and false negatives. Yeah. And you don't want that because then the test itself is just not valid. Right. But I mean, a lot of people use that as evidence that polygraphy shouldn't be done at all. It's not valid. Yeah. False positive in polygraph thing is when you find somebody who is deemed deceptive but was telling the truth, false negative is when somebody who wasn't telling the truth is deemed truthful. Like Gary Ridgeway, the Green River killer, they had him for a little while and gave him a polygraph and he passed and they let him go and he went and killed a bunch more women. All right. That's right. I didn't know that, actually. Yeah. There's also the federal government is the largest consumer of these exams, and if you work for the federal government, you've probably had one to get the job. But you can't do that in the private sector. Thanks to the Polygraph Protection Act, employee Polygraph Protection Act in the late 80s, they said, you can't force your employees to do this, you can request it, but if they don't want to do it, you can't fire them because of it. You just can't do it. Right. Not in private land. Right. Unless you have a contract with the government and then that's not valid. Right. But yeah. The federal government is the largest opponent to them in court, but also the largest consumer. Imagine that. And there's been a lot of cases that shaped this admissibility or not. But the polygraph, it seems like it's kind of on its way out. I wrote an article about MRI being used as lie detectors. Oh, really? And that's starting to kind of come into fashion. The more we start to understand, like, how lies are born in the brain, being able to see it and saying, this is the pattern that will happen if this person is lying, and then that pattern happens. They say, well, we know you're lying. We just saw that live form in your brain. That makes sense. Yes. But at the same time, people who understand MRIs say it is way too early to be doing that. And even if we can do it with 100% accuracy, there are a lot of moral and ethical questions to it as well that we need to address first. Always. And then penile plasmagraphy. What's that? So remember the pneumographs that go around the chest and the abdomen? Imagine one of those that goes around the penis, and it does the same thing. It detects changes in attraction at birth. That's a perfect way to put it, yeah. Wow. And it's used to detect arousal. They use it for sex offenders. It's under at least as much attack as regular polygraphs. But I wrote this blog post called Using Science to root out Latent homosexuality among homophobes. A study at UGA used penile pleasmography to find if anyone who they had deemed homophobic became aroused when exposed to homosexual pornography. Wow. Yeah. It's one of the better posts I've ever written. Jeez. All right. That's our future, I guess. Penal pleasmography for everyone. Maybe everyone with a penis, at least. And then Chuck. Lastly, I want to encourage everybody, if this has piqued your interest about lie detectors, to go watch the Shoe Court shoe store job interview clip from Mr. Show on YouTube. Oh, yeah, you remember that one? That was very good. We had a friend, Paula Tomkins, and he has a breakthrough. Oh, is he in that one? Yeah. Good old PFT. Yes. And that's it for lie detectors, right? Yeah. I want to take a test if there's someone in the Atlanta area that administers these and would be willing to give me a lie detector test. I would love to do that. Okay. And I'll watch. Yes. As long as I can approve the questions or not approve them. But I don't want to be rooted out as some miscreant. It's a little late for that. Just keep it above board. If you want to know more about lie detectors and play with some lie detector flash animation, you can do that by typing in lie detector in the search bar on housesteporks.com. And that means it's time for listener mail. That's right, Josh. This is from Brad. And, Brad, if you remember, we had a list of suggestions from a listener not too long ago that thought our podcast could be a lot better if we changed a few things. Brad has some suggestions of his own of how we can make the podcast better. We should both have nicknames. We do ZAZ up the actual name. Like welcome to Stuff You Should Know with JC. And the dingo sit back while getting a big helping of knowledge from Chucko and the duck. I second the suggestion to remove the personal anecdotes should be moved to a separate podcast called The Josh and Chuck Memoir. Daily 1 hour podcast can recount your lives from birth to present, focusing on depressing stories that are marginally factual. It's in development. Chuck, please raise your voice one octave. Josh, lower yours one octave. What? Okay, so now this is how I talk. The opening of the podcast should be a description of what each of you ate that day and the number of trips to the bathroom. This allows the listener to keep track at home. Hedgehogs, brain surgeons, arcades, and Bolivian politics are underrepresented on your podcast. At least 20% should be about these subjects. Do not exclude listener mail. Instead, create a quieter audio track, reading the listener mail and overlay it on the rest of the podcast. That way, listeners can hear both the mail and the main content at the same time. That's a pretty good idea. Why not set the podcast? We would literally drive people insane if we did that. Why not set the podcast to a backdrop of tribal drums and jungle animal noises? It would give it an exotic feel that's over the listener mail. Track over the whole thing. So that'd be three tracks feet. Yes. And it would lead to suspense for the listener to wonder if you will be eaten by jaguars. And it was clear from the podcast on Mummies, neither of you had ever been mummified. Please refrain from explaining topics that you don't have personal experience with. And then the final suggestion just retail episodes of this American Life. That last one went down like the Dave Letterman Top Ten list. So that's Brad. Thanks, Brad. Those are all great ideas. I like three tracks all in one streaming at once together. Listener mail quietly, the podcast and tribal drumming. Yes. And jungle noises. Yes. Let's see if you have access to a polygraph and want to hook Chuck up to it, let us know. Yeah, you can let us know on Facebook@facebook.com. Stuffyshonow you can tweet to us at syskpodcast and you can send us a regular old email at stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show. Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer, school's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-06-17-sysk-decapitation.mp3 | SYSK Selects: Do you stay conscious after being decapitated? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-do-you-stay-conscious-after-being-dec | In this week's SYSK Select episode, historically speaking, decapitation was a popular means of execution -- it's been used by everyone from ancient Romans to French revolutionaries. But is there any truth to claim that victims retain their consciousness? | In this week's SYSK Select episode, historically speaking, decapitation was a popular means of execution -- it's been used by everyone from ancient Romans to French revolutionaries. But is there any truth to claim that victims retain their consciousness? | Sat, 17 Jun 2017 15:35:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=15, tm_min=35, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=168, tm_isdst=0) | 28741911 | audio/mpeg | "Hi there, everybody. It's me, Josh. Your friend, Josh. And this week I've selected do you really stay conscious after decapitation? It was one of our top three grisliest episodes that we've ever done. We talk in depth about what it's like to have your head cut off, and it's pretty grim, but it's also, in my opinion, one of the most interesting ones we've ever done. So if you are faint of heart or weak of stomach, skip this one if you like. But I dare you to listen anyway, because it is that good. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast on Josh Clark. There is Charles W. Chuck Bryant asleep at the mic. Wake up, Chuck. I could fall asleep right now. What's wrong with you? Is it Paulin? No, it's just the means he wired and I just sweepy. Are you? You have a long night last night? Yeah, I've been sleeping. That great. Oh, really? Plus, I got the window open because the weather is so nice, but that means I hear birds in traffic really early. So I've been waking up at like 615. Yes. I hate that. I hate those birds. The early birds catching their worms. I heard all stupid happy songs. Yeah, I don't like that either. I had a weird, uncomfortable dream last night that I was trying to rent a car and everything was sold out because Texas A and M was in some sort of crazy championship and there's like 500,000 people there and they'd rented all the cars. So I just stand around and wait until somebody brought a car back and jump on that. And there was like twelve other people doing the same thing. It was kind of no idea why. Out of nowhere, huh? Yeah. I thought at least it'd be UT. No. So, Chuck so weird. What that was that was an example. Dreams in general, of my neural networks. Whatever I'd learned or thought of that day or something had jogged my memory. Whatever. Sure. There's an idea that dreams are basically your brain strengthening neural networks by stimulating different ones. Right. Basically doing some paperwork, some sorting while your body's sleeping. Yeah. We still haven't done our Deluxe Dream podcast that we haven't somebody asked for it recently. Yeah, we'll do it. I think we're getting more and more prepared, too. It's coming. Okay, but that idea is kind of based on one of well, it's one of the things that's based on a guy named Francis Crick, who you'll remember was one of the co discoverers of the structured DNA. Yeah. He was the D, right? I know you're thinking of running D. Yeah. He, later on in his career, really got into the idea of this thing called The Astonishing Hypothesis. I love this, but it's a little depressing if you ask me. We've talked about it before. I think we talked about it mirror neurons. But the Astonishing Hypothesis is essentially that all of our thoughts, our dreams, our beliefs, our hopes, our fears, our connections to others, every aspect of the human experience is based on neurons and their excitement. Right. And he said, quite famously, quote, you're nothing but a bowl of neurons. Or pack. Okay, but I said, quote, yeah. So you're just rewriting about a sack of neurons. I like that. A fistful of neurons. Oh, God, that's awesome. Thank you. That's a band name. I knew you were going to say that. Fistful of neurons. Yeah. Someone's going to go be that now. Yes. So at the basis of all this is the neurotransmitter, right? Yes. Which is an electrochemical compound that depending on what kind of neuron is excited or what compound is passed from synapse to synapse. Right. Yeah. You're going to have a different kind of experience, but all these experiences are based on these electrochemical reactions in your neural networks. That's right. So you have one neuron exciting another, and they become connected and it goes on and on. And then you have a neural network that's associated with fear, or fear of bears, more specifically, you see a bear and it's excited because you stored this neural network as a memory. Right. And that's consciousness. That's being alive, as they say. But it kind of takes the mystery out of life to a certain extent, I think. Yeah. But also and that's a great set up, too, for this. As long as you can measure that and you can measure those brainwaves, that means there's something going on there. Right. Because we do have machines called electroencephalographs EEGs that measure the electrical activity in your head. And we've determined, science has come to agree that there's a strong enough correlation between somebody going, hey, why is this thing on my head? And electrical activity while it's happening. That when we detect this electrical activity, we're saying this person's conscious. Right? Right. And that is a great way to set up a study that was performed in the Netherlands. He's wacky Dutch at radbowd. I'm sure that's not pronounced correctly. I would say Rabu University in the Netherlands. Where in the Netherlands? That word. I know. It's a lot of confidence right there, Miguel. That's what I'm going with. And that's one of the easier looking Dutch words with their aunt's. Crazy. Yeah. So they did this when you work with lab rats, that sometimes you have to put them to death, and what they do is they chop their little heads off because that's a quick and speedy way to kill something. So they thought, we might want to do some test to see if this is actually a humane way of doing this, which is what they thought all along, which is why they decapitate rats and other lab animals, is because it's assumed that's humane. Right. These Dutch researchers saying, well, wait a minute. Is it? Let's find out. I would think smothering one with a tiny pillow would be while petting it. Yeah, while stroking it. I thought about that too, but fear. Yeah, sure. Because I think we should probably define humane here. Humane is probably the absence of fear and pain. It's a humane way to kill something on purpose. Yeah, right. Those are probably the two things I would want cut out of my death. Yes. Fear and pain. So they did this. They performed these tests on rats, attached them to the little EEGs, cut off their heads, and they found that the brain continued to operate, generate electrical activity between 13 and 100 Hz. Frequency. That means thought and consciousness. The study of electrical activity in the brain, we found that within that band, that frequency band, those frequency band, that's when you're thinking and feeling and saying, what is going on? Right. Why is my lifeless body over there without my head on? Right. For about 4 seconds. And then lights out. Yeah, lights out. And then I think after about another 50 seconds or something, 40 or 50 seconds, there was one last burst. Lights back on. It wasn't exactly lights back on. It was like the end of everything in one last point. But there was nothing between those that indicated consciousness. It was just like everything was gone after about 50 seconds. But 4 seconds consciousness. Right. Which brings us to capital punishment. Capital. The way they came up with that originally is from the Latin term kaput, which means head. So decapitation capital punishments derived from decapitation. That's exactly right. And so now we can talk about humans losing their heads. Well, yeah, because as we said, a humane way of executing something or dispatching something is to take fear and pain out of it. Right? Yeah. And the study of these rats suggests that hold on. I want everybody to do this, right? I want you to look around, to think, to feel, to listen while I count 4 seconds off. Are you ready? Yeah. 1234. Took a lot in just then, didn't you? A lot more than I'd be comfortable taking in with my head not attached to my body. Exactly. So this is why the rat study is so disturbing. Because it suggests that after your head is cut off, you are still very much aware of what's going on and can think and feel and be terrified, right? Yes. And I wish I had a better source for this, but I did find one doctor that firmly believes that there's a lot of pain associated with a decapitation execution. By decapitation? Yes. Maybe not for long, but he's like, I don't know about this painless thing. Right? And long before this Dutch study was published, people have long suspected, like, you're still conscious after you're decapitated for a little while. Right? Let's talk about decapitation first, I want to give a shout out to our buddy Alan Bellows from Damn Interesting who wrote a great article as well. Do you know him? Yeah, he emails with us sometimes. Okay. Yeah. He wrote one called Lucid Decapitation that I use as a source for this. It's great. I read that today, too. Yes. So, Chuck, let's do talk about a history of head loss, as it were, and that losing one's head isn't losing one's cool? No, you mean chopper style. Although you do probably lose your cool when you lose your head and you're still conscious. We'll find out in the biblical apocrypha. I love that word. There's a widow named Judith. She cut off the head of an Assyrian general named Holofernese, and he was a bad guy laying seas to her town. She cut his head off. Romans did that. Reduced him and then cut his head off. That's the way to do it. Especially if you're a biblical widow. Right. The Romans did that to their own because they thought it was a better and more painless way than crucifixion, which they did. The outsiders. Yes. Which is not a very nice way to die. No. Medieval Europe, obviously all kinds of people, from the ruling class to peasants, and today it still happens in a few Middle Eastern countries. Yeah. Qatar, Yemen, iran. Most prominently, Saudi Arabia. What was it? Fahrenheit 911. There's footage of somebody being beheaded in public in Saudi Arabia in the late 90s. Do they use the sword? Yeah. Really? Yeah. The Schmittar and Josh, they're also the extra judicial. Like when a journalist is captured and beheaded by a group of gorillas. And that's not like they don't use a sword or a guillotine is really gruesome. Yes. It's extremely gruesome. That's right. That's why most modern cultures have come to the conclusion that beheading is extremely barbaric, it's extremely painful way to die, and I imagine probably one of the more terrifying ways to die, too. Yes. But it took a while for everybody to come to that conclusion. Right. Yeah. You mentioned Saudi Arabia is one of the main countries they have, I guess you would call a very qualified swordsman yes. To do this. But other places they're not so qualified, and it doesn't go as smoothly. Sometimes there's, like, some chopping to go on, which is not ideal. And one of the reasons why it is an ideal is because it takes chopping, or it did for many centuries, because you had to either do it with a knife, which was really, like, not a beheading. It was more cutting someone's head off over the course of a few minutes, probably. Or you could try to behead somebody with an axe or a sort. And those are the two favorite implements used for state sanctioned executions. Right. But as you said, in some cultures, like Saudi Arabia today, you're a very highly trained, highly skilled headsman, is what it's called. In other cultures, you could have also doubled as the guy who, like, pulled the lever on the gallows. Right. And you had no extra training. Maybe you'd done it once before. Maybe you hadn't. So for the most part, when you were beheaded, most likely it was going to take more than one blow and you're going to feel it. Yes. Then everything changed. Yes. The guillotine. Yes. Chuck, give me the fact of well, one of the facts of this podcast yeah. I've always heard, and I think a lot of people have always heard, the guillotine was named after Joseph Guillotine, the inventor of the guillotine. He was not the inventor of the guillotine. No, it was named after him. It was named after him, but he was not the inventor. He was the champion of the guillotine as a humane method of execution. Is he a doctor? Yeah, he was. He was a French physician of the revolution. Another doctor named Antoine Louis was the one who actually invented it. And Joseph Ignati Guillotine had a lot more power and clout and said, this invention is awesome. It's going to allow us to kill people more humanely, but also more quickly. And that actually led, inadvertently, if the guillotine started out to be a humane method of execution to what's called the Reign of Terror. Yes. I think you said 30,000 people hit the guillotine in one year. In less than a year, actually. And 30,000 is one of the lower estimates of it. I've seen up to like, 50 or 60,000 people, just like they're like, oh, great, well, here's a machine of execution, and we're going to basically turn it into the end of the assembly line. Yes. For those of you who don't know what a guillotine is, a little odd because they're all over the place and cartoons, even in pop culture, but it's tall, like 14ft tall at the top. Yes, 14. And it drops a large blade that's held in a track so it goes straight down. How heavy? So the blade itself has a weight at the top. You see it's like an iron bar. And then the angle blade, right. Diagonal blade. Those two things combined weigh about \u00a3175 or 80 mutton. The mutant is the weight. Yeah. So this puppy slides down very fast at 14 from 14ft in its track, very precisely hits the back of your neck. It's very sharp, and that generally means your head will probably just fall straight down into the little peach basket. Right. Ideally right now, if you were beheaded prior to the invention of the guillotine, right. Prior to this podcast. And also, I have to say, you're right. Everybody knows what a guillotine looks like to a certain extent. It wasn't until I wrote this and was doing research for it that I really actually looked at the actual guillotine, the whole assembly. Right. I mean, look at that thing. That monster is horrific. And that's used by the state, and that's how you are going to die. You're going to lose your head. And Victor Hugo famously said that a person can have a certain indifference on the death penalty as long as one has not seen a guillotine with one's own eyes, which is, I think, very true. It's pretty easy to talk a tough game about things like this until you actually see it go down. Exactly. What it does is most notably is it deprives your brain of oxygen and blood, right. Your circulatory system, it's a closed system. It's based on pressure. Your heart is pumping the blood throughout the body, it passes by the lungs, drops off CO2, which you exhale, it takes in oxygen, which you inhale, and then the whole thing goes again. Right. As long as the system is closed and the hearts beating in and the lungs are transferring air, you're fine. Once you take a head off, you have opened this closed system and eventually the heart is going to just pump everything out of the neck and whatever was in the head at that time is going to come out and the brain, starved of oxygen and blood, starts to degrade very quickly. It's processes start to degrade. Right. Yeah. Now if you are at the hands of a hack, literally headsman, right. He doesn't know what he's doing. He's got a blunt blade, he's hungover, who knows? Right. He's going to take your head off. It's got a discoI. It's good. What is the disco? I hacked and you're going to bleed out probably before your head comes off. Not so with the guillotine. It is very precise. It comes right down, it takes your head right off. And then there's a little wooden shield to make sure that it doesn't go flying into the crowd, that it may be hits the shield and it bounces into the basket where a headsman can hold it up or sometimes throw it into the crowd. Didn't know they did that. Interesting. And sometimes they would be big jerks. In the case, a very famous case of Charlotte Corday, she was executed in France in 1793 because she assassinated a revolutionary leader named Jean Paul Maura. And the jerk executioner picked up her head and smacked her around a little bit. Yeah. He got eleven years in prison for it too. And people who witnessed this say that her expression on her headless head, I'm sorry, her bodyless head. Her dismembered head. Disembodied body. Good Lord. Showed unequivocal marks of indignation. So she actually had a facial expression of like, how dare you slap me. Right. And from what I understand, it wasn't like that's. How she looked when he picked her head up. Yeah. There's a change. It was after he smacked her, like her cheeks flushed and she basically went into a rage right before she died. He got eleven years for that. Interesting. Yeah. The French did not you did not screw around. You didn't do that. That was a huge lapse in humanity taste. Yeah. Cut off the head is fine. Just smacking around. Well, again, remember that this is the time, this is 1793 france officially adopted the guillotine in 1792 and used it until 1977. Yeah. That was the last guy to have his head cut off by the French state. It was, I believe, a rapist, murderer immigrant who hit death row. And then three years after that, France is like, we're done with the death penalty. Isn't that crazy? People are like, partying in studio 64. 54 with their disco is 64. Where in the world did that come from? Yeah. And then all of a sudden in France are cutting people's heads off stuff. Right. But again, remember, they adopted it the year before this guy smacked Charlotte Cordays face the year after they adopted it. And people are like, I don't think that's supposed to happen. So from that moment on, and probably before that, because, Chuck, there have been other instances of people in history who had their heads taken off skillfully. For example, Amberlyn King Charles I had their heads taken skillfully and both of them were reported to try to speak like they were moving their lips or their eyes were moving. Right. This is not funny. It's insane. Yeah. I'm not laughing because I think this is funny. And there's a huge debate that's become increasingly one sided in favor of what we're talking about today. The other side is, well, this is just like ghost electrical activity. Yeah. Like you prick a frog ten minutes after it is dissected and they're still going to move. They have that stimuli. Or Marshall brain has that very popular post on the blogs about sprinkling salt on frog's legs and making a move. Really? Surely you've seen it. I don't think I have to check it out. That's crazy. Yeah. If you cut a leg off or you cut an arm off yeah. That's remnant electrical activity. It's the same thing in the head. It's still electrical activity. The problem is you don't experience pain and fear and terror in your arm. No. Your arm feels absolutely nothing. All sensations that we experience, whether it's our arm being cut off or feeling terror at seeing our arm cut off, all of that is in the head. So when you decapitate the head and there's still electrical activity, the chances are that it is conscious experience. Yeah. Your brain it's not like your head got bashed in. Your brain is very much intact. Yes. It's just not attached to the lower half. And it still has plenty of oxygen and plenty of blood to deliver that oxygen for a few seconds. And that's what's required. As long as your brain doesn't suffer any damage, as long as you have oxygen and you have blood, you are likely going to experience consciousness. And this is pretty much the conclusion that people have arrived at, like, yeah, if you cut someone's head off cleanly and quickly, they're going to know what's going on for a little while afterwards. Yeah. And how long is very much up for debate. They've tested or not tested, but they've seen evidence in other mammals up to, like, a half a minute. Chickens are very famous for running around the barn yard with no heads for a little while. Do you ever hear the story of Mike headless chicken for a very long time? In Mike's case, 18 months. Yeah, but Mike the headless chicken. And if you're interested in that type in Mike the headless chicken, how stuff works, and it'll bring up some things here. They're including a blog post I wrote on it. But he was different because the farmer missed his brain stem. And chickens are almost all brain stem. Yeah, but Mike lived, like, an extra 18 months all brain stem and actually good, juicy breast. Exactly. And he choked on a kernel of corn. That's how Mike died after having his how is he eating it, though? With a dropper. Okay, that makes sense. Let's tell some more stories, anecdotal stories about people living and making faces after their heads and cut off. Okay. Because those are interesting. Yeah. In 1989, an army veteran was in a car crash with a friend. His friend was decapitated, sadly, and he looked at his friend's face, not attached to his body and saw a distinct change in expression from, he says, quote, first of shock and confusion and then terror or grief. It's horrific. It is horrific. You mentioned ambo. Lennon king Charles. There was one story, a very dubious one that's not in his biographies, but Antoine Lavoisier apparently agreed to try and blink for as long as he could afterward. Yeah, he was a French chemist around the time of the revolution, right? Yeah. So he reportedly blinked for about 15 to 20 seconds. But there was also another murderer named Larsenre who said, all right, I'm going to wink at everyone after my head is cut off if I can. And he didn't wink. Yes, there is an account that is not dubious. It's probably the most scientific observation is awesome of consciousness following the capitation ever. It's very famous, and it is verified, as far as I know, in a guy named doctor Boreo basically got permission to study the decapitated head of a murderer named Henri Languel. Right. So he was right there, right at head level when long wheels head came off. His plan in place, I assume he immediately picks up the head and starts experimenting on it. And over the course of 25 to 30 seconds, the physician basically, he said, opened his eyes and focused on just his head, focused them on Dr. Barrio and then kind of like, faded out again. And the doctor said, languel, and Languel opened his eyes again and focused them, he says, undeniably, focus them on the doctor's eyes again. And then he tried it a third time and then nothing. So that was his plan, was just yellow's name. Yeah, I guess it worked. But it did work. He said that his observations were that this decapitated head went from its eyes closed or glazed over to consciousness, coming back into it and focusing its eyes on him, because as a response to his name being called. Yeah. And 1795, a German researcher, st somewhere in this is the worst one of his own. He said that there was a physician inspected ahead and poked the spinal canal with his finger, and that the head the person grimaced horribly, and they grind their teeth. So it's almost as if the head was saying, I know you think I'm dead, but that really hurts. Yeah. The spinal canal is where your spinal cord is in your spine. So you would think that there was a little bit left because he was poking it up into the spinal cord with his finger. And I can't imagine the excruciating pain that that would cause. Well, the doctor Ice found that said that he thought it was decidedly painful. That's what he said. He's like, you can't expose and cut the spine like that without there being a lot of pain. Yeah. And that was St Simmering, right, in 1795, arguing in the French newspapers to stop cutting people's heads off. Well, they listened a little less than 200 years later. So I think the answer to this one is, yes, you stay conscious after your head is cut off from your body, at least for several seconds. That's right. All right. Well done, sir. Thank you, sir. Good article. If you want to learn more, you should search for stuff. You should know how stuff works in your search engine, and it should bring up our brand spanking new, beautiful looking stuff. You should know, homepage. Yeah. We got a little fan page. Now, that looks like a proper fan page. Yeah. And we decide what's on it, right? We say, hey, here's some cool articles you guys should check out. Here are some articles based on some of our favorite podcasts, image galleries, quizzes, just basically everything. Like it's like they gave a portion of the site to us, and we're doing some cool stuff with it. How about that? So you'll be able to find that there, right? Indeed. Okay. Wow. I didn't say search bar. No, just type the capitation into the search bar@howstuffworks.com, and that will probably bring up some cool stuff, including this. That sounds like a practical joke. Yeah, just type the capitation in and see what happens. Brings up nothing but rabbits. And since I said search bar listener mail. Josh I'm going to call this little poem from Alex our fan. And Alex birthday is April 26 today. Happy birthday, dude. Happy birthday, Alex. You know your timing there, buddy. Yes. And this is his 21st birthday, and I hope he has a strong stomach, or else he was never going to hear this. That's right. Alex is in a creative writing class, and he writes poems, and lots of them. Wait, he says, I write nothing but poems, even though I'm a guy. Yes, Josh, he is a guy, but he is a poet. Strange thing to say, Renaissance man. Recently, I was listening to how fossils work in Saunas, more interesting than you think. And I wrote this poem about the podcast. Sleeping in my bed, trying to absorb unique facts about different topics. Dreaming of a fossil forming a young Josh smoking, and an older Chuck laughing at dirty Chucks. I'm not sure what that means. Understanding now that reading about Saunas requires you to strip. Having this podcast allows me to own a piece of history. I'm sorry, own a piece of unique history. Okay. Learning about different parts of human life, healing over and laughter at the jokes. But you are reading this like William Shatner reads poetry. I am. Now I know why people own eye products. To listen to Josh and Chuck w talk about talk and joke around. Hope you like it. I hope you like it. Part of the poem. I don't remember. No, it's not okay, because that'd be weird. So the whole I end all my poems with hope you like them. Yeah, but the first letter of each line spells out stuff you should know. Oh, you didn't know that? That's why I was reading it. Like Shatner having would be the H on would be the O. You didn't know that? Even points out, if you still don't get it, read the first letter of each line. So very creative. Thanks a lot, Alex. Happy birthday to you. Right, Chuck? Indeed. Probably shouldn't ask for any decapitation stories or poems. Yeah, no poems. I don't get any ideas from this. This is just special, right? Yes. If you have an unusual pet that is not a ferret because it's not unusual any longer, we want to hear about it. If you have taken an animal from the wild and tamed it to be your pet or possibly do your bidding, we want to hear stories about that. Okay. Send it in an email to stuffpodcast@housestepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housestepworks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The House of Forks iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on itunes. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. 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How Face Transplants Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-face-transplants-work | Believe it or not, scientists and doctors have discovered a way to transplant part -- or all -- of a face from one person to another. Tune in to this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com to learn more about the astonishing practice of face transplants. | Believe it or not, scientists and doctors have discovered a way to transplant part -- or all -- of a face from one person to another. Tune in to this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com to learn more about the astonishing practice of face transplants. | Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:05:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=14, tm_min=5, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=113, tm_isdst=0) | 22846143 | audio/mpeg | "You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that, we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural sciencebased nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands. Find Halo Elevate at petco pet supplies plus, and select neighborhood pet stores. US hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun's shining, the daylight's longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from exactly right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilguera and Georgia Hard Stark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from houseteporkworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Chuck Bryant. I got to come up with something new. Chuck, I know you say, there he goes, like, I run by the city of Chuck. Thanks for coming back. Yeah, we'll figure this out. Maybe when we're not recording for sure. We'll just take the extra effort. That means we'll have to speak outside of this room. Now. We don't do that. We're like Pete Townsend and Roger Daltrey. They do that. Or like the Gallagher brothers from Oasis, because they hate each other. Right. But when they get together, it's like pure gold. It's magic, man. So, Chuck, have you ever seen the 1997 John Woo movie Face Off? I have not. Good. Chuck, you want to talk about face transplants? Yes. Do you remember Travis, the chimp? It was like my first blog post ever. Yeah, that chimp that went crazy in New Hampshire. Well, apparently, he tore that woman's face off. Oh, really? Yeah. There was a transcript of the 911 call, and one of the cops is like, you need to send an ambulance out here. There's a man down. He is in trouble. The guy couldn't even tell it was a woman. Like, her face was pulled off. Wow. And one of the things one of the first things I heard after the grizzly detail emerged was that this woman would likely get a face transplant. Right. And I'd heard of them, but vaguely, and hadn't really put much thought into a face transplant, you know? Right. I remember just from and we'll talk about it later, but the French woman was the one that came to mind. I hadn't heard about her. I wasn't paying attention, I guess in 2005. That was a rough year for you. It was. Let me think. Very hazy. Holy cow. I lost. 2005. I'm going to have to give some thought to this while we're practicing new intros. Right? Sure. Okay. So, yes, this poor woman who was attacked by this rampaging chimp, who was eventually shot to death by the police, will likely get a face transplant. And we just so happen to have an article on the site appropriately titled how Face Transplants Work. And that's what we're going to talk about today, right? Yeah. I love this article, by the way. It was gruesome. It was gruesome, but it was really I don't know, stephanie Watson wrote it's just really well written. It is well written. I agree wholeheartedly. There's all sorts of pictures and actually there's an illustration. Yeah, I did, too. Yeah. The face is kind of draped over the skull. Right. I like the face on ice. Yeah, that was the best one. I wonder if Marcus did that one. We'll never know. We'll never know. No. So, Chuck, the first successful transplant of any kind was and there was a physician, I think he was in Boston, named Joseph Murray. Yeah. And he carried out the first successful kidney transplant, and he did it using identical twins, which was the key early on. People had tried transplanting things before, and the transplant went well, but ultimately the body rejected it. You know why? I want to hear your explanation, pal. Well, it's because the body isn't very receptive to foreign tissue. So when you get back in those days when you would get something transplanted, your body sees that as a foreign invader, just like it would a disease or something, and the white blood cells kick into gear and just go into attack mode. Yeah. The body no liki foreign invaders. No. But if you're identical twins, you had enough of a match to where it worked out. Right. The problem is most people who need transplants don't have identical twins. It's a terrible way to establish medical procedure, but it was a good way to start. Well, sure. And it was successful. It showed that you can transplant human tissue from one person to another and it be successful. So that was like the real milestone. 54. Yeah. And then after that, people started exploring other ways to do this without identical twins. You know how I want to hear your explanation. Well, you're really piping up today, aren't you? I know by the what they figured out is if they could suppress your immune system, then you could use drugs like cyclosporine. You could be successful with a transplant. And what they're trying to suppress is things called antigens, which are proteins. Yes, sir. They are found on the exterior of tissue cells. Right. Yes. And those are the things that create that prompt an immune response. They're the ones that sense like, I don't remember this hand being here before we lost our hand. What's going on here? Go get rid of that hand. Right. And then the white blood cells attack like the calvary. Yes. Which is awesome. It's cool that your body does this, because that means you have a robust and violent immune system. Of course, if you're trying to get a transplant, it's no good, but you want your body to go after things with vigor. Sure. Yeah. Like MRSA. You don't want that. No, but yeah, if you have a hand, you wish you could tell your antigens to just settle down. It's your new hand and you're pretty fond of it, right? I'd like to keep it. Right. So the problem is the drugs that they came up with were immune suppressive. Meaning? Okay, the antigens are no longer being prompted to attack the hand or send the white blood cells to attack the hand, but they're also not being prompted to go attack the MRSA bacteria that's in your body now. They left you susceptible to other problems. Well, pretty much everything else. I mean, how many bacteria and viruses, just germs in general, do we come in contact with every day? A lot. And we don't even notice. Like, we did that one on tugs causing warts. And like 20 million people have the human pavlova virus and very few are actually suffering from it. We don't even know where carriers because our bodies can ward it off. Right. So we had to come up with something better. And they did. But it was along the lines of immunosuppressive drugs. We just got them slightly more refined. Right, exactly. Once we had that down, we started really going crazy with heart transplants. Yeah. Transplants. Eighty S and ninety S is when they really kind of started mastering this whole technique. Right. And then after that, after the vital organ transplants, we started getting into those hand transplants. I got to tell you, I find that fascinating. Yes, me too. Very Luke Skywalker s. I know you're going to say that. Thank you. You know me so well. The way you're doing your hand, it was sort of like the scene from the movie. Yeah, it looks like it. Oh, yeah. They can't see it. Inevitably, we end up at facial transplant. Right. It took a little while, but really, if you think about it, we went from the first successful kidney transplant to the first successful face transplant in about 50 years. Not bad. That's pretty quick. Let's talk about it. You want to talk about that poor girl in 1994, San Deep KUAR? Yeah. This is just all kaur. In 1994, Josh, she was nine years old in Northern Indian. She was chopping grass to feed her buffalo, her family buffalo, which is a noble pursuit. Very much. And her hair got caught in the Threshing machine and basically pulled her entire face and scalp and hair right off of her. Clean off of her, yeah. And her family reacted promptly. They threw her face into a bag, put the girl on the back of a moped and drove to the closest hospital, which was 3 hours away. So they drove their faceless, scalpels, hairless, daughter to the hospital on a moped for 3 hours and the doctors took a look at her and were like, we can't do skin grass. This girl is never going to function properly again. So they actually put her face, scalp and hair back on and she's functioning. Yeah. I actually just saw a picture of her at 19 on the Internet. How is she looking? She looks good. There's some scars, obviously, and I think her right eye has a little bit of a droop to it, so you can tell. But if your face has been pulled clean off by a pressure, you really can't complain about the little droopy eye. I was impressed. Yeah, I'll go that way. That was technically the first facial transplant, but the first real transplant from a donor came in 2005. Can I handle the grizzly details on this one, please? There's something that I noticed in researching how face transplants work and that is that all face transplants begin with a horrible gruesome event. Yeah. There's really no way to lose your face unless there's some horrible accident. And even if there's like a disease, it's a ravaging, horrible disease too, right? Like tumors or something like that. Or the Elephant Man disease, I think is what they call it. Yes. He was not an animal. So this woman was named Isabelle Dinoir and she's a French woman. And in 2005 she popped some sleeping pills, passed out on her couch and she woke up. I don't know if this is a normal habit of hers or not, but she woke up and went to go light a cigarette and found that it kept falling out of her mouth. She didn't know what was going on. She goes to the mirror and the lower half of her face I took from below her nose down was gone. She was nothing but, like, tissue and teeth. Yes. And apparently, from what I understand and I know you know something different, I'd like to hear it. From what I understand, her black lab chewed the bottom of her face off while she was sleeping. True? Is that true? It is true. And I couldn't get a straight answer. I read a bunch of articles and follow up articles on this today and I still didn't get what I think is the absolute truth of what happened. Some people claim she was committing suicide and then the doctors denied it. But then one doctor said that she had tried to commit suicide. And then the whole dog situation, black labs, I mean, you're a dog guy. I can't believe that a lab would do that. Right. So what they think might have happened was she was out and the dog was concerned because they thought she was dead and was pawing at her face and became really agitated and upset and pawed and scratched to the point where there was blood probably, and then started chewing on blood, trying to evidently trying to wake her up. But there's speculation about that too, but they think the dog did do it for some reason or another. They think the dog did it for a reason, trying to arouse her from her slumber. Because I think I read someone else said that you'd have to be so far out of it to not wake up with that kind of pain sensation that it had to have been a suicide attempt. Got you. I thought it was a little odd that she took pills and fell asleep on the couch. Right. And then she came out later and said that she hit her head and was knocked out. So I'm not exactly sure what happened. All I know is the dog was put to sleep, which really is upsetting to me. That is upsetting, especially if it was trying to rescue her. I mean, the whole thing is upsetting. Regardless of what happened. Isabel Denoir got a face transplant. She did indeed. And this is the first major newsworthy face transplant, which I still didn't hear about. That was a rough year for you. Hey, everybody. If you want a great quality website, you want to do it yourself with no must and no fuss. Then there's nowhere else to look in Squarespace. That's right. Squarespace has every single thing that you need to put together an awesome website. Everything from growing and engaging your audience with email campaigns, collecting donations for your cause through Apple, Pay, Stripe, Venmo, PayPal. Plus, you can also make your website optimized for mobile, which is great for your user on the go. That's right. And if you're into selling stuff, square space is everything to sell anything. They have all the tools you need to get your business off the ground. They have ecommerce templates, inventory management, really simple checkout process, and secure payment. So whatever you want to sell, you can sell it on Squarespace. Yeah, don't just take our word for it. Head to squarespace. Comsok 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. Comcysk. Squarespace. 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 apparently, they could have taken tissue from her chest to repair the damage, but she wouldn't have had very much movement, right. It would have just looked like a face, but not really exactly like a fake eye or something, right? But what they want is feeling and function going on. They wanted to be able to smell and feel and have all the senses reacting. That's the ideal. Most surgeons are perfectionists. Yeah. So what they did was they found a donor. Here's where we're getting to the ethical aspects. Can we jump ahead and move around a little bit, please? Okay. The only person who can be a face donor is one who has to be on life support. Brain dead? Sure. On life support. Well, someone has to be alive. Right. But you wouldn't give up your face. Sure. No, no one's a chance. I just want to get specific. It has to come from a live donor, and the only scenario where that could happen is if you're brain dead on life support, and then the family has to agree to pull the plug, essentially. Right. And remember, we did the how comas work and we were positing whether or not people feel pain in deep vegetative state, and you got to hope not when they're taking your face, because that's exactly what they do. They go to the donor. They move the donor into the operating theater. They take the face off. I imagine they cut around the scalp and then down behind the ears, maybe in front of the ears, whatever below the chin. And that would be a full face transplant. Right. As our illustration shows. They put it on ice. Well, this was a partial face transplant. Okay. So it would have been like the lower part of the face, right. But whatever part of the face you need, whether it's full or partial, it would be cut off, removed, depending on whether or not any of the connective tissue was needed. Still, any bone, any fat, muscle, all that stuff may be taken as well. And then it's again put on ice or whatever, transported to wherever the recipient is. And then all of these things are reattached, blood vessels are reattached, connective tissue, all this stuff. And you have to do it in such a way. Well, number one, skin tone is kind of a big consideration to find a match. Sure. You want to find somebody, you have to do HLA testing or matching, which is the antigen testing, to make sure that you have a similar enough immune system that there won't be a rejection. Right. You may have to put bone down, as was the case with a Chinese guy in 2006. Yes. And he was mauled by a bear. What is going on? Right. He was mauled by a bear. And this was a unique case, different from the French woman because he was missing skin and part of the bone in his nose and cheeks. He was a huge talent. Right. Hers was just skin, and his required quite a bit more. And we're talking like teams of 15 to 20 doctors over the course of 15 to 20 hours. Well, with Madame de Noir, she had a team of 50 doctors. Wow. They started at 1030 at night, and they finished it four the next day, four in the afternoon. Right. It went straight through. The irony is, if she did try to commit suicide, her face was donated by a woman who failed in a suicide attempt. I know. Yeah. How about that? Yeah, it's a little odd, but yeah. Okay. So they also practice the people. Mice and cadavers rats, cadavers rabbits. There's a picture of, I guess, one of their test subjects, a rabbit with a face transplant on page zero, the first page of this article. And it's just cute as a button, but it's also furry. We don't have the luxury of fur as humans, so they kind of have to do a relatively good job reconstructing a face. Right. And it usually takes more than once. There'll be several phases of surgery. Yeah, sure. Yeah, it shows. And I've seen pictures of the French woman over the course of different surgeries getting better and better. What I thought was interesting was that once you have the surgery, you need to be on these immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of your life. So it's good that you're able to live through this and get a new face. But these drugs also put a serious dent in your ability to survive and live a long life. Right. And apparently Madam Dur is not really helping things along. She refuses to quit smoking, and I thought you might respect that. And the doctors are like, Come on. Yeah, she smokes pretty soon afterwards, too. Yes. Well, I mean, if you're a smoker, you're a smoker, dude. Face transplant or no? I guess so, yeah. My first father in law got, like, shunts, put in. He was smoking and golfing, like, a couple of days later. Really? He just wouldn't stop. Wow. Heart shunts, I should say. Okay. Cardiac shunts. Now, Josh, these are all partial transplants, even in the case of the one from China. And as of the writing of this article, we actually need to update this article. There were no full transplants, but there have been since then. Chuck, I have to say, you are killing it today. The external research, you corrected me at least once, if not twice. I am proud of Chuckers. Thank you. Josh Thomas, head hearts. Chuckers. So, yes, Josh, I'm ignoring your praise. There have been two transplants that I know of. There may be more, but I've noted a couple that have happened that are full facial transplants. One of them was a woman in Chicago who they haven't named, keeping that quiet, who the doctor basically said she didn't have a nose, she didn't have a mid face at all. And they were able to transplant, Josh, almost 83 square inches of skin with muscle, bone, upper lip and nose from the donor still attached. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. And the Cleveland Clinic is where all this is going on, man. If you need a face transplant, you want to be in Cleveland. Sure. And then there was a man a French man who had the Elephant Man disease. Yeah, I see you have a picture there. Can I see? Yeah. Wow. That's quite a difference. Yes. And this was just March of 2008. He had a transplant and new lips, new cheeks, new nose, new mouth. We should publish that before and after photo on a blog. After the blog, this podcast comes out. What do you think? Yeah, let me look and see if we can get rights. Okay. Hey, everybody. If you want a great quality website, you want to do it yourself with no must and no fuss. Then there's nowhere else to look in Squarespace. That's right. Squarespace has every single thing that you need to put together an awesome website. Everything from growing and engaging your audience with email campaigns, collecting donations for your cause through Apple, Pay, Stripe, Venmo, PayPal. Plus, you can also make your website optimized for mobile, which is great for your user on the go. That's right. And if you're into selling stuff, Squarespace is everything to sell anything. They have all the tools you need to get your business off the ground. They have ecommerce templates, inventory management, really simple checkout process and secure payment. So whatever you want to sell, you can sell it on Squarespace. Yeah, don't just take our word for it. Head to Squarespace.com. FSK and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code SYSK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain that's Squarespace. Comsysk. Squarespace. 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. I create. Learn more@ibm.com. Yeah, I think we can. OK. Apparently they can do full facial transplants now. It's an amazing and amazing thing. Well, that brings up another ethical concern besides taking the face of somebody who's not dead, but is brain dead. Right. The other ethical concern that some parts of the medical community worry about is what happens when the wealthy are like, I don't want Collagen or Botox, I'm just going to get a facial transplant from a poor brain dead person. I'll pay the family, like, $20,000 and take the Face. You know, I saw that in the article and I don't buy it because right now they do a good job with these transplants, but the end result certainly doesn't. If your aim is to be extremely handsome or beautiful, that's not what you're going to get right now with the Face plan. Right now, sure. But again, Chuck, we went from the first kidney transplant to face transplant in 50 years. Where are we going to be 50 years from now. And I mean, really, is there anything stopping vanity? No, there's not. Especially if we harness genetics so that we can age right. We harness longevity, but we still kind of age poorly. You don't think that people are going to pay for a face transplant by 80 if we're living to, like, 120 on average? What I think will happen in 50 years is there will be other ways to make yourself beautiful, like you said, to stop the aging process. There will be other ways besides finding a beautiful brain dead person to take their face. I think that's just me. We'll see. Of course, I'll be long gone. Both of us will just yes. I think I'm going first, too. Donate your face now. And actually, let me also say this. This is such a tangential aside. Did you know that if you are an organ donor, you should and you have a problem with your head being used for cosmetic surgery practice? You have to specify. I do not want my head used for cosmetic surgery practice. Really? Yeah, because if you go into a med school that focuses on cosmetic surgery heads and they practice on you doing faceless and stuff. Interesting. Yeah, I'm an organ donor, and actually, I need to make that little caveat there, like, do not use my face, it's too pretty. I wonder if I noted that you can use my face but let me wear my flat cap. That would be cool. Yeah, it was like your tongue hanging out with one eye open still, but your flat caps on cool to the end. Nice. So, of course, the best thing you could do is learn to be pretty on the inside, and then you wouldn't have to worry about anything. Unless you're mall by a bear, your black lab to the bottom of your face off. Then you get a pass for the face transplant thing. Absolutely. You want to learn more about that. It's a really cool article. You can type how face transplants work into the handy search bar on how stuff works.com. And are we still doing plug fest? Yes. All right, our producer Jerry says yes, so let's do it. Chuck, let's start with the blog. Abbreviated version. Yes. Blog good. Blog fun. Josh. Chuck, write blog fans, read blog. Fire bad. All right, moving on. Okay. The stuff you should know super Stuff guide to the economy. That's on itunes. 399, worth the money, getting good feedback. Type in Super Stuff on the search bar on itunes and you can get it. All right, pluckbest is over. Okay, so then it's time for Reader Mail, and I see that the podcast finally came out where we said, haiku is dead once and for all. Yes. That was great. It's interesting. We still have some people writing in that are upset about the lack of Haiku's and then many others writing in saying thank you because I was tired of it as well. Well, in case anyone didn't get the memo, let's play that little clip from that listener mail where we do say that Haiku Theater is dead. Here it is. Right, josh, this is significant because today is the day where we retire Haiku Theater. Thank did everyone hear that? We are retiring. Haiku Theater. We love your Haiku's, and you can still send them if you want, but we're not going to read them anymore. I agree. Thank you, Chuck. Thank you, Chuck. So, as you can see, I'm not lying. Haiku Theater is clearly dead. I don't see any reason for anybody to send in Haiku. Yeah, but what is not dead, Josh, are mistakes that we occasionally make that will never die. And we got a correction from one we just did on the world ending in 2012. And this is a good one, and I like to read the good ones. Yeah, good science one. Sure. Just wanted to make a small correction. You mentioned that the lava flows can be used to determine the direction of magnetic north in the past, which is true, but it is not because the lava actually flows toward the pole. So evidently, Josh, there are magnetic properties of some of the individual mineral grains. And I know someone mentioned iron in one of their emails inside the molten lava, and that becomes aligned with the direction of the pole. So when the lava cools and hardens, that direction is locked in. So the lava doesn't necessarily have to be flowing north, but the iron particles and other minerals in there are pointed north. And evidently you said the lava flows north, and that's not true, buddy. Okay, so samples of the lava is collected with care to note. The original orientation can then be brought into the lab and geo referenced. And we get a big cheers from Jessica for that one. Cheers back, Jessica. Also, Peter wrote in about that John the yellow dart. Thank you, John. The yellow dart. And we're not allowed to say last names anymore. That's why. If you're wondering how are we going to get in trouble for the yellow dart, then? No, it was actually John the yellow Dart Blank. Oh, got you. Okay. Well, thanks, John. The yellow dart. Can we say blank then? Sure. John the yellow Dart Blank. So his last name is not Blank. We know for a fact. Yes. Okay. Because wouldn't that be ironic? Yeah. All right, well, thanks, all of you wrote in to correct me. You know how much I love that. And if you want to send a correction in or tell Chuck that his hair is beyond awesome, you can do that by sending an email to stuffpodcasts@howtofworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstep works.com. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you 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.com." | ||
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-11-03-mc-sysk-tig-notaro.mp3 | Movie Crush: Tig Notaro on Mask | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/movie-crush-tig-notaro-on-mask | Episode two of Movie Crush is a very special one. Comedian Tig Notaro dropped in minutes after a very important, life changing phone call to chat with Chuck about the movie Mask. Have a listen! | Episode two of Movie Crush is a very special one. Comedian Tig Notaro dropped in minutes after a very important, life changing phone call to chat with Chuck about the movie Mask. Have a listen! | Fri, 03 Nov 2017 19:28:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=19, tm_min=28, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=4, tm_yday=307, tm_isdst=0) | 68259238 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, folks, and welcome to Movie Crush. It's Chuck Bryant here and boy, I got to tell you, this week is a pretty special episode. This one needs a little bit of set up and I urge you to listen to this one because the background of Tig Nataro's interview and how this thing started was well, here's what went down. So I had met Tig before at her comedy festival that she curates every year, benson Ball in Washington, DC. And Josh and I do our stuff, you should know, live there usually every year and was lucky enough to meet her last year. And she's just really sweet and a very nice person. And so I hit her up to be on this show because she was coming through town to perform and she said yes. It was very sweet of her to do so. And they have the show waiting for her to get here, texting with her assistant who is traveling with her. And they said, all right, she's here. Meet us downstairs. Met her downstairs. I was really excited because I adore Tik Natara in her comedy, as I'm sure everyone listening does. And I meet her downstairs in our building and she's just a little weirdly removed, I guess the best way to say it. She's a very warm, friendly person. So it was different than I was expecting to get. She wasn't being mean or anything. She wasn't being a jerk. But I could tell something was going on and I kind of walked around the building a little bit and then got on the elevator. And the whole time she was just sort of nodding and being nice enough, but something was off and I could tell something was off. So we get up here in the studio and she needs a moment to go to the little podcaster's room. So I walk her over there to the bathroom. So here you go. I'll be inside. It's fine. She takes a while. She gets on the phone outside and is sort of having it looks like a fairly intense conversation and wrap set up. And then we get into the studio. We sit down and we are just sort of small talking initially. And she starts to cry right there in front of my face. And I don't know what to do. She's just sort of crying and saying, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. And I go, all right, listen, I'm going to give you a minute. And her assistant is actually in the studio with us. So I'm going to give you all a SEC and step out and let you deal with whatever's going on here. So I go out and I start chatting with producer Noel and I'm like, ticks. And they're crying. And he saw what was going on through the window here and nobody knows what to do. Jerry is kind of over there too, and we're all just sort of wondering what we should do. So I give it a little bit of time. Finally, her assistant comes out and says, hey, she's good. She wants to do this. So I was like, Are you sure? And he says, yes. Come back in the studio. I sit down, and I said, Listen, Tig, I said, we do not have to do this. I said, Whatever you've got going on is more important than this silly little show, and I will not think any less of you if you want to postpone or cancel or whatever. I said, you take care of yourself here. That's what's important. And she said, no, no, I'll be all right. I was like, all right. And are you sure? She said, yeah. And she looked at me, and she looked at her phone, and she was sort of still wiping tears from her eyes. And she said, It looks like I'm going to live. And I just stopped, and I started to get a little emotional, honestly, because I'm a sensitive guy. And I was like, what do you mean? And she said, that was my doctor. And she said, I had my five year results from my cancer treatment come back. And it was basically a call I have been waiting on for three days on whether or not the cancer was back. And if the cancer was back in the way that they thought it could be, it would be a death sentence for me. And I just got the call. I'm going to live. And I am, like, literally fighting back tears at this point. She's 2ft from me, and it's a very intense situation, and she's sort of crying, laughing at this point. So it's a good call. That's the great news. But she was just overcome, obviously. We kind of chat for a moment about she called her wife Stephanie and share the good news with her, and they were crying, and it was just really a super special moment. But even though it was good news, I said, Listen, seriously, I know it's great, but if you still don't have to do this, we're literally sitting here about to talk about the movie Mask, and I don't blame you if this is not what you want to do right now. And she said, no. And she said, you know what? She said, this is exactly what I want to do right now. So that's the set up for this episode. My second interview ever with someone for the show. Not like the most accomplished interviewer yet. So, needless to say, I was sort of on ice skates at this point, but it made for a really good conversation, and I just really hope you enjoy it. So here we go with Tic Nataro and Mask Man. Well, and especially after everything well, and I'm right at my five year mark where I'm supposed to be technically in remission, right? And people have been congratulating me, and I've been walking around with like, well, or I might be terrible, right? So I've just been like, come on, let's just get this news. And a funny addition to this is that Thomas is just talking about how uncomfortable is I've never cried. We've worked together now for a long time. I've never cried in front of him. And then I'm like, oh, wow. Like, the day after, he's like, well, I'm a little awkward when people cry. Oh, no, I have to release this sad but very new excited energy. Yeah. He was specifically talking about ex girlfriends. Okay? I am on track. Good. I'm alive. Stephanie knows. I told her. I told her. And she was texting that she was crying, and I think that really triggered me. Yeah. Well, kids, now it's like, not that it's ever a situation, but I have a lot in my life that I love. That's awesome. So everything's going great with kids? Yeah, everything's. I mean, I really have a pretty splendid life, so there'd be a lot to mourn. Yeah. Anyway, boy, this is going to go down in history for me. Me too. My apologies. Oh, no, I think you have this thing where everyone cares about you so much as fans because you've been so open about all your experiences the past few years. So I think everyone feels like you get a collective hug from your fan base, which I don't know if you can feel that. I'm sure you can. I definitely can. Thomas gets the residual stuff. Really? At the Merch booth. Are you doing season two of One Mississippi? It's coming out september 8. I'm so glad. Yeah, it's so great. Thanks. I think the quality that I find a lot of TV shows is attracted to me as heart, and like, Master of none is another one. And I think both those shows just have so much heart. And that's something you can't manufacture. Right. So it's great. You can manufacture it. Do you want to watch it? Yeah, well, exactly. But my family's from Mississippi, so it's sort of that's what he was reading that to me in the car. Oh. How did you know? Wikipedia. Was that on there? My family in Mississippi, they started an email chain that I was on talking about how I have a Wikipedia page. And they were all like, oh, chiming in, like, wow. Right. I've actually done a lot of other things. And you could probably have your own Wikipedia page, too, right? I mean, somehow, some way. But this is not my biggest accomplishment. I hope not. Well, I think for a long time, stuff you should know had a page, but I was like, no, why don't I have a personal page? And then that happened. I was like, Be careful what you wish for. My family, my dad's ancestry is from, like, Tupelo and Jackson and Ponitock. I don't know. I do not that's your family. You know all the towns in Mississippi, right? So I went there as a kid growing up and stuff, so it's kind of cool to see. Although you didn't grow up there, right. You grew up in Houston? I was born in Jackson. Then we moved to Pascal, Mississippi, on the Gulf Coast. And then we moved outside of Houston to Spring, Texas, and then used to spend our summers in New Orleans and Jackson and Hattiesburg and Pascal. Right? Yeah. So you're familiar with this weather? Does it freak you out too much? No. Good. Sounds good. Were your early days in Houston like are you a big movie goer? How did they factor in? I went and saw Greece and Star Wars, which are kind of my two big movies. I did, too. Yeah. You know what? I remember going to see Eddie Murphy, his concert films and also all Molly Ringwald movies. Just all that kind of, I guess, Rat Pack type stuff. Molly Ringwald, Breakfast Club. I think I've always been a little more of a music person. Right. And I've followed Stand Up a lot also until I got into it. Comedy records. Sure. Yeah. But yeah, I think consistently through life, I'm always more heavily in the music world. Thomas and I were driving to Georgia yesterday, and I mean, just going through anywhere from the Indigo Girls to Frightened Rabbit to Ronnie James Dio. That's a nice swing. Yeah. There's a Venn diagram in there somewhere. No, but it was a fun little drive. So you drove on this I think you said you were in Mississippi and then Oxford. Yeah, oxford, Birmingham, Atlanta. Yeah. Thomas and I were talking before. Do we mention who Thomas is? Yeah, Thomas is your assistant who is feet from us, giggling in the background, smiling, so proud of me. All right, Roger Ebert. Yeah, we were talking about stuff you should know, did a Birmingham show, and just how sometimes when you go to places like Birmingham and Oxford, they're just so appreciative. It's just really lovely. Well, I was reading about Birmingham, and I guess it's the number one, unless I have completely wrong information, but the number one most liberal city in the Southern states. Oh, really? Yeah. Probably of a certain size, maybe. I can't imagine it's more liberal than, like, Athens, Georgia. I don't know. How do you measure how liberal the place is, too? I'm not sure. But I could believe that, though. Birmingham is pretty cool. I think he has a pretty cool rep. Yes. I was stunned, and I think Atlanta was ranking fourth. Yeah, the city of Atlanta is fairly liberal and the in town neighborhoods are well, I know it's fairly liberal in Atlanta. I guess my shock was I thought it would be closer to the top. Right. Yeah, I did, too. I wonder what number two and three were. I don't remember. Again, I could have gotten all the wrong information and I'm here to spread that's not what the show's about anyway. So we can go ahead and get into Mask if you want. Sure. I did. Should let everyone know. I verified a little nervously right before that it was not The Mask, the Jim Carrey movie, because I don't know what I would have said about that. Well, here's the thing. There was a part of me that wanted to reach out and clarify which one, but then I also thought it'll be hilarious if you research the wrong movie. And I came in to do a more dramatic film. And yours is you've researched this over the top, ridiculous film. And so I was like, you know what? Just leave it. I appreciate that. And let it do what it wants to. Yeah, I think I would be in a panic if I hadn't seen Mask. And that happened. But Mask for me was it was a big HBO movie for me. I was born in 1971. I was too. Oh, yeah. What's your birthday? What's your birthday? March 15. March 24. Shut up. Really? All right. In Mississippi ancestry. Yeah. So when I was I guess we were 14 then in 1985 to say yeah. When Mass came out. And it was I don't know about you, but HBO, when that landed in my neighborhood, we were kind of one of the last neighborhoods to get it because I kind of lived out in the woods and on a dirt road until it was paved when I was like twelve. So it was a really big deal. Now we're bragging, right. So HBO came late and I would just watch some of these movies over and over again. And Mask was one of those. You know what my HBO movie was? What? Under the Rainbow. Oh, yeah. Do you remember that? Chevy Chase. What was the premise? It was a wizard of Oz. Like remake? No, I actually don't even remember what the movie was about. But I remember there were just a lot of little people, and I watched it several times a day. Anytime it was on HBO, I was like, Well, I know what I'm doing with my time. I don't remember the premise that there was definitely a wizard of Oz angle. I don't know if they were trying to do a remake or a musical or something. I have no idea. Nothing stuck except Chevy Chase and little people. Same here. But really, I think that's the movie I've seen most in my life wow. Is under the rainbow, thanks to HBO. Yeah. Have you ever heard of that? Oh, yeah. Watch it. That's not one of those you can hear about anymore. Of course not. It didn't live on in, like, the popular culture. I don't think it was thriving at the time. No, but something like Mask, like, I think people still talk about that kind of movie. I bring up Mask a lot, and it is often followed by The Mask. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So I watch today again, Mask is really hard to find. Like you can't even pay for it on YouTube as a rental. Like, I had to watch it on YouTube, but the screen was in the top little third of the corner and then all around it were, like, starbursts going off. And it was in yeah, that's the original. That sounds about right. Terrible quality. It was really weird. But I've seen it. Like I said, because of HBO. I can't even hazard a guess, but at least, like, ten times, probably. Yeah. So it's a movie I was really familiar with but hadn't seen in many years. So it was fun to go back and watch it now. This is an embarrassing moment where I admit I didn't go back and watch it. That's okay. Okay. No, that wasn't, like, part of my homework. There won't be a quiz, so you don't need to worry about it. You remember the gist of the movie, right? Yes, I do. So eric Stolts. Oh, I remember. Yes. Okay. I thought you were about to say, I didn't know that's who that was. No, I for sure did. Yeah. I read a Funny Thing today where apparently at the rap party, there were crew members introducing themselves to him because they didn't see him out of his makeup. So they didn't even know what Eric Sold looked like. Wow. And I also read that Cher dated him after the movie. Really? Yes. Kind of tarnished it a bit in my head. That is bizarre. Yeah, I thought it was a little bit weird. I was about to say, Are they the same age? But I guess that doesn't matter. Well, no, of course not. But my wife is 15 years younger than me. I think that's about the age difference that Sharon Eric's told. Did I just ruin it for you about me and Stephanie? No, it doesn't tarnish well. You didn't play her mom in a movie. No, I played her love interest in a movie. Oh, that's right. Yeah. She's really good in one Mississippi, too. That's part of the heart of that show, I think, is this, like, little sweet butting relationship that you guys have. She's so good in season two. She's so good. Really? Oh, my gosh. Who is the guy that plays your dad? Or, I guess, John Rothman. He's so good. Phenomenal. And I've seen him over the years as a character actor, but Jesus, that role is just so, like, internal. But he's doing a lot with it. Yeah, it's really fun to watch. Yeah, I just can't wait for a season two. Very excited. So, you know, probably that Springsteen was supposed to be the songs, right? Or do you know that? No, I know. Bob Seger. Bob Seger was the soundtrack. Yeah. So he was the stand in. Peter Bogdanovich, the director, was insistent on Springsteen being the guy because in real life, the real Rocky Dentist was a Springsteen fanatic. And so, very famously, they had a battle because I think the record label. I can't remember if it was Columbia or Universal who was who I think Springsteen was on Columbia and Universal was the movie studio. But someone didn't like each other and they wouldn't allow it. And Bogdanovich later sued the studio because they made him use Bob Seger, whom I don't even think he cared for. Really? Bob Seger, I feel like, makes that movie. Oh, really? Oh, my gosh. The end credits. I remember. What Bob Seeger song is that? Well, I can't tell you because I watched the directors cut today, which has Springsteen. Really? Yeah. How was that? It was a little like bizarre mask because you're right, it's such a throughline the Bob Seeker stuff. And then having seen the Seeker version 15 times, I knew that the Springsteen version was out there. So it was a little strange hearing like Thunder Road and Born to Run. I'd be so curious to see that version because I feel like Bob Seger represents way more of that world, like that sort of biker yeah, that biker world than Bruce Springsteen does. Bob Seeggers is on the nose. Yeah. And the Catman Do song especially, because one of the big subplots of the movie was his Europe trip that he was going to take with his friend. Yeah. I mean, so great. Yeah. All right, so you're in the Seagull camp. I love Bob Seger. You're not a fan? Well, we actually had a thing on Stuff You Should Know, where I complained about Bob Seger, I think I was complaining about a specific song, Turn the Page. You know the song? Of course. I'm a Seger fan. How many times I have to tell you? And I think it may have just been so I can make the joke that should have been called Turn the Station because I always thought that was kind of a funny joke. And then I heard a lot from a lot of people, loyalists that kind of gave me shit for that. And a Metallica. Do you hear their remake of Turn the Page? Oh, no, I don't think so. It's great. It's just a heavy, slow version. Yeah, but it's good. I'm not typically a fan of remakes of anything. I think they had it handled. Guys, relax. Right? But I feel like Metallica did a really great Metallica version of Turn the Page. Wow. You're going to have to hear that. Yeah. Well, it's sort of the ultimate Grizzly Road song. As a touring artist, when I hear that song, I'm just like, that's me. Well, you definitely going to have to check out the Springsteen version. I think you can get it on DVD. Unless you want to watch the weird third screen YouTube starburst version. No, thank you. But as far as the bikers go, I don't know what kind of growing up you did in Houston, but I was a very sort of sheltered Southern Baptist boy before I came to my senses. Later on in life. And the notion of a biker gang was very exotic and scary to me. So to see this movie where they love puppies and did blood drives, I don't know if you remember that scene where they were, like, had a blood drive at one of their bike rallies. I don't remember. It was kind of early on. And that's where they had the puppies and they all cared for Rocky and love one another. And it was just very kind of mind blowing for me to see this other world of the bikers that I shouldn't fear them. Well, I think it's that typical situation, whether it's bikers or punk rockers or just that whole, like, we take care of our own, and then all the little spikes on the jackets, whether you're a bike or a punk rocker, it's just stay away from me because if you get too close, I'm actually really soft and I love puppies and I love babies. And it's like they don't trust how sensitive they actually are, so they have to put the spikes on their coat. Yes, that makes sense. And they're just like, back off. Right. I cry easily. But they can show that love to each other, though. Yeah. I think when they're within their little community, they have their little puppies and babies. Well, it seemed unrealistic to me as a kid, but now that I'm older and I look at that, I think that's probably you're probably exactly right. And Bogdanovich probably nailed the biker scene, like, more than anyone else. Yeah. Whenever I see bikers, I'm just like, I'm not scared of you. Right. I'm a biker. Oh, really? Yes. I have two motorcycles. How did this happen? Well, I started riding motorcycles. Well, how long do we have? The story triggers another, but that's all right. I always wanted to ride motorcycles. And I had a friend growing up that invited me when I was in fourth grade to come over and ride motorcycles in her pasture. And she said, do you know how to ride a motorcycle? And I was like, yeah, because I'm like yeah, I know. And so I went over to her house and we were going to ride motorcycles, and it was just a mini bike. You know what a mini bike is? You don't have to switch gears. It's just gas and brake. They're like protein motorcycles. Yeah. But they're just like little things. And so I got on her mini bike and I just was like no control of the bike. I just went shooting off through the pasture over like a bump hit like a hole in the fence. And then I slammed into the fence oh, no. And fell over. And I had hurt my hand, and I just wanted my mommy. And I had gone from just feeling so quickly, yeah, I know how to ride a motorcycle because I truly just thought it was just doing verm in their hands. And you've probably ridden bicycles. Of course. One. I've been watching the Fawns, and I've been watching Evil Knievel, who I was obsessed with. And I had the same all those, like, wind up the very same toy. Yes. And my mother stopped buying them for us because the evil doll ended up twice on our heaters that were on the floor and melted. Right. But anyway, when I was 17, I was going to play pool at this pool hall with my friend, and there's this motorcycle shop next to the pool hall. And I had already dropped out of high school and had a job. Right. And I'd saved all this money, and I was like, Should I buy that motorcycle? And my friend, I still didn't know how to ride one. And she was like, yeah, you have to. So we went back the next day, and I bought the motorcycle. And when my friend and I went into the shop, this is our plan. We were pretending like I had broken my foot so I can't ride. So could he teach my friend how to ride a motorcycle? We weren't going to plan. Yeah. Did you have the limp? Yeah, that was my first acting job. Right. Yeah. I was like, yeah, my foot's broken. Can you just show her how he did? And we learned, and we didn't even have motorcycle helmets. We had brought along a Gokart helmet and a plastic football helmet. We rode the motorcycle. Wow. Yeah. Like a Houston Oilers helmet or something. Yes. And we just were so amused. It was her little brother's plastic football helmet, and then I ended up selling that. So they sold you a bike to a young lady, 17 year old lady, limping with a plastic football helmet? Yeah. Well, they didn't see the helmet. Okay. That was something we took out of the car. Got you for safety. Yeah. We didn't want to be pulled over by the cops. Right, of course. So you grab your football helmet and nothing to see here, officer. Right. And so I ended up selling that motorcycle. I had that from when I was 17 until I was probably 23. Oh, wow. Is that your primary mode? No, I had a car as well, and then I bought years later, I bought a couple of vintage motorcycles that I still have. Nice. But Stephanie no longer will allow such a thing. I think a lot of people go through that thing, especially if you grow up loving evil and evil. And the fans, at one point, I've thought about it, like, oh, man, I know they're dangerous, but they're just so cool. Yeah. And I got married. My wife was like, no, go ahead and get the thought out of your head. So did you own a motorcycle? No, I never did. Okay. I think I kind of thought about it here and there over the years. Well, yeah, stephanie said probably before we were together, she would have thought it was fun and cool, whatever, but she saw somebody die on the motorcycle and she said there's no way if it was before she saw that. Right. But then after she was like, it's me or the motorcycle. Yes. They collect dust in your garage. They do. Okay. They do. I think I'm going to get rid of one of them. One of them is Gold and one of them is teal colored. They're Honda CB 350s. Those are cool. Really cool. One's a 69, one is a 70. The gold one is named Goldie Honda and the teal one is her Kurt Russell. Kurt Russell, okay. Yeah. I thought it was going to do a teal no, I know that's the setup and then fooled you. Goldie Honda and Kurt Russell sit in my house. Who am I going to sell it to? Yes. I mean, you love them both. No, I for sure sell Kurt Russell. Oh, yeah. Goldie Honda stays. Yeah. Goldie Honda was the first and I had that motorcycle. I did like ten episodes or so of Sarah Silverman's first TV show, and I had that motorcycle in that show. And so there's kind of an attachment, right. What if your sons grow up and they're like, why don't you have two motorcycles for it? I know my good friend Rick, he collects motorcycles and he races motorcycles. And behind Stephanie's back to the babies, he's always like, yeah, you always get him a side car. Those are kind of cool. That was a great story. Thank you. So the bikers. Well, first of all, we need to talk about Cher in that movie. Yes, we do, because I don't know anything about Cher's process in her career, and I may be wrong, but I've always had the feeling that she can kind of be in anything if she wants to be, or at least put herself out there to just act all the time. Yeah, but she's only done like, five movies. Yes. I feel like she could do whatever she wanted to, but it's purposely just sort of been super selective. Yeah. I mean, you hear about people being selective. Yeah, but she really wants to watch. She's really selective. She's just like, seriously, only the greatest movies ever. That's all I'm doing. Yeah. Which is a Vswick mask. Moonstruck. Of course. The Sonny and Cher show. That's a great movie. But I know that mask. She was in Silkwood and had a small part in Silkwood before this, but this was her first big starring role and everything that she's in, she's just so good and real and authentic, and I've always wanted more share in my life, in my movie life. Yeah, but you know, Cher is going to do what Cher wants to do. We can't boss this woman around. No, and apparently Peter Bogdanovich couldn't either because apparently there was some friction because she was sort of new and she wanted her boyfriend to play. Gar, who was Val Kilmer at the time. So after you see Sam Elliot, I mean, he is Gar. I'm surprised it's not his name, cause remember what Valkyrie looked like in 85? There's no way he could have pulled that part off, man. Gosh. That Gar. Yeah. I mean, come on. I know. Do you love that movie? Yeah, I do. Yeah, I like it. No, I love it. And seeing it today, it kind of brought back a lot of did it hold up? Yeah, I haven't seen it in a handful of years. It does hold up. I think it avoids that, like, movie of the week thing that it easily could have been because Bogdanovich was a director and a really masterful director. And the casting my mom has been in love with Sam Elliot since she was from that generation of mustachio Hunks of the 70s, were kind of right up her alley. Did she like Tom Selek? She loved Tom Selek and Burt Reynolds. Okay, sure. In fact, Smoking the Bandit filmed in Atlanta and shot some scenes across from my elementary school. And our station wagon is in one of the scenes. Why did you wait so long to bring this up? Well, this gets even better. For probably twelve years after that movie in our garage, we had the Sheriff Jackie Gleason's car door in our garage. It was knocked off of the car in a scene in the movie. You were so closely tied to that. I know. Somehow my dad got it and we had it in my garage for years until my mom was like, get rid of that thing. Get rid of that piece of movie history. Wow. But anyway, long story short, she drugged me down one day to meet Burt Reynolds. He did like an autograph day. And it's one of those things I'm like, I don't know, nine or ten years old, in line for hours and hours to meet Bert Reynolds and have him smack his gum in my face and hit me on the chin and sign a thing for my mom. You know what movie history I have that I didn't realize was movie history at the time? I used to work for Sam Raimi. In what capacity? I was an assistant. Oh, cool. Not his personal assistant, but I was just an assistant for the company. You hear that, Thomas? Yeah. I remind Thomas Near daily about assisting Sam Raimi and let me tell you how it's done. Right. But when I was I think the company was moving out of a building. I can't remember how I acquired Sam Raimi's old file cabinet. Oh, wow. But I acquired I started working for Sam Raimi when he was finishing up a simple plan. Great man. And moving on to he was finishing that. And then he was in pre production on his big, first big movie, which was Spiderman. No. For Love of the game with Kevin Costner. Right. That was weird. I know. There's one moment where Kevin Costner's hand is bleeding and there's like, a shot that everyone's like, oh, they're sad. It looks like evil deadline file cabinet. And I remember when I brought it home, I was, like, peeling all the labels off. It said like Dark Man and Evil Dead One and Evil Dead Two. Did you have it just so you could use it as your own? Yeah, I wasn't even, like, thinking, this is Sam Raimi file cabin, like, historic little stickers. And I couldn't fully get the stickers off, and I just bailed halfway and just wrote, like, comedy on one and just all these stupid labels that have to do with me. Right. But then years later, after he went from just cult iconic director to just, like, one of the biggest Alist directors you can find, I looked at the file cabinet and I was like, thank God. I was unable to fully scrape off Evil Dead and Dark Man and all these labels, even though my stupid comedy label is written on there, too. That's pretty funny. It's a funny merging of my stuff and Sam Raimi's file cabinet. But I have that, like, Johnny Ron's base case and a bunch of stickers. I couldn't get them off. It's fine. He used it as a planter. So do you still have that? Oh, cool. And use it. I do. And now you tell everyone, right? It's in my garage, so I always forget. Oh, with Goldie and Kurt, I need to get Cher to come over and hang out in the garage. Does Sam Raimi do you know him now? Does he know who you are and that you worked for him? Yeah, I made a couple of short films and he paid for both of them. One is called Clown Service. Yeah, I saw that he paid for that. He did. Oh, wow. Well, portion of it. And my first short film called Poop Dreams colon a series of staying short. They can follow that one. I'm certain you haven't. It's not anywhere to be found. Okay. You've never heard of this Thomas. Okay. Sam not only paid for it, but he's in it. Oh, wow. Yeah. And then he gave a chunk of money to Cloud Service. Awesome. Because that cloud service kind of helped put you on the map, didn't it? Or did it? No. Okay. It only came out a couple of years ago. Okay. I wrote it 20 years ago, and then I started a Kickstarter fund to raise money for it five years ago. And then I had a few bumps in the road in life and installed the production, and then I made it two years ago. I know what I'm thinking of now that I read about it recently. Because of a controversy. Yes, that's why there is a controversy around it. Yeah, you got ripped off. You don't need to say anything controversy. Just know that I wrote it 20 years ago. I made it two years ago. And it's based on true events from my life. Right. It might have put me on the map to some people who had never heard of me. I know the first time I saw you was the Kona and O'Brien appearance where you shoved the stool around. I was just like, who is this? That is the best thing I've seen. Thank you. And Paul Tomkins was the guest that night too, right? Yeah. So I'm a fan and sort of friend of his now. And that was why I was watching that night, was to watch Paul. And then you came on and did that, and I was like, wow, this is awesome. It's funny, because when I pitched that idea to the booking agent producer, they were like I said, So I just want to push a stool around. And he was like, Well, I trust you, but I think I need to see it. And I was like, yeah, it just makes no, you really need to hear. It makes these squeaky noises. It makes people laugh, and then it makes them not laugh. And they laugh and then they don't. And he was just like, Let me just come see this. I was like, yeah, sure. And somebody came and saw me do it live. And he was like, oh, my gosh. So that was part of your act for a while. For a little bit, yeah. And then when I did it, when I was doing it on Conan, I couldn't get the stool to make the noise it was supposed to make. So I just went on a leap of face, literally, and leapt up closer to where right. Yeah, you brought it on the second stage because there was a plexiglass. Underneath the plexiglass floor were these lights that come up. And so I went over and I was running it across the plexiglass, and it was just making well, yeah, I think I probably told you scratch before. You probably heard it directly from me. But, yeah, I scratched the floor. Now, the scratch isn't still there. They had to have it buffed out. But what is still there is the sound of the stool. And one of the sound guys, I guess, to Annoy Conan, will play it every now and then. That's great. Well, it was kind of great that you went up to that second level because then you had Andy and P ft. Conan just dying in the background. So that really added to it. It was really fun. So that was my introduction to you. But you can watch Cloud Service on vimeo now. Okay. Yeah. Well, that should settle any controversy question. Two years ago, I do feel like I need to mention that we were talking about how great well, how great Gar was and Sam Elliot, but the only thing in that movie that kind of took me out of it was I don't know if you remember there's the one scene at a party, one of the many biker parties where he has a mustache rides shirt on. No, I don't. Yes. I don't think I probably knew what that meant when I was 14. And then I saw it today, and I was like, oh, man, my car is way too cool to wear a shirt like that. It's like somebody walking around with a hayman or whatever. Bart Simpson. Don't have a cow. Yeah. What are you doing? I remember a friend of mine was on a date and she ran off to the bathroom and called me, and she was like, I'm out with this guy, and he's wearing what was that movie? The guy that was filmed, I think, in Salt Lake City with the kind of nerdy guy no, Thomas said Wayne's World, by the way. Napoleon Dynamite. Napoleon Dynamite. I guess he had some Napoleon Dynamite shirt on. Yeah. And my friend was like, Am I crazy? But this is such a turn off. And I was like, no, it's telling of something that's absolutely yeah. If you choose to wear like it was probably a vote for Pedro. Yes, it was for Pedro. On the first day. On the first day, you're screaming yes. Because you pick out your clothes for a first date and you think about it deliberate and you might try a few things on. Even I'd like to see the rejected outfits from that day. Like, see what T shirts he did not wear. Can I tell you my favorite Gar moment? Yeah. And it's actually my favorite well oh, my gosh. Right when I start to say it's my favorite moment from the movie, then my brain jumps to other unbelievable performances by Cher. But Cher and Gar together. I guess that's not her movie name, but anyway, it's when Rusty was her name. Yes. And what's her son's name again? My dad with names, but I love the movie. Rocky. Rocky. Rocky's gone off to camp, and Rusty is so devastated and trying to write a letter. Oh, my God. And that is a scene that when I would try to describe it to somebody, I would a lot of times start crying. Yeah, I know. It's so raw, her love for this child. And when Gar comes in and he starts to try and write what she's saying, and then he just stops and looks at her and oh, man. Are you kidding me? Yeah. I mean, just kill me. Now, another few of those scenes are when Rocky confronts her about her drug use and she rips up one of his baseball cards and he goes into his room, and it brings on one of his headaches brought on by his bone disorder. And then she goes in there because it's one of those parents kid is the parent of the parent kind of situations, and all he cares about is for her just to not do drugs. And then she goes in there and does her thing where she talks to him to get his headaches to go away. Because they go to the doctor and they're like, what do you do? And they're like, she talks to me and they go away. And the doctors are very incredulous about that whole thing, of course, because it's an 80s movie. Yeah, but that scene just devastates me. Doctors are still incredulous. Yes. He's got a lot of experience there. And then the scene where Dozer, the big tough biker with the stutter after graduation, tells him that he's proud of him and that's the only thing he says in the whole movie. I was crying in my room today. Yeah, it's like in there with the blind straw, crying quietly. Were those all the ones that destroyed you? Because there's a major one just like come on. No, that's not it. Okay, shall we go on? Well, we may as well. I was thinking you might be a tough little cookie, if that's all that destroys you. Well, we should go to Laura Durne. Then. Rocky goes to Camp for the blind. And first of all, that's where I developed a lifelong crush on Laura Durham. I think everybody yeah. That movie kind of did it for me. And I still just adore her. Well, first when she feels his face and he tells her that he's not handsome and he has this thing and she feels his face and says, he looks pretty good to me. That gets me. Yeah, of course. Just a look on her face, that sweetness and openness. She already knows she loves the sky. And of course, his face. Is everything's going to feel and seem perfect to her? Yeah. It's just so sweet. Yes. And then when he teaches her the colors with the hot rocks and the cool things, and she gets it. Yeah. It just wrecked me. Yeah. Is that it? Yeah. I mean, we should talk about his death. Yeah. It's devastating. Devastating. I was weeping this morning. I'm a big SAP and a big sucker. I don't know when I got so emotional. But have no qualms about breaking down and crying if the spirit moves me. I don't think we caught my boohoo session on audio today. Obviously, I will. You should watch Mask tonight. You need to get cry. I don't. I'm boohooed out today. Well, so as you probably remember, in the movie, the night before, they're having another big biker party and he says that his headaches kind of bad. So he goes in and goes to bed. And then she gets the call in the morning that he's not at school. And she fucking knows right then. There's no way Rocky wouldn't be in school because he, like, swept the academic awards and goes in the room and he's there and she knows he's gone, but she's getting older. She's pulling the blinds up and talking to him like, Get up. Oh, my God. It's just devastating. It's too much. It is. And she keeps talking to him and then goes and kind of destroys her kitchen briefly. And it's just so painful because he's this one bit of light she has in her life. Very hard to sit through that scene. And I remember being 13 or 14 and just like, it wrecked me then. Yeah, it's a sense of old Baptist boy. Yeah. I don't know if that movie is what started things off for me, but I love movies that just destroy me. I do, too. I don't know what it is. It's a catharsis in a way, too, I think, for me, it is. Yeah. Probably so. Just to be affected so deeply about something you're seeing. I'm not that way with music, too. Like, any piece of art now can move me to tears in, like, a second. Yeah. I feel like that might be that first dramatic film, and then it just became I actually don't follow comedic movies or things like that. It's just more like Bjork and Dancer in the dark. Yeah, I'm there. Oh, my God. Talk about a heavy movie. Boys Don't Cry. Oh, jeez. Yeah. But then my favorite thing to do when I leave the movie theater after movies like that, as I'm going down the escalator with other people that clearly just saw that movie, I'm just like, I didn't think it was that funny. What did you think was the funniest part? People are just like, he was this human monster. It's always so weird in La. Too, because I lived there for, like, five years. And when you hole up in a dark theater and especially a heavy movie like that, and then you come out and it's always just like you're at the fucking grove or something. It's so alarming. Like a trolley goes by. It is. It's alarming. Like a trolley full of tourists. It's very disconcerting to me. I remember I left a movie at the Beverley Center one time. I can't remember which one it was. They have, like, the series of escalators going down there, and this is inconsequential, but I looked out to the side and there was something going on in a parking lot across the street. And I went down, I was like, what's going on over there? And someone said, oh, the goco's are about to play. It's free. I was like, Are you shitting me? So me and my friend went from this downer movie and we literally walked straight off as the go goes stage. It was a little shorty promotional thing, but they did, like, their eight greatest hits and banged it out. Yeah. In like 40 minutes. And it was one of those La things, like, did this just happen? This is, like the best day ever. Oh, my gosh, the gogos are so great. I'm here, but I have plenty to say about that boy. Yeah, well, I mean, you're my age. That was our wheelhouse 71. Yeah. I mean, we talked about this march. Yeah. PISCES, right? Are you PISCES? I think I'm Aries. Stephanie follows all that. I think it's unlike PISCES cusp or something, but I truly don't know what I'm talking about. And hilariously enough, I don't know what her sign is. And she is astounded every time she finds us out because she talks about her sign all the time and you just don't remember. I can't clock that. I can't quite register. It's not anything like that that I follow. So you could put a gun to my head and I cannot tell you what Stephanie's fine. Well, we did a Stuff You Should Know episode about astrology, about how it was just bullshit. So don't feel bad with an ex girlfriend of mine when we'd have an argument, she was like, It's because you're in Aries. Everything I did, she. I guess because you're in Aries. And I would always say so you're telling me that if I was born just one day earlier, everything would be your fault? Right. I'm baffled by I don't have information on it and so I don't want to completely slam stuff my wife believes in free whatever her sign is really quickly. Speaking of alternate casting, kevin Costner, who you mentioned from Sam Raimi's movie, was almost Rocky Dennis. Do you want some Costner trivia? I'd love some. Do you know what his production company is called? Oh, boy. Can I get a guess? Sure. Kicking Bird Productions. That's correct. Kicked Productions. Really? Yeah. Why is that something about his grandmother? I'm not sure. But Kevin Costner was the star for Love of the game. Yeah. When I worked for Sam, there was a mix up to a couple of mix ups where cash was delivered to me when I was at my office that was clearly supposed to go to the production or someplace else. I also ended up on a conference call with Kevin Costner and somebody else and looped in, I'm just wondering about the cash. Is that how costner operates? He just has cash delivery? He was just petty cash or something? Yeah, I thought you meant like a briefcase or something. I ended up with an envelope of petty cash that clearly had to do with the production. And then I ended up on a conference call going, hello? Who is that? This is Tig. And it was Kevin Costner and somebody else going TIGS. What do you mean? Yeah, but it was me just really unaware of what was happening. And then I was like, I'm an assistant over at my name is Tig. You're probably so afraid to miss any meeting. Like you felt like I never needed in a meeting. Well, that's why when you get the conference call, I thought, they must really need me. I got to get on this. Yeah, I was like, A call for me, okay? I press conference and all of a sudden in on a meeting when did you hang up from the meeting? After they were like, okay, well, can you hang up right now? We need to have our meetings. Yeah. When you were politely asked to leave, and now could someone actually connect us to Tig Productions and not this buffoon? Answering the phone at the production office? Is your production company. Kevin Costner. Production? It should be. It should be. That's a good idea. Rob Lowe was the other person who almost played Rocky. I don't have any trivia for you, though. No, that seems like it would have just been weird stunt casting. Like, let's take, like, the most handsome guy in Hollywood. I can't stand stunt casting. The thing I pride myself on with my show is that we hire who's perfect for the job. Yeah. And I personally am never, like, I want to get a celebrity or I've always wanted to work with this person. It's easier to buy into, I think, for me as a viewer, because when I saw the guy that played Receptive, I was like, Wait a minute, I know that face. I think he was in Ghostbusters. Well, see, that's the thing, is, if somebody's just like a character actor, working actor, I don't care. Or if they've never acted, but I do not want to cram a bunch of famous people. No, that's weird. And the guy that plays your brother, he's so great. He's so good. Yeah, it's really so great. Second season. I can't wait. How many episodes? Six again? Okay. Yeah, that's good. A nice, tight, like there's no filler episode. No, I feel that way, for sure. I watched it with my wife when it came out, but I think people try to do too much these days for more episodes. Right. Like, anything over ten, I'm trying to do less. Yeah, that's good. Goal. All right, well, let's finish up then, with a couple of quick segments. Okay. You've been kind enough with your time. I want to call what Ebert said, because Roger Ebert is my favorite movie critic of all time. So I like to go back and kind of see where he landed. Two thumbs up from Thomas. He gave Mass three and a half stars out of four. Three and a half. I wonder what the little half problem was. You know what? John Ronson said the same thing when he got three and a half stars on his movie. He went, yeah, I wonder why he deducted a half a star. Yeah, but I mean, really, what was the problem? I don't know. I guess he just didn't think it was a perfect movie. I disagree. Well, here's his quote. Movies don't often grab us as quickly as Mask does. The story of Rocky and Rusty is absorbing from the very first, maybe because the movie doesn't waste a lot of time wringing its hands over Rocky's fate. Mask lands on its feet, running. Not bad. And then five questions, and these can be short answers. I don't even know if I have a name for this yet. Sort of like movie going one on one with Tig. And you'll call that segment movie going? When I won with Tig every episode. What was the first movie you remember seeing in the movie theater? I think it was Star Wars. Okay, that's good. We were six. We were 71. March 1 R rated movie that you remember seeing in theater or in VHS or whatever? Porkies. Yeah. I couldn't go near that one. That was so forboken in my life. I would have really I don't think anybody was saying, sure, go ahead, watch it. I think there was just other activities going on at my house that were more interesting to my mother than monitoring what I was watching up here. Watching Porky. Right. Such a dumb movie. Now that we look back, though, didn't you know it was a dumb movie when you were watching it? No, because I didn't see it till I was much older. Because I thought it was, like, the sexiest movie ever made because there were body parts in there that aren't usually shown. And I literally thought it was, like, the filthiest movie. I have no recollection of the movie nakedness. Yeah. I just know I watched it and I know it was rated R. Will you walk out of a bad movie? Do you remember doing so? I did walk out of a bad movie. Do you remember it? I do. Are you willing to go on record? I am not. Because a friend of mine was in it. Oh, no. And I was stunned about how bad it was. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And then I saw a bad movie. I think it was not tremendous. And I didn't walk out because my friend and I were laughing so hard that it ended up being so fun laughing in the wrong way. Yeah. What was that one? Can you say that one? It was Kong. Kong? Skull island. Oh, like the recent thing? Yeah. Okay. Did you see it? No, it looked I knew better. Why did you go see that? Well, I love you got better things to do. I love the original King Kong movie. Yeah, same here. The original meaning. Jessica Lange. Yeah. And so when this movie was coming out, I just was hopeful. Sure. And my hope was completely annihilated. It's supposed to be really bad. It was just me and my friend and two other people in the theater. And I don't know what the other people thought of us, but we were laughing so hard. Yeah. So funny. It's one of the funniest. I can't believe it. Well, that's good that you stuck it out. You didn't walk out. I wanted to, but then I just also wanted to see how much this would escalate into ridiculous yeah. How bad it could get. This movie felt like they turned in the first draft. Nobody gave a note. Yeah. Everyone was just like, all right, all cameras go. Let's do it. Yeah, let's do it. We wrote the movie. Can you name a guilty pleasure movie aside from under the Rainbow? A good point. Like, is there one that you go back to a lot that's just kind of ridiculous and dumb? Yeah, I guess some people think it's ridiculous and dumb. And actually, now that I'm a fairly educated adult, I can see some flaws in ways that are not socially accepted, not just socially acceptable, but there's horrendous behavior and you're cheering for an abusive person. But Urban Cowboy. Yeah. That is a nearly perfect film as far as I'm concerned. Sure. And that's a guilty pleasure because I think I relate to it and connect to it. Because living in Texas as a kid and that was Houston, too, wasn't it? Yeah. And living outside of Houston, a lot of these people look very familiar to me. I bet. And the urban cowboys that lived in penthouse apartments and drove the big trucks and cowboy hats. And my parents were friends with specifically this couple that we used to go over to their house. It felt like John Travolta and that new girl he started to date with the hair down the back, the crystal gale here. I've seen her live at the rodeo. But anyway, so, yeah, I would say urban cowboy, for sure. I could watch that movie. And I love Deborah Winger. Oh, man, she was so good. I mean, she still is. She is who I wanted to play my mother on One Mississippi. And she wanted to play my mother Mississippi and wrote me this unbelievable email. Oh, wow. Just desperately wanting this to work. And then she got booked on she had another show, right, called The Ranch. Yeah. Which I haven't seen. Ashton Kutcher. It's like a sitcom on Netflix and then Amazon. There was just a lot of like, we want somebody that anyway, it didn't work. But the actress that does play my mother on One Mississippi is so phenomenal. She's great. And it's like one of those things, like, once you see her, like, I can't imagine even Denver Winger. And I know I already said I didn't want to litter a show with just famous faces, but that wouldn't be stunt casting. No. Oh, my gosh. Deborah Winger. Nothing better. Boy. Officer and a gentleman. Still is Cher. I mean, those two wow. Cher reminds me of my mother. Deborah Winger reminds me of my mother. Oh, really? Yeah. My mother is a little bit of a glam. Well, no, she's very beautiful, but she's wild and a little irresponsible. And so that character in Mask reminded me a bit of my relationship at times with my mother. And I think it's also why it kind of killed me a bit. Yeah. Before we get to question five, I was going to ask you is like, what was it about Mask specifically for. You. Yeah, it was the parent child connection. And I did feel like a lot of times I was the mature together one and that I was a lot of times parenting and trying to get my mother to pull it together in different ways and never happened. Well, that kind of came through on the TV show. I kind of had a feeling that might have been part of it. What do you mean, part of your love for the connection to math? Yeah, for sure. Shares portrayal very much reminds me of my mother, but I also really connected to as my mother because of that. Just passionate, like, I'll rip your face off. I love my kids so much. Deborah Wing or Share kind of love for their kids, for sure. I saw Big Mistake. I saw Terms of Endearment, believe it or not, for the first time last year on a plane and had to put on my sunglasses in my seat. And I told my wife after, she was like, what the fuck? Did you watch that on a plane? Do you know what that movie is? I was like, I thought I could handle it, but yeah, I could not handle it. Have you seen that? I don't know why it took me so long to see that movie because I love Deborah Wing. Oster Gentlemen is one of my favorite movies of all time. And just speaking of wrecking me, the whole movie wrecked me. And finally, do you have like, a movie ritual? Like, do you kind of sit in the same place or get the same thing at the concession stand? I have always been somebody that gets popcorn. Well, I love bark through beer. Barks. It's from Mississippi. I would always get barks, no ice. I'd always be like, don't you even put ice in there because it comes out cold anyway. So just fill up the large one with barks, no ice. Yeah. You get so much far root here. Yeah, and I don't typically eat like that, but when I would go to the movies, I was like, fill me up big old barks and extra large big gulp of popcorn and then throw some Milk Duds into the popcorn. Classic move. But now I'm vegan. So Stephanie just reminded me the other day, she's like, our milk judge days are gone. Oh, yeah. And do you sit in sort of the same area or do you care? You know, this girl I dated several years ago, she told me the trick at this one theater in Los Angeles. Which one? Well, I don't want to tell you because in case you're in town, if you're going to see a movie when I'm going to see would it be that awful to bumper to me? No, I don't want you to steal my good seat. Okay. It's at the Grove. Okay. And if you sit with you sit behind where there's bars. I think it might be a handicapped seating is in front, so there's no chairs there. So if there's nobody in a wheelchair sitting there and you sit behind those bars, you can just put your feet on those bars. I guess you could be a total jerk and put your feet up there if there's a wheelchair there. But I would highly suggest being a considerate human. Yeah, not doing that. Put your feet down, you slob. But anyway, wow. So that's your secret tip. Yeah. Grove. But I also always have had a fantasy of going to a movie, walking to the front, the very front rope, right or left corner by myself, just in an empty theater that was sitting there. That's Jon Ronson's move. He sits in the front left seat. Well, I'll see him there. I'll sit on his lap. So strange. Kind of like to see that. I know we have to wrap up. I will say this is what my fantasy I've always wanted to do is go into the Grove and just start making announcements to the theater and not work there, obviously. And just see how that goes for me. Yeah. See what it takes. Yeah. Because the person that does work there is going to come in and need to do the announcements and ask me, would you just freewheel it? Yeah, just like make sure you get your ticket validated and no talking. Turn off your cell phones. Really tell people the rules, please. Bathrooms are over here. And if you have to get up and get in. And then the person that job that is comes in and sees me doing it. Yeah. One day. One day I'll do it. All right. Thanks, Tig. Thanks for having me. I appreciate you coming in. All right, so how about that? Tignataro and Mask, mere seconds after getting the news that she was going to live. Very intense, cool conversation. She is the best. The fact that she sold it on through this and I feel like we really shared a moment and I think she even admitted it on the show, that she's going to remember this one for a while. So I feel lucky to have been with her when she found that news out. Very grateful that this all worked out this way and not a bad way to get the second show off the ground. So I hope you enjoyed it and we will see you next time on Movie Crush. And until then, would you mind putting your phone away? Movie Crush is produced, edited, engineered, and scored by Noel Brown from our podcast studio at Pond City Market, atlanta, Georgia. 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 ERK 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." | |
413c7e00-53a3-11e8-bdec-63bca37f67a6 | Could There Be A Loch Ness Monster? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/could-there-be-a-loch-ness-monster | People have believed something strange lives in Loch Ness for at least 3500 years. Thousands of people have sighted the Loch Ness Monster and dozens of expeditions have been launched. But does the fact that nothing’s been found mean it’s not real? | People have believed something strange lives in Loch Ness for at least 3500 years. Thousands of people have sighted the Loch Ness Monster and dozens of expeditions have been launched. But does the fact that nothing’s been found mean it’s not real? | Tue, 12 Feb 2019 17:05:06 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=17, tm_min=5, tm_sec=6, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=43, tm_isdst=0) | 59955077 | 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 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 howtofworkscom? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry. Jerome Rowland over there. So this is stuff you should know. Is that Frankenstein? Is that Frankenstein or what? No, you got your arms extended like it is. No, those aren't arms. Those are flippers. I see. I'm a monster. Okay. That was a groundskeeper. Willie close. Yeah, that was pretty good, right? Country. Are you doing, like, a Loch Ness monster impression? Man, you're good. I use the powers of deduction like Sherlock Holmes did in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Look at that. Little bit of foreshadowing. By the way. We covered a bit of this everyone we know in Sea Monsters four years ago, but we felt this monster was so great that or she perhaps yes, maybe Nessie deserved her own space. We'll just go with there? Sure, why not? All right. Yeah, I went back. I was like, I feel like we definitely did a Loch Ness episode. But no, just a little passage in the Sea Monster episode. So we'll flesh that out a little bit. Okay, sure. So, Chuck, let's go back about 10,000 years. Okay. We need a lot of Kerosene in the way back machine and human excrement farts. Can I do that? Well, you just did. All right, we'll see if that stays. So human farts and Kerosene apparently now power the wayback machine. Oh, it always did. Maybe Jerry will add some extra sound effects. So here we are, and we're actually chucking the land that will become Scotland in a few thousand years. And if you look right there, right there, there's a glacier retreating. It's melting. As it's melting, it's filling up. This gouge in the earth. And this gouge, Chuck, is eventually going to be called Loch Ness. That's right. And this gouge, my friend, as you know, is not huge as far as square miles go, but it's very deep. It is. So Lockness is, like, long and narrow. And it was created when an ice sheet gouged the rocky earth in Scotland 10,000 years ago. And then the ice melted and filled it in, basically, like I just said. And it was a deep gouge, not very wide, but it's like deeper than the North Sea, which surrounds Scotland. It looks like 36 km or 23 miles long. And then most recently, the newest, deepest depth is measured at close to 900ft, which is staggering. Yeah. So it's like 1000 the size of Lake Michigan, but it's three and a half times deeper than Lake Erie. Man, that's deep. It is very deep lake. It's also really dark too, because the runoff from the land around it's very peat rich, which is black. And so that runoff goes into lake and it turns the lake of very, very dark color. So it looks mysterious. Like you can look at Loch Ness. I've never been there personally, aside from this time, now that we're here. Sure. But from what I understand, it is like a nice, mysterious looking lake. Yeah. I mean, I've always thought it looked creepy, but it's beautiful, really. But there's something about deep, dark and reputed monsters that will do that to you over the years. Yeah. Like lakes in Georgia. I heard once there's no natural lake in Georgia. Every single lake in Georgia is manmade by the power company, as far as I know. That's true. There may be a natural lake somewhere that I don't know about in the mountains, but I think they're supposedly all Georgia Power lakes, aren't they? That's what I understand. And every single one of them, I mean, they're no deeper than like 30, 40, 50ft. It's not very deep at all as far as lakes go. And a lot of them have flooded structures. Like they built a dam and the water built up around it and flooded, like towns or whatever. For sure. Like there's a Gulf station under Lake Lanier, I believe, right? Yeah. They're automobiles. Supposedly an old remnants of houses under a lot of these lakes. It's like over other art though, when they flooded the valley. Exactly. Same thing. So when you're swimming in a lake in Georgia and it's just like 30, 40, 50ft deep, you can just feel everything underneath. You imagine what it must be like swimming in a lake and feeling that there's 900ft between you and the bottom of this lake and what all is there. I don't know. I feel like you could probably sense that feeling. Right. So if you put all this together you can kind of say, well, of course people are saying that there's something in Loch Ness so you can just look at it and think there's got to be something hiding under there. And apparently that's been the case for many thousands of years, from what we understand. Yeah. I had no idea that this went back that far. But there were these people way back in the day called the Pix Picts and they were a tattoo covered tribe who were fierce warriors. And the Romans named them painted ones, I guess, because of their tattoos. And they carved these I guess they're just like it says, standing stones, but with little carving wall carvings. No, it's a free standing carved stone that has pictures of animals on them. But is it like a sculpture? No, it's like a flat stone that they use is basically like a canvas. But it's a stone. It's a free standing stone. All right, because I saw the pictures, but they were so close up, you couldn't really get that big image. But long story short, there were actually animals and things like everyone else that drew on cave walls. You would draw what's around you and everything can pretty much be explained. Except for this one. They carved the Loch Ness Monster. We'll just go ahead and say it. Yeah, it looks like kind of a seahorsey kind of thing. And this article, one of the articles we used was from Nova PBS Nova series, and they basically point out that if you look at all the other carvings that the picks made, they're immediately identifiable what animal they were drawing. Sure. With this particular one called the Picked Beast, no one has any idea. And they're like, oh, okay, well, it was a Loch Ness Monster that they drew. Right. Or an elephant that's swimming, maybe. Well, I don't want to spoil it, but elephants do swim a long distance. Yeah. That's the thing that connects the two episodes today, isn't it? That's right. Swimming elephants. Who'd have thought in that one thing? So the pics, at least as far as 1500 years ago, we're drawing pictures of sea monsters around Scotland, and there's a lot of legends like sea monsters that we talked about in the sea monsters episode in Scotland in general, not just Loch Ness. Yeah, they're crazy for them. Yeah, they really are. And they have all sorts of scary stories behind them. Like the water kelpie. Yeah. That frightened me, reading it at my desk, right. Where the water kelpie will come up and say, hey, kids, you want to ride on my back through the lock? It's going to be fun because all these guys kids sound like that. And they jump on and they're immediately stuck to the beast, which takes them down to the depths of the lock, and they all drown and then chuck. And then I think you should take it from here. Which part? Their heads become stuck. Right. And they drown and die. What happens the next day? Yeah, I'm not quite sure how this happens, but their livers wash ashore the next day. So I guess the beast likes to eat all of the child except for the liver, which I get. I don't like liver either. No, I don't like liver myself, especially kid liver. Right. Which you would think would be delectable. But no, 1500 years ago, Loch Ness Monster possibly with the picks. We fast forward about 1000 years. Beyond that, there was a saint named Saint Columba who showed up in Ireland and said, hey, Heathens, have you ever seen any pamphlets or brochures about Christianity? I have some I can give you. And converted the Scots to Christianity. 565, I think, around that time. And there's a story of St. Columba who was going to visit a picktish king and said on the way. Stopped at the lock and looked out on the lock and there was some Scottish guy swimming and St. Columbus saw a monster swimming toward the guy as if to attack them. And held up his hand and said. In the name of God. I command you to turn around and swim away. And apparently the monster did. And this really, I guess, extended St. Columbus credibility among the picks. Yeah. And I think we could just end the show right there. There you go. That's a lot less proven by history. Right. And then flash forward again. There was a BBC correspondent named Nicholas Witchell. And there are a lot of people who over the years, we'll talk about a lot of them who have really gotten into this, like, quit their jobs and this became their job kind of thing. Yeah. Like it gets under your skin. Yeah. Under your locky beastly skin. And he wrote a book in 1974 called The Loch Ness Story. And he ended up digging up about a dozen or so references pre 20th century to some sort of monster out there. Yeah. And it really started to pick up weirdly in, like, the second half of the 19th century, but it was sporadic. But the year of the Loch Ness Monster the year the Loch Ness Monster became part of the public consciousness was 1933, though, for sure. That sounds like a great place to take a break. Oh, boy. Okay, let's do it. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers, all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change in industry. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com. Today's episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by SimpliSafe home security. SimpliSafe believes that your home should be the safest place on Earth for every family. So they offer advanced, whole home security that puts you, your home, and your family safety first. With 24/7 professional monitoring, SimpliSafes agents take action the moment a threat is detected, dispatching police or first responders in an emergency, even if you're not home. Yeah. And Simply Safe uses proprietary video verification technology so that monitoring agents can visually confirm the threat in order to get higher priority 911 dispatch and 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 at SimpliSafe. comStuff. Go today and claim a free indoor security camera, plus 20% off with interactive monitoring. Just go to SimpliSafe. comStuff. All right, Chuck. So I said 1933 was the year that the Loch Ness Monster kind of hit the global scene, like really made the world Party. Yeah. And for a good reason. They finally built a road that went around the shore on the north side specifically. So all of a sudden, you could drive on this lock and you could look at it and stare at it and eventually see something if you spend enough time there. And in April that happened. Mr and Mrs McKay were local to the region. They were driving home and they saw what they described as the most extraordinary form of animal rolling and plunging on the surface. That was written up in the Inverness Courier, and they used the word monster for the first time. And so the Loch Ness monster was officially born. And that whole year that was in April, that whole year, there were different sightings and just kind of the fever really hit a fever pitch. The fever hit a fever pitch. It was pretty feverish very quickly that year. Yeah. So there was something else that happened in 1933, too, that I've seen a lot of people point to is potentially something that kind of kept the media interest going, was that King Kong was released basically worldwide in 1933. And there's like a whole thing about that whole forbidden island where King Kong lives, where dinosaurs are still alive and stuff like that. And a lot of people point to being exposed to that is kind of keeping this, like, bringing it to that fever pitch. Yeah. I mean, there were more eyewitness sightings. Supposedly a motorcyclist saw one on crossing the road. Supposedly they offered up a circus, offered up a reward of \u00a320,000. People were camping out and kind of just kind of waiting for Nessie to appear. And then finally, in December, and this story, you're going to want to listen closely and then put a pin in it so it'll come back to haunt us later. Or not us, but the show the World Party. But the London Daily Mail hired an actor, a director and a big game hunter. This is a great name all rolled into one. Yeah. Marmaduke Weatherell. Great name, and said, Listen, dude, you have all these skills. You are a director and actor and you know your way around the forest and the lake, so get out there and see what you can do. He said, that was the most bizarre pep talk anyone's ever given me. He's like, I know all these things, right, but I appreciate it anyway. Yeah. The Daily Mail sent him up there to figure out what was going on. This is December, did you say? Yeah, December 33. And again, this whole thing started in April, and you've been building and building, and then by the time so The Daily Mail, they were like, basically like, the Daily Mail is now, from what I understand. You know what I'm saying? It's The Daily Mail. I don't really think you have to put it any other way. Are they like a tabloid? Oh, yeah, for sure. Okay. I mean, I always get those UK rags confused on which ones are, like, tabloid and which ones are reputable. They were printing clickbait before computers were around, before they even knew what that was. They're like, Why are we calling it clickbait? Yeah. Like what's a mouse? They called it thumb bait. Right? Actually, they call them remember, we talked about this in our tablet episode? They called it like, hey, Martha stories. Like, stories so amazing that they got the reader to say, hey, Martha, listen to this. Can we do a show on tabloids? You don't remember? No, we did. It was a good one. Well, I know. We should just sit around and listen to old episodes sometime, refresh our memory. Okay. So weatherl shows up to Loch Ness, among a lot of pomp and circumstance. The Daily Mail didn't just quietly send them there. They really promoted this. And he starts searching, and within just a few days, he found something. He found tracks in the mud around Locke's ass. And he did his measurements because, again, remember, he's a big game hunter, tracker, outdoorsman and actor. And an actor. Not a successful actor. I get the impression that he was, like, kind of an Ed Wood type actor director. Okay. But he calculated that the animal that made these tracks with, like, I think, four towed tracks in the mud was at least 20ft long. And this happened at December. He took plaster casts and he sent them off to the Royal Museum, the Natural History Museum in London, to be analyzed just as Christmas set in. Yes. Even though this was potentially the greatest find zoological find in the world, in world history, they were like, we still have to go on break on holiday. Bob Cratchett commanded. Everyone waited. They did come back from holiday, and monster hunters were all over London or all over Loch Ness, and they were super excited. And then in January, Zoologist said, bad news. Not only is this the footprint of a hippopotamus, because that would have been pretty amazing in and of itself, right? Yeah. Like, what's hippopotamus doing there? Right. But they said, no, it was a taxidermy hippopotamus foot, and it was probably like an ashtray or an umbrella stand, right? Somebody just walks around with print here, footprint there, and whether I fell for it. So there's a question of whether he was the perpetrator of the fraud or whether he was the victim of this fraud, but he fell for it and he was humiliated. I didn't see any actual articles but apparently the Daily Mail, the paper that sent him up there humiliated him in their coverage of the whole thing. So he retreated from public view. He was humiliated. And don't forget Duke Weatherough, because he comes back later. Yeah. And not only did they ruin his good name or his mediocre name at least the whole incident just sort of put a damper on Nessie for a few decades. Kind of brought out the crackpots. And anyone that had any sightings, they would be dismissed and said, no, it's an illusion. It was a duck or a log floating or a swimming deer or something. And it sort of put a big dent in this being taken seriously for a long time. The impression I have is that the world was kind of like fool me once. Like they got all wrapped up in this whole thing and then it was proved to be a big fraud. So everybody just abandoned the Loch Ness monster? Well, most people did. Anybody who seemed legitimate, especially if you're a scientist. The Loch Ness monster was not real. Yeah, but that did not stop just regular human beings and monster hunters to not go there anymore. They were still into it. I think there was a book in 1974 that said more than 4000 people have said that they saw something. That's a lot of people and not only that, but a lot of the eyewitness accounts were really similar and a lot of them were from people that were there was a Nobel Prize winner. There were scientists and teachers and lawyers and priests. It wasn't just a bunch of kooks like you and I out there. Yeah, there was a guy named Doctor Richard Cinch. He was a biochemist who won the Nobel Prize. He said he saw something. And like you said, they kind of bore similarities in these reports. Like there were humps, at least one or two humps rising above the surface like an overturned boat. Maybe it was an overturned boat, maybe. So a lot of people reported something with a long, slender neck and a small head rising out of the surface, rising out from the lake. And there's this local doctor named Constance White. I think she might have lived in Inverness. She lived around Loch Ness and she had a lot of friends who had come forward and said I've seen this. And people just shouted and laughed at them and they were humiliated themselves. And she said, Enough of this. I believe there's something there. I think these accounts are similar enough that there's really kind of lends some credence to this idea. And she started collecting all these different reports and published the reports along with sketches from the people who made these reports into a book called More Than a Legend In. And it took the Loch Ness frivolity and turned it back into a potentially scientifically studyable thing. Yeah, for sure. It's not like it fully legitimized it, but it kind of reminded people like, hey, it's not just a bunch of crackpots out here making stuff up. Like, there have been some reputable people who've seen very similar things, and here they are, all collected in one space. So that inspired more people to, namely the scientific community, to get involved. And it happened in about a ten year period. There were four different expeditions from Oxford, Cambridge, University of Birmingham and the BBC that all went out there and did their own expeditions and investigations with sonar, which was, I guess, a newer technology at the time that allows you to use sound to search underwater for something. And it basically was a little bit better than someone sitting in their lawn chair with binoculars for hours on end, which is what people were mostly doing, I guess, in that first wave in the early 30s. Here's what they had. Right. Constance White's book also kind of gave rise to a second wave of Loch Ness hunters. Inspired a lot of people. There was the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau, which set up shop on the shore of the lock and kept watch and led investigations and expeditions for a decade, I think from 62 to 72. No, that's not bad. Spending ten years looking for Loch Ness Monster, I think you've established your bona fide. And then Tim Dinsdale, he was an aeronautical engineer, and he became kind of a famous Loch Ness hunter because after reading More Than a Legend, that constant White book, he was inspired to go hunt for the Loch Ness Monster. And on his first time out, he caught something very weird moving away from him on the lock on film. Have you seen it? Yeah, I've looked at all this stuff. I think some of it looks very interesting. They didn't sell film in particular. Looks pretty interesting to me, too. Yes, agreed. I'm not going to go out well, let's just say I'll save my judgment. Save it. But like I said, over the years, as technology got better, they started using this technology. In the 1970s, there was a series of expeditions sponsored by Academy of Applied Science out of Boston, and they were the first people to combine sonar because they're already using that. Right. But sonar and underwater photography under the leadership of a guy named Robert Ryan, who was I love this description, a lawyer trained in physics, and they were using side scan sonar, which we've talked about before a couple of times over the years. Tabloids pressure hunting or something. Okay. Or Barbie, I don't remember one of those. But here's the idea. There is you combine sidescan sonar and time it along with your underwater photography, and if you get something, a picture snapped at the same time, you get a let's call it a ding. I don't know what sound it makes, but I assume a side scan sonar dings if something swims by? Well, no side Scanar, so it sends out a ping or whatever, but it gets echoes back from all the different stuff that it bounces off of at different rates, and it creates basically like a picture of the floor of the lake. Yes. I just made a ding to alert you. Oh, I got you. I see. Like a typewriter, right. Or a microwave. Yes. But the point is, if you have those two things that like, hey, we got a real picture, and then a side scanned sonar picture at the same time, then it has a little bit more credibility all of a sudden. Yeah, it really did. They hit something on, I think, in June 1975, they had the system going, and at the same time that the sonar was showing at least one very large object moving, they were getting photographs that, when they developed, showed some very odd stuff. Yeah. And this underwater photography, it's got a strobe light that works so you can see stuff because it is very dark. And this thing, like, if you look at these photos, it looks like a big, triangular sort of diamond shaped fin or a flipper on a big kind of creature, but it's not super detailed. But it does look like something different and interesting. Did you see the other ones that came out of that batch? Yeah, I mean, it all looks different and interesting. I'm not saying, like, oh, my God, look at that monster, because I don't know enough about what sort of weird fish might be in that lake, but it definitely looks weird enough to prompt attention. I think it looks like a big, bellied, long necked sea monster to me. That's what it looks like. All right. You use the word monster. I was trying to avoid that. Well, it looks like a monster of the ce. I mean, this is a big deal. When they got these, these were respected scientists carrying out a sober, level headed expedition to drinking a little bit. Let's be honest. Soberish, level headed ish expedition. And when they came with these pictures, when they developed them again, the world was like, all right, fool me once, wait a few years, let's go again. That's the mantra of the world, especially in the love that this happened in 1975, because we're like, which stores should we pay attention to today? The haunted house in Amityville or the Loch Ness monster photos or the Bermuda Triangle. Yeah, I love the 70s. They're the greatest decade ever. So great. And then they're like, who cares about any of that? Let's go to a key party. So, Ryan, his distinction on his project was important because he had a couple of while he was fairly reputable, he had a couple of really reputable scientists that backed him up. This guy named Harold Dock Edgerton from MIT, and he's the inventor of side scan sonar. So I think he probably totally loved that they were using his equipment. He said, well, at first he was not on board, which makes his finally coming on board even more legitimate. He was like, no, I think you're a crackpot. And then he saw that, so he's think this seems legitimate. He said, It looks like a flipper of a monster. He said, It looks like a monster of the sea. And then this other guy, Sir Peter Scott, who was a naturalist, and they both got behind Rhines, which was a very big deal. So much so that Ryan was actually able to present evidence at the House of Commons in London. And people were starting to take this really seriously. Yeah. Here are the states that would be like, testifying before Congress about the sea monster that you found in Lake Havasu or something like that. Yeah, I'm sure there's one in Lake Havasu. Oh, I'm sure there are several, which is great that we said that, because now we're going to get a million emails telling us the name of the monster in Lake Havasu. It's the Havasu monster. Is that ungrateful to say something like that? I don't think so. I think it was. I'm going to take it out. All right. I don't know if he actually presented the findings or not, but they definitely wrote up sir Peter Scott and Robert Ryan's wrote up an academic paper. It wasn't peer reviewed, but it was published in the journal Nature, which is there are two big English language science journals, science and Nature, and they got theirs published in one. And it was in the opinions and comments section. Sure, but Science letter to the editor, basically the crackpot corner. Yeah, but Nature published it. They could have been like, no, this is ridiculous. And these guys published this paper, from what I can tell, earnestly, like they meant it. Right. So in this paper, they gave Nessie its scientific binomial name. Yeah. And this is after, we should say that the naturalist, Mr. Scott, said, oh, by the way, not only are we do we believe what Rhines is doing, but I think that Nessie is a plessy assaur. This is a marine reptile that we thought went extinct 65 million years ago. So that did not help the case. No, it didn't. And I think I get the impression that Ryan was kind of like, we didn't talk about you saying this publicly, but Scott kind of jumped the gun, from what I understand. But he did say that. And that really turned a lot of the scientific establishment types that Ryan was trying to basically get on board to try to find the Lochness Monster. Turn them off. Yeah. But nevertheless, they did give it that name nesseteris Rombo, TerraX man. If you ever are at a trivia night and they ask you what that is, I will be so ashamed of every single one of you if you missed that. That would be a tough trivia. Question, though. That's a great one, though. Yeah. Nesseteris. Rhomba TerraX is the Loch Ness monster. Yeah, I think that's one of the better trivia questions I've ever heard. All right, well, I'll trivia masters out there. Take note. Use it it will, and thank us afterward and direct people to stuff you should know on the Iheart Radio podcast app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Well done, Chuck. I think you're going to get, like, a gift card from Target or something for that. So they give it this name mainly. It's not like they're like, hey, let's just name this thing. They did it really because there was a new conservation law in the UK that said a species won't be protected if it does not have a binomial and a common name. So they said, just to cover ourselves, just in case Nessie is a real thing, let's go ahead and name this lady right again after that, after Sir Peter, scott said it's a dinosaur, which, again, is not the most far fetched thing in the world. The Seala camp was thought to be extinct for tens of millions of years and started finding them off of the coast of Africa. So it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility. It wasn't like this guy was like, well, it's aliens, obviously. It's a giant alien. It's a sea alien. From what I understand, they were Ernest and they were trying to do this legitimately. Although one of the MPs in Scotland pointed out that Nesseteris Rambatarix is an anagram for Monster Hoax by Sir Peter S. Pretty good for many years. Everybody's like, well, yeah, Scott at least hadn't bought into it. But he responded to this years later with, like, do you really think that if I wanted to do that, I couldn't have also fit in the cott? And Scott? And he didn't really answer the question, but I think the impression that I got from actual Loch Ness monster hunters is that he was earnest and the anagram was unintended. Yeah, that's pretty I mean, I don't think that was the deal, but it is pretty interesting that you can form that anagram specifically. Pretty interesting. Monster hoax by sir Peter S. It's pretty specific. But I mean, what a betrayal, because Robert Ryan's was a true believer, and if that's what Scott was doing, he was one of the bigger putts the British naturalist community ever produced. Which, by the way, did you get that email about Yiddish? No. Apparently putts is a very bad word. Is it like fanny in the UK? No, it's just that this nice lady wrote us about Yiddish words and sayings and she's like, most people don't realize that schmuck and putts are not the nicest words. What does putts mean in, like, American English? We'll discuss offline. Okay. I really want to know. I'm not sure I can wait. That's okay. You can wait. Can you make some hand gestures? Sure. I'll give you the initials. Okay. So in the 80s, things started to ramp up a little bit more. There were more sonar hits coming around. In 1987, in the late eighty s a one million pound, they spent a million dollars for a week long exploration called Operation Deepscan. And this was once again the Loch Nest project, who were science based. What they were doing now, and I thought this was interesting, they weren't like, Listen, we're searching for Nessie. They said, what we're going to do is just go search for anomalies with the sonar and see if we can start ruling some things out. Yeah. And they used like 24 boats, from what I understand, to sweep in unison using side scanner, the whole lock at once. They were just going slowly back and forth over the lock. And remember, that side scan sonar creates like a picture, an image of the lake floor. And so they were really coming up with some good stuff. Most of the stuff they found was stationary objects, so obviously that's not it. But they did find three things that, from what I understand to this day, have never been fully explained, that were obviously moving targets that were large, that they don't know what they were. They have no idea. Yeah. Pretty interesting. Yeah. And this carried over, of course, into the early 90s. Another BBC guy named Nicholas Witchell organized project how do you pronounce that? Erkohart. I was going with erquart. Oh, erquart. I like that. I do too. Silent h. Yeah. But also the Project Ear Quarter was a real scientific and the first one scientific extensive study of the biology and geology of the lake itself. Yeah, Nicholas Witchell, he was leading this thing, and they weren't looking for the monster, but he was that guy who wrote that 1974 book about the monster. Yes. People kind of come and go in the story. It's interesting. It really is. It's a tight knot of, like a ball of worms writhing together or something. But he did while he was doing the study of biology and geology, he did find another underwater moving target, followed it for a few minutes, lost it, but it was just yet another kind of unexplained large moving mass. And there was a sonar expert named Arnie Carr, who was aboard the expedition, who said, I would say that this is biological in nature. Obviously it was moving. It was about 15ft long, about the size of a small whale. We shouldn't compare it to things you're like, it sort of looked like an overturned boat. All right, well, maybe it was. Or the Finn looked like a large ore or a small otter. Like stop saying that. All you're doing is making me think. Well, yeah, that's probably what it is then. Yeah, it probably wasn't a small whale. I don't know. Is it a sea monster? It's a monster of the sea. Okay. So again, I don't know if you guys are paying enough attention, but just slowly. Over the years, people have continued to show up at Loch Ness. Launch expeditions, come up with some things that couldn't be explained. And the most recent one happened in 2016 when a group of researchers from Norway showed up to the lock to explore under an expedition and try to find the Loch Ness Monster. And they actually found something using sidescan sonar. Did you see the picture? Yeah, it looks like a sea monster just kind of laying on the bottom of the lake there. That's exactly what it looked like. I don't know if they thought, well, jeez, did it die? Is it sleeping? What's going on with this thing? Because it wasn't moving. And I don't know how they figured it out, but it turns out that it was a prop from a movie from The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, billy Wilder movie. And if you look at this monster in that movie, it looks like the Loch Ness Monster. And when they were done, they just basically let the air out of the humps and sink it. Yes. And it just lay there for like, 50 years. Oh, man. But the reason why it looked like the Loch Ness Monster even so much, that just the sonar image of this thing lying on its side at the bottom of the lake, this prop looked like the Loch Ness Monster is because we all have the exact same image of the Loch Ness Monster. And what a lot of people don't realize is that that image comes from one specific photograph that was published in 1934. And we will talk about that after this message break. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers, all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change in industry. IBM let's create learn more@ibm.com. 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All right, so you left us with quite a cliffhanger, the very famous, dare I say, infamous photo of Nessie that looks like someone with her finger sticking out of the water and their arm. Really? Is that what it looks like to you? Sure, it looks like a monster of the sea to me. It is the most famous picture of the Loch Ness Monster, which is interesting because I think that stuff from 1975 looks way more realistic and potentially provable. Well, this is 1934. Give them a break. No, I know. And that's why it took the world by storm, because it's the oldest one, I think. And that's if you type in Loch Ness Monster image, this is the first thing that you're going to see. Yeah, it's what everybody's seen. It's like the first thing they teach you in school is they show everybody a picture of the Loch Ness monster and say, this is the Loch Ness monster. Now onto reading. So this picture's origin, it first showed up on the cover of the London Daily Mail in 1934. This is the year after Duke Weatheral had been kind of denounced and humiliated. And I mean, very quickly after that whole thing, this picture appears. And even though people had said like, no, the Loch Ness monster is not real, this picture really kind of kept interest going. Like the world didn't just completely walk away from it. Like you said, everyday people were still interested in it. And it was largely because of this picture that was published in 1934. Right. So the photo has a pretty good story in and of itself. It was sold to the Daily Mail by a surgeon from London named R. Kenneth Wilson. He said, I took this picture, saw a big commotion out in the water, and I saw a sea monster, and I took a photo, and everyone was like, this guy is a surgeon. Why would this guy make this thing up? It's got to be real. Skeptics are like, there's no way this thing's real. Of course it's a hoax. And it took, what, 50 years, basically 51 years until they actually did scientific analysis of this thing. A man named Stuart Campbell, in an article in the British Journal of Photography, almost in psychology, no photography, it's a little different. He concluded that he looked at it, did a big study and said, all right, this thing looks real, but it's two to 3ft long, and I think it's a bird or an otter. And I think that surgeon knew that. Right? But the whole reason why so many people were like, this is a real picture is because the guy who supposedly took it are Kenneth Wilson. Right. Like you said, he was a doctor. And so the whole world was like, well, no, this guy is a doctor. Of course he's believable because doctors have never done anything wrong right. Apparently, no one had seen the nick yet. Good. Thank you. Finally. Even in 1084. When this British Journal of Photography analysis was published. That was mostly kind of like. Oh. I knew it. To people who already thought it was a hoax. To the rest of the world and to a lot of Loch Ness monster hunters that did nothing to delegitimize it. Again. Because our Kenneth Wilson was a doctor. So of course he wouldn't have perpetrated a fraud. And then finally, in 1994, there was a guy who is a Loch Ness monster hunterfinatic named Alistair Boyd, and in 1994, he basically dropped a bomb on the world and said, the surgeon's photo is 100% fake, and I have this story that explains how and he basically said, no. Even among Loch Ness monster hunters like himself, the surgeon's photo has been basically debunked by this story that he came up with. Right. So Boyd and his wife, because I'm sure Boyd was like, hey, this is my new crazy passion, so you have to come with me. She rolled her eyes and said, okay. So they teamed up and they did have a large animal sighting in 1979. So they were into it. It's not like they're out to debunk this thing. I think they were trying to bunk it. They did some research behind the photo. He came across an old newspaper clipping. And the son of remember we had to put a pin in Duke Weatherell Marmaduke, who was famously duped, supposedly with that hippo foot, and sold out by the Daily Mail. So they found an old clipping which his son Ian, or Ian, I'm not sure how he pronounces it, said that that photo was a hoax. And Boyd was reading this article in 1975, and a couple of very important little details kind of stuck out to him. Yeah. So Ian Weatherall had said that there was a guy named Maurice Chambers involved in the hoax, and Maurice Chambers is the guy that our Kenneth Wilson said originally when that photo first came out, 60 years before, maurice Chambers was who he was going to visit. So it would be really weird that Ian Weatherall would know who Maurice Chambers was and that our Kenneth Wilson, dr. Wilson would know him as well. That was one thing. Then the other thing is the picture he described was a version of that photograph that was only published once. Right. Because the one that he described showed a little bit of land and the picture that we've all seen had the land cropped out. Yeah, it's a detail that not many people would have noticed. Right. But Boyd was like, hey, this thing was only published once in 1934. So this guy either has a freakishly good and weird memory or he's the one that took the picture to begin with, because that detail no one else would have known. It's not like proof positive or anything like that, but they're pretty good points to kind of start to suspect. So it was enough to get him to go try to find out more. Because, remember, this is the article was from the apparently people hadn't paid much attention, so we went to go find Ian Weatherall and found out that he was dead. So he went and found another guy who was mentioned in the article, christian Spurling, who was Duke Weatheral's stepson. He had been involved as well. And apparently, according to Alistair Boyd, when he went and tracked down Christian Spurling, sperling confessed to him. Yeah, 93 years old. Sounds like a sort of a deathbed thing. He was like, It was us the whole time. He's like, Also, I have something else to tell you. I hit a person with my car and drove off once. They're like, no. Who cares? Yeah, let's talk about this picture. So here's the deal. He said, because of the way that Duke, I guess, stepdad. That was his stepdad. Yeah, duke was his stepdad. So the way my stepdad was treated by the Daily Mail and sold out and made to look foolish, he went out to get even. It really stuck in his cross. He can't get revenge. So he enlisted his son and myself when I was a young boy, to go out, build a model monster onto a toy submarine and stage this photograph, which included they included the background and part of the zoomed in look. You can't really tell that it's Loch Ness, but in the original photo, like we said, you could see it. And they did that on purpose is proof that it was Loch Ness. Yes. And then they got through Boris Chambers, the common friend, they somehow persuaded Dr Wilson to take the film, have it developed and then pretend like he had taken the picture and sell it to the Daily Mail, basically act as a frontman to this whole roof. Again, probably the greatest frontman you could have ever gotten. Because the whole world for decades was like, no, this guy wouldn't have been party to a fraud and he was party to a fraud. And I could not find any explanation for why he would have been. Because they call it the surgeon's photo rather than the Wilson photo, because he really wanted to back away from it, which I think legitimized it more in some people's minds. But I have no idea why he joined up on this hoax. But he did. I wonder if he had something on him. Well, a lot of people actually say they still don't buy it. They still don't buy that it doesn't make sense that Wilson would have been a part of this, that some people, even one guy cited a toy expert. Yes, a toy submarine from the 30s probably wouldn't have done the trick. Yeah, that sounds like the worst kind of internet pet ant. Great. Chase closed. Actually, toy submarines would have looked more like this. Right. But sure people have tried to poke various holes in the story that it's a fake over the years, which is interesting, too, but it's really saying something, though. Also to keep in mind Alistair Boyd, the guy who told the world the story of how this famous photo of the Loch Ness monster was hoaxed like, that does nothing to his belief. He's like, I'm sure of anything that there's something in Loch Ness. And I think he said something like, if he were a wealthy man, he would spend the rest of his life trying to catch another glimpse of it. Because, like we said, it kind of gets under your skin when you get into the Loch Ness Monster in the 1990s. Here are some more explanations, because here's the deal. You have to prove something exists, not disprove or wait, not prove that the burden of proof should be on people that say this is a thing. Yeah. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Yeah. There have been people over the years that have tried to explain it as other things, and, like, maybe people are seeing something, but what they're really seeing is blank. A man named Steve Felt in the 1990s, he's one of these guys that, you know, kind of became about obsessed. I'm not going to say that, but no, you could call him upset. Came so interested that he quit his job and did this for 30 years. But he said, here's what I think it is. He said, I think it's a Wells catfish. And if you look up Wells W-E-L-S Catfish. Everyone knows catfish can get large, but these are European catfish that they look photoshopped when you look them up online. And two or three people holding these things up in Europe, they get larger. They are huge, like 13ft long, which, by the way, don't forget that one. Robert Ryan expedition found something that was the size of a small whale. About 15ft long. Yeah, okay, but this is a really big point. Steve Feltom is saying this this guy left his life in the 90s, holds the Guinness record for the longest search for Loch Ness, which is just dumb. It is. They lost their way a long time ago. They really did. He's saying, I don't think it's a sea monster. I don't even think it's an undiscovered species. I think it's a giant catfish that lives in the lake. That's a big deal that he's saying that. And that seems to be a trend among Loch Ness enthusiasts, that it's kind of turned a little more toward, hey, let's use our time and effort and energy to figuring out how it's not a sea monster, which is a really big change, and not just like Loch Ness monster searches, but it says a lot about the world, too. Yeah, I think this Wells catfish would certainly explain all of those unexplained, underwater moving, side scan sonar images. They're not the most detailed thing in the world. It's not a photograph. Right. And these things are I mean, just look up Wellscap pitch. They are tremendous and large. Right, okay. So that's a pretty good explanation. A less good explanation that we just have to mention, though, is that was the elephant thing. Yeah. There was an historian in 2006 who said, well, you know, I just came across some evidence that circuses traveling through Scotland used to stop and rest at Loch Ness, and they would let the animals out to wander around. And elephants love to swim, which is the crossover thing between the episodes today. Right. Yeah. Elephants love to swim. And probably what some of these sightings in the 30s were of the Loch Ness Monster were elephant swimming in Loch Ness. Yeah. Completely away from the rest of the circus and the people that were resting on the shoreline. And then after he finished, he said, and here's the deal with all the supposed evidence over the years. That stone carving, it's manuscripts from pre medieval times. It's stories like real documentary evidence. These photos and things, none of them there's no hard evidence. They can all be interpreted as they are explained away as different other things. Yeah. Right. And also, that whole thing developed where Sir Peter Scott said it was a plesiosaur. Right. Which is an extinct marine reptile, not a dinosaur. It was a marine reptile. Other people said, no, it's a sauropod, which makes even less sense because a sauropod was a terrestrial dinosaur, which had never taken to water. So what would it be doing in Loch Ness? But for decades, those were kind of the two conceptions that the Loch Ness Monster was a surviving Sorepod or a surviving plesiosaur. And there are a lot of problems with those. Number one, both of those types of animals went extinct tens of millions of years ago. Yeah, you could stop there had it not been for the silocanth. Right. But we respect the Cele camp, and so we should explore further. And then you have the problem of the fact that a sauropod is terrestrial beast that breathes air. So while it could swim, it would have to come up every few seconds and breathe. And ten reports a year over the history of Loch Ness, with close to a half a million people visiting every year, you would see if this thing has debris every few seconds. There would be a lot more sightings than that. Yes. And even if it were a plesiosaur, which, again, is a marine reptile, they didn't have gills, so they would have to come up for air, too. So same thing. Right. So the fact that it's actually kind of rare for a nesty sighting to be reported, that doesn't make any sense because these things would have to come up quite a bit. And if it's just one, that means that this thing survived 70 or 60 million years. So it's a 60 million year old animal which makes zero sense but some people say, well, no, you could have like a continuous line of these things, could you? Though probably not. And the reason why you couldn't is because the lock is just too small to sustain probably even one plesiosaur or one soropod let alone, I think Sir Peter Scott and Robert Ryan's in their 1975 paper estimated that you'd have to have about 30 breeding individuals to continue a line. I guess in the lake there's just not enough food. There's something like 22 tons of biomass or fish for them to eat and that just would not be nearly enough. Yeah. So if you have, let's say, 30 of these that are mating and breeding creating more little nests over the years and a lake that small I know it's deep, but it is a pretty small lake. But if you have 30 of these things, let's say conservatively and they all have to come up and breathe every few seconds you'd see little fingers popping up out of the water all over the place and at some point there would be a bone or a scale or a tooth or a whole body something washed up on the shore and that's never happened. Yeah. And that's a big problem. I mean, despite thousands of people saying I saw something and some of their stuff kind of bearing some similarities to one another despite the films and the photographs and all that there's not any actual hard evidence like you said, like a bone or tooth or something like that that shows there's something in the lake that is real. Yeah. My money on figuring this out. Last summer in 2018 researchers finally took samples of environmental DNA. Edna and this will tell you in fact, it did yield about 500 million individual DNA sequences. This will tell you basically anything that has lived in this lake. Right. Maybe not forever. Or is it forever? I don't know how far back it would go. As long as it had viable DNA it hadn't deteriorated yet. So it could be like whatever a scale of this monster and this has worked before, I believe, that yielded evidence of unknown life when they discovered a human species called the Denisovans. This works. They have these 500 million sequences and now they're just plowing through them? Basically, yeah. Now they have to analyze them and see if anything that hasn't been identified before it turns out it's pretty smart. It's amazing. It's like they took a photograph, a snapshot of all of the DNA that's in Loch Ness right now. It's a great idea. Yes. And then they're going to sort through it. It could yield something. Who knows? I'm not saying like just saying that the thing is not a plesiosaur or not a sauropod or is not even a giant catfish or something like that doesn't mean that it's not possible there's something there that we don't know about yet. But if this doesn't show anything, then it should. Well, it never will close the case entirely, but it will for a lot more people, I think. Yeah. And then there's one other really big explanation against, especially with the whole, like, surviving dinosaur thing. The Loch Ness is only 10,000 years old. It's not like it was around before when the dinosaurs were swimming around and they could have found their way into Loch Ness. And as the sea levels lowered and Loch Ness was separated from the sea, they got trapped there because Loch Ness didn't exist until it was gouged out of the Earth by the glaciers during the last ice age 100 years ago. It's just too young for something like that. Too young. Too young. But, Chuck, if they ever do find it, it will enjoy protection because they drew up like a protective order, basically, that says that any new species found in the lake, including the Loch Ness monster, if found, the people finding it can take a DNA sample and they have to release it and they have to make sure that it survives. They have to protect it. Pretty neat. It is neat. So do you think real quick, do you think there's anything in there? No. So nothing we don't know about. You don't think there's anything in there? Well, it depends on if you count a giant catfish is something we don't know about. I would say we know about that. Yeah. I think it can be explained. Okay. Have you seen incident at Loch Ness? No. We talked about it in another podcast, I believe. Oh, really? Yeah, another episode. I can't remember when. But yes, we talked about it. I wonder what that would have been about. It may have been in the sea monsters one, I bet. But that's the Vernon herzog. It's worth watching because Werner Herzog is on screen. Right. And anytime you can get him talking or on screen, just watch. But it is a documentary about Bernard Herzog going to make a documentary about Loch Ness and then while they're there, it's a making of a making of and while they're there, they see unexplained things. It's good, though. It's a fun Friday night watch. Alright, Friday night. But just to listen to Vana Hertzok, right? It's great. We have ways of making it talk. Yeah, exactly. So is it on Netflix, do you know? Or Amazon Prime? I have no idea. Well, we'll find out. All right. Well, if you want to know more about Lock you got anything else? No. If you want to know more about Loch Ness monster, loch Ness or Scotland or anything like that, go on to the Internet. It's a really wide and deep resource, deeper than Loch Ness even. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. This is a listener mail by way of our old friends at Coed. Awesome. We heard from Anne, our friends, as a reminder, many years ago when. We were just a fledgling podcast, this group nonprofit called Co ed Cooperative for Education. They invited us to go to Guatemala, which we did, you, me and Jerry, which was a crazy fun trip. It was. And we learned a lot and it was very eye opening in many ways. And we've been kind of working with them unofficially since then. So they have a new drive going on. They are on a mission right now to keep 1000 girls from dropping out of school in Guatemala. And as a reminder, the kind of whole jam is to break the cycle of poverty in Guatemala. And the way to do this is through education. Because if not for education, then kids at a very young age stop going to school because they need to work and help support their family. So they're about halfway to that goal. Everyone, to keep 1000 girls from dropping out of school in Guatemala. And 41 of the stuff you should know, army sponsored a student last year and that's great, but we need more of you in Guatemala. The start of the school year and there are still a few dozen kids waiting to be sponsored. Sponsoring a student costs $80 a month. Or Co ed will pair you with someone else if you can half sponsor someone at $40 a month. And to meet the students who need sponsors, which you can actually do online. Pretty powerful stuff. Just go to Cooperativeforeducation.org. Yes, and we've seen it with our own eyes that they do really good work so we can vouch for them. And it's money well donated for sure. Yeah. Or if you want to go down there like we did, they still take groups down there twice a year and you can kind of very much see it with your own eyeballs and it's very good program and it's helping the whole population, but especially the young women of Guatemala. Yes, and give them the website again, Chuck. It is cooperative for educationorg. Okay? So go check it out everybody. And in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, you can go to stuffyheanow.com and check out our social links. I've got a website too called The Joshclarkway.com. And if you want to send an email to Chuck, Jerry and me, you can address it to stuffpodcast@housestepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housestepworks.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. 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aba50620-3620-11ea-924d-9fd3586bf6d2 | Short Stuff: That's A Head Scratcher | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-thats-a-head-scratcher | It’s actually really strange that scratching your head is a widely understood sign that you’re puzzling over something. No one’s exactly sure why we do that, so interesting theories abound! | It’s actually really strange that scratching your head is a widely understood sign that you’re puzzling over something. No one’s exactly sure why we do that, so interesting theories abound! | Wed, 30 Sep 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=274, tm_isdst=0) | 10382157 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Jerry's out there. Oh, I'm sorry. Dave's here in spirit, too. So this is short stuff. You should know the short stuff edition. Dave Ruse? No. Dave Kustan, the editor of Short Stuff. The producer. Okay. He's our Jerry for short stuff. No, I know. We haven't given Dave a lot of love on the show. I know we need to, man. He's great. Yeah. Short Stuff came along, and Jerry was like, yeah, don't bother me with that. Yeah, I have time for this crap. Do I make extra money. Then? Forget it. Yeah, man. You guys don't know Jerry like we know Jerry. What's great is she'll never hear this. You know that's, right? Yeah. Coustean will never pass this along. He's too terrified of her. That's right. So we're talking about scratching our heads when you think, which is something that I don't do. When I read this, though, there are a couple of thinking ticks that I have that could be explained. That's just not one of them, for sure. And this was one of those things where I'm like, how is this going to be like the origin of a grain of salt just going to send me into some sort of blind rage? I thought so at first, and then no, it turns out when you start to really look into this, because if you think about it, that's a really weird thing to do, to scratch your head when you're sitting there thinking and you might not do it. I don't do it, but we might not even know anybody who does that reliably. The thing is, it's like an idiom. That being a head scratcher. It's like a cultural thing, at least in the west, where if somebody scratching their heads and they're standing in front of chalkboard, you know that they're trying to figure out some sort of problem and they're having trouble with it. That's just what that has to do with. And the explanations are multitudinous. And again, it seems like something you'd be like, that's ridiculous. And then if you stop and think about it, you're like, that actually could be right in this case. Yeah. Like, if you were to take a beginning acting class and you were in there with a bunch of dumb beginning actors like I did in college. Right. And the professor said, the acting teacher said, all right, here's the scene. You're trying to figure out a very difficult problem. The first thing one of those dopes would do is scratch their head. Right. Because that is just a popular trope to indicate or maybe scratch their chin. Right. Something like that. Which counts as part of the head, I guess. Yeah. But it's universally a sign that you're thinking about something. Yeah. So it doesn't really make any sense where we have said that you would do that, and there's no definitive explanation for why, which has really left the door open for a lot of people to put some ideas up. One of the big ones is that it's a relic of evolution. And that really what you're doing, is you're not helping along your thoughts. You're actually showing a form of distress. Whether it's angst, anger, anxiety. Those are kind of the different interpretations and explanations. But the first one is that we're showing a remnant of what we used to do back in the, I guess, the tuktuk days where something made us angry. We would maybe throw our arm up and strike them or whatever. And the first explanation of this is that we are starting to do that. We're raising our arm out of anger, and then we stop because we are civilized now. And that ends up being like we almost kind of play it off by scratching our head. Yeah, it's a little thin. But here's the thing. This is when I was really like, oh, maybe there's a little more to this. When you see somebody who's really mad and they're trying to keep from hurting somebody, you will frequently see that person, like, rubbing their forehead or rubbing the back of their neck or something like that. And what they're saying is this is some sort of, like, derivation of that. Yeah, I totally have seen that. And that is a real thing. There's another possible explanation. This was in a 2009 article for Psychology Today when a former FBI counterintelligence agent named Joe Navarro talked about being under stress. He said our brain requires a certain amount of hand to body touching, like either hand wringing or rubbing your temples or touching your lips or something. And what he's saying is that it's a soother instead of maybe a signal to an enemy. It's just you self soothing yourself through some sort of stressful or fearful situation. And there's actually some research to back that up, which I think, Chuck, we should take a little break, okay. Collect our thoughts, and then come back and talk more about this whole head scratcher. Great. All right. So you said that the FBI agent, Joanawaro, said that this is kind of like a soothing thing. Like we're self soothing. The sense of touch can have a soothing effect on us. And if we're experiencing stress or anxiety or something, just touching yourself can help. And supposedly, because our head is the source of this issue, our brain is that's why we would touch our head rather than, say, like, our knees or something. Right. The thing is, there is some research to back this up. There was a study in 2017 in Scientific Reports, which is a journal, and it watched 45 Reese's macaques who are sorry. Not sorry. Yeah. And they found that kind of the higher on the totem pole level macaques, when they were stressed out, they might start to itch or scratch or just do something, and that this was taken by other macaques who were saying maybe more aggressive as a sign of, like, I'm really stressed out, so just kind of leave me alone. And they actually were left alone. Yeah. It made me think of the seinfeld where George said, if you want people to leave you alone, look stressed out and annoyed. And there were all the times that they would walk by his office in Yankee Stadium, and he was doing that. He would have his hands on his head, rubbing his temple going, and people be like, everyone would pass by his office and not bother him. Right. He's a rises. Macaque these researchers were saying the way they interpreted that is that it tells this potential attacker. One, I'm not fully stable here, so you don't know what I'm going to do, so maybe lay off me, or I'm super stressed that I can't possibly defend myself. There's no point in attacking me to show your dominance. I'm already submitting here, so don't waste your energy either way. The Reese's Macaques that displayed some sort of itching or scratching behavior, scratching behavior, while they were stressed out, signaling they were stressed, were attacked less than those that didn't. So I like this last one a lot, too. This one that you dug up, displacement activity. So you've got an animal that has a couple of different options in, let's say, a stressful situation, and it doesn't want to do either one of them or maybe can't decide which one to perform, so it does what's called the displacement activity. So you've got a bird. Let's say that another bird comes to attack it. It's like, well, should I attack back, or should I just fly out of here? I'm just going to pick up the ground instead. And preening might be another activity or grooming oneself. And the theory is that these may have emerged. Maybe it's a soothing physical contact, right? Or maybe it's just a routine behavior to calm yourself down, or maybe sort of linking with that other one to throw off the person. Which kind of made me think of that guy in Athens who crashed his bike that day. He had two choices was get up really quick and get my books and ride out of there. Didn't say I meant to do that or act in a lot of pain. And he said, I'll do the third thing. I'm going to act like I'm reading a book. Yeah. So he engaged in displacement activity 100%. So there's one last explanation that I found, and that is that people who scratch their head or rub their eyes or something like that while they're thinking are engaged in a certain kind of learning mode is what it's called, a dominant learning mode. And that is where our senses are involved in the way that we think about or recall or take in information. And so people who are tactile with their learning modes might touch themselves, touch their heads or something like that. People who are visual learners might kind of look up in the sky or something like that. That's what I do. You're kind of exaggerating the point of the sense, even though that sense is not giving you any information, helping along. It's almost like we just kind of revert to the sense that we're most comfortable with maybe taking information. I'm not sure, but that's the last explanation I saw. Yeah, that's the one that really hit home for me, because I am 1000% of visual learner. If somebody's trying to explain something, like how something operates, they can talk to me until they're blue in the face. But if I actually see it, I will understand it. And if I'm thinking of something or if I'm deep in thought, I will often tip back in my chair and kind of look up in the sky and they're saying that that's what I'm doing, basically. And it makes sense. Somebody needs to teach you about percentages visually, because there ain't no such thing as 1000%. Shut up. I have to say, Chuck, you can't see me right now, but I have never scratched my head more than I have during this recording. This has been brutal. All right, well, hopefully you didn't lose too many. So that's it for short stuff, everybody. Me and Chuck say adios. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts from my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, you." | |
How Christmas Worked | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-christmas-worked | On Christmas eve, Josh and Chuck decide to take that ineffable Stuff You Should Know approach to the celebration known as Christmas. Join the guys as they unravel the mysterious historical roots of the holiday's evolution in this episode. | On Christmas eve, Josh and Chuck decide to take that ineffable Stuff You Should Know approach to the celebration known as Christmas. Join the guys as they unravel the mysterious historical roots of the holiday's evolution in this episode. | Thu, 24 Dec 2009 15:49:55 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=15, tm_min=49, tm_sec=55, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=358, tm_isdst=0) | 26598994 | 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 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. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Ho ho and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is Charles W. Chuck. I heart Christmas time, Bryant. Yours is way better than mine. Mine sounded like an Irish priest. A leprechaun. Oh, yeah. Terrible. How's it going? Great. Happy Easter. Yeah. This should be coming out right at Christmas. Yeah, we're going to plan for that. So if it is to all of you listening out there in podcast land, we hope you're having a great holiday season yeah. Safe and well and with family. And we wish you all a Merry Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanza and whatever you choose to celebrate it's. Pet. What's that? I think it's Buddhist new year. Okay. There's all sorts of stuff going on this time of year. Yeah, big time. Yeah, but we chose to talk about Christmas. Chuck was brought Baptist. I was raised Catholic. It's what we know. And it's a pretty interesting story, too. And if you're Jewish and you hate Christmas, you're going to stick around because you're going to love this one, right? Yeah. And you know what? Next year, we'll do one on Hanukkah. Okay? Deal. Yeah, I actually know a significant amount about Hanukkah. Let's do it next year then. 2010. All right. Book it. And we'll eventually do Kwanza, too. Yeah, we'll do that in 2011 maybe. Or maybe we'll do it like a holiday extravaganza, buddy. If we're still around in 2011, then we're either doing something right or something wrong. Okay. I haven't decided which. Okay. All right, josh chromos. Is that what we're calling it? Nah, christmas. Okay. So, Chuck, have you ever engaged in Christmas? Yeah. Josh once a year. I've engaged in 38 of them. Wow, that's pretty nice. Thank you. That was my intro. All right, let's talk about this. Man, it's so ubiquitous. There's people who are usually drunk, dressed up as Santa Claus, ringing bells, asking for donations. Sure, there's little kids like screeching in the middle of aisles in toy stores, eye whining. There are mines like elbowing one another in the face to get to that last. That's mine. Exactly. Give me that beanie baby. And then there's people who are punching Walmart greeters in the stomach for saying Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. It's the most contentious time of the year. Do you know where I am? Where? I'm at home and I am shopping online. Dude, it is the way to go. Never again. And you know what? We go to Ohio. I just had the gifts shipped straight to my in law's house. Very smart. No must, no fuss. Yeah, as long as you order early enough to make sure you're not spending the last week biting your nails when they arrive in time tracking packages. I can tell you by experience that people are very forgiving if their gifts aren't there. All you do is you get a little card, you write it inside like you're getting this. Or you print out a picture of it. Right. It's coming, I promise. And a coupon for a free back rub. I did do coupons once. One year. I was so broke, I had a friend take a picture of me stand there with my pockets turned out and be going like this. Last year? No, it wasn't last year. It was like five years ago. And that was that. Like, everybody kept it. No one turned it in. They just liked their tickets. I made birdhouses one year when I was broke. That's awesome. They were good, too. Sure. I bet they're nice. All right, so let's talk about Christmas. How does this jam get started? Well, Josh, the roots of Christmas are varied, to say the least. You cannot riotously varied. You cannot point to one single thing and say, Christmas was born out of this. Jesus'birthday on December 25. You can't even point to the aspects of Christmas and say that each one is born out of this. No, you can't. Basically, Christmas is a bunch of different groups that are from antiquity brought together. Right? Yeah. Like most of these early versions of Christmas, I guess, if you even want to call it that, were festivals that marked the winter solstice in Europe, mainly in Rome. Yes, true. Rome had a big one called Saturnalia. German pagans, they honored Odin, who was a god who flew over settlements at night, blessing some houses and cursing others. Sounds like coal and switches or treats to me. So that was a pagan god? Yeah, Norris Germanic. And then also you have the Druids who like to contribute things like garland and holly to the whole mix. Kissing under the mistletoe actually is apparently a euphemism for some of the sexual practices that went on during the Druidic winter solstice festivals. People probably didn't think they were going to hear those words in the Christmas podcast. Yeah. It's true, though. Oh, yeah. Christmas was rife with sexuality, and one could even say perversion drinking and just crazy parties in some cases. You're talking about Rome? Yeah. The Druids were big into it, too, apparently. The Celts. Right. But in Rome, they celebrated the Pretty Rockets festival called the Saturnalia from December 17 to 24th. Is that not how you pronounce it? No, it is. Okay, I thought you're going to correct me. And that honors Saturn, the god of agriculture. And they had a big carnival, and they feasted and gambled and gave gifts and chorales and got drunk, wasted for days. This is Rome. Yeah. Going party like they did. They also apparently love to stuff Jews with food until they were so full that they could barely move, and then make them race each other naked through the streets for everyone else's enjoyment. So this is Christmas. These are the roots of it. And then, of course, you have Christianity, which effectively took it over in the fourth century Ad. Yeah. They say we need our own holiday to rival all these winter solstice shenanigans. Right. The fourth century Ad. Really? And we or Ce, depending on who you are sure. Really kind of changed things. This is when Christianity stepped it up a bit. That's when St. Augustine was supposedly issuing all these proclamations. Basically, the Church just made some moves and it worked. Yes. And they chose December 25, the day of the Feast of the Nativity is what it was originally called. And since they said, hey, pagans, you come over to our religion. We've got something over here. It celebrates the birth of our Savior and all that, but you can still throw down. This is going to be the last date. Much like Ash Wednesday. Right. Fat. Two Mardi Gras leads up to Ash Wednesday. And the party stops on Ash Wednesday. But they go crazy ahead of time. Very much the same thing. And it continued like this for many centuries. Yes. Initially, it still wasn't the big daddy. I mean Easter and Good Friday still ruled. Sure. And the Feast and the Nativity was kind of the lesser of the three. And the Puritans had some problems with this, though. They did pretty much any group that was very doer about religion. And were Christians outlawed or banned Christmas festivities because banned it. Yeah, he did when he started Christmas. And the Puritans in New England outlawed it, what, from 1659 to 1681 in Boston? Yeah. No Christmas. None. And actually, Cromwell had soldiers patrolling the streets to make sure there was no revelry whatsoever. And we're told to arrest anybody they found celebrating Christmas when he outlawed it. And still today, Jehovah's Witnesses, christians, Christian sect don't celebrate Christmas because they clearly see it as or they see it as a clearly pagan holiday, and that all of these all these pagan roots have come together and just got a christian stamp of approval, but it's really just pagan, right? Yeah. So let's move forward a little bit in our time machine to the 18th and 19th century. This is when things start to calm down a little bit. Okay. And it becomes a little bit more like the Christmas we know and love, including 1846, when Queen Victoria's German husband Albert, prince Albert, he introduced a Christmas tree to the castle, and they essentially got their picture made in front of it. That was an engraving at the time. Of course, they had to stand there for four weeks. Yeah. But it was their children in them in front of the tree. And that kind of may have been the first Christmas card like we do today. That's nice. Do you send Christmas cards? No, I don't. I'm such a slacker. I've never sent Christmas cards. Yeah, so don't be offended. Friends who listen none of my friends listen to this. When I don't send Christmas cards, I just don't do it. I haven't done it. I'll do that one day. Okay. So, Chuck, let's talk about gift giving. Okay. In 2007, Consumer Reports said that they issued an article in November of 2007 that said 12 million Americans were still paying off Christmas from the year prior. From a year later, 12 million Americans were still making payments on their credit card gifts. So in addition to hearing is that Santa sleigh and jingle bells I hear Josh flying overhead? I think you're hallucinating. Am I? I don't hear anything. In addition to that, do you know what I hear is the sound of credit card machines? Well, yeah, that's old, but yeah. The swipe of the credit card beep over and over. Thank you. That's what I hear. Yeah. It is decidedly commercial now. And one of the reasons why people are still paying it off is we spend an ass load of money on Christmas presents and decorations. $8 billion on lights alone. Nuts. Listen to this dude. In 1998, the National Retail Federation, which likes to come out with their annual forecast of how much Americans are going to spend on holiday gifts and just anything that has to do with the holidays, they forecast at 173,000,000,000 in 1998. Wow. This is the height of the.com bubble. Everybody was rich back then. That's true. Everybody. You weren't rich either. Shouldn't 2009 this year, the National Retail Federation projects that we will spend $437.6 billion wow. In a recession. That's nuts. Yeah. I don't drop that much on Christmas. We're going to spend half a trillion dollars on Christmas in a recession. I know. That's a bad year. I know. And you know what? I think they said that during recessions, even sometimes you go out of your way to make Christmas special because you've pinched all year long. So that might have something to do with you. Done what? Because you pinched your pennies all year long. Pinched all year long? Yes. I didn't hear that correct. Okay, what if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call 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 hands on experience, network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K. Twelvecom podcast. That's K twelve.com podcast. And start taking charge of your future today. But gift giving. Josh, what is this? Where did it come from? Well, like I said, a lot of these pagan rituals, they gave gifts, but almost all of them did change. Lena but the roots are generally traced to the Bible and Jesus being born, and the Three Kings, the Magi that traveled to Bethlehem with their three gifts of gold, frankincense and Myrrh. Right. And actually, Eastern Orthodox Christians tend to celebrate Three Kings Day on January 6, which is the day they think that the magic arrived with their gifts. Okay. Because it took them a while. Sure, yeah. Everybody's riding mules back then. It took forever. Things kind of progressed like this for a while. And then in 1820, do you know what first appeared? Josh stores began placing Christmas themed ads in newspapers and magazines. Yeah, for the first time. Even before then, though, Macy's stayed open, I think, for the first time until midnight on Christmas Eve in 1867. Yeah, that was after that, but yeah, I thought you said, I'm sorry, I'm losing my mind here. But yeah, in 1867, they stayed open for those last minute Christmas shoppers. Yeah. So by 1867, it was already a frenzy. Yeah. Should we talk about Boxing Day real quick? Sure. Just cover that for all the Brits out there. Get the sidebar of the way. If you're in England, Australia, Canada, or New Zealand, christmas does not end on the 25th. No, it continues onto the 26th day. So what is that? Josh well, apparently it grew out of a tradition where servants who had to work on Christmas all day serving the rich families of New Zealand, Australia and great Britain and Canada. They were given the next day off the 26th. They have their own Christmas, their own servant version of Christmas, and apparently that was taken over by the rich fat cats as well. Right. So there's a Boxing Day and Christmas, I take it, in those countries. That's the way I understand it. Wow. Chuck, Josh, let's keep going on with this origin stuff. This stuff is very interesting. It is. Can we talk about St. Nick for a second? Yeah. So you know there really was a St. Nick, right? I do now. School me. He was actually canonized in the 19th century, but he was born in 2070 Ce in Turkey. He was a Mediterranean dude. Really? Turkish. Was he? He was Turkish, and I think he died in 340. So he was old. Right. He was worshiped by a group of sailors who formed a cult around him, the Saint Nicholas Colt, or the Nicholas Colt before he was canonized. A group of sailors? A group of sailors just idolized this guy, literally. Right. So these sailors actually, I guess, sailed to Turkey and said, we're going to take St. Nick's bones. They're being kept in a shrine in Turkey. Bring his bones out. Exactly. Okay. Or they went in and got it themselves. One of the two. Right. And then they take the bones back to Italy and place them in a shrine. When they do so, they displace this pagan idol known as the grandmother, t capital G. The grandmother had a reputation for placing gifts in children's stockings. St. Nick, who was a real person, who was a Christian martyr, I believe, okay. Takes over this lady shrine. Got you. And the association with gifts and him giving gifts and even gifts in stockings, her reputation goes to him. Wow. So it originally started with a woman in 1087. That's when the sailors went, we're not done yet here, my friend. Santa Claus has a very long and circuitous route, but it's amazing how it all comes together. I'm roasting chestnuts, by the way, while I'm listening to this. So because the Nicholas cult gave each other gifts, all right? And since they were known for giving gifts, they were one of the more popular cults around. So when they spread north, people were like, hey, you're kind of cool, let's hang out. And they converted. They were a very powerful cult. And when they moved into Germany or the Germanic areas, odin, remember you mentioned him earlier? Long white beard, blew over houses. Right. Santa Claus as we know it today is the collision of Odin and St. Nick. Wow. And the grandmother, technically, I knew I had something to do with Germany. Right. I remember hearing that once. So Santa Claus was, I think, a Dutch word for this conception. But it wasn't until 18 nine that Washington Irving wrote a satire of Dutch culture and said he used the name Santa Claus, the Dutch name which introduced the name to the English. A few decades after that, a guy named Thomas Nast, an illustrator, starts drawing his conception of Santa Claus. Adds the North Pole, the elves, the Workshop, all that stuff. And then finally, Santa Claus, who we know and love today, the jolly fat man with the red coat and the white trimming, all these things have accumulated up to this point. And then our image, our iconic image of Santa Claus was, thanks to an illustrator who was contracted by the Coca Cola Company in 1031 and seen there's, Santa Claus. Wow. Isn't that crazy? That is crazy. Yeah. What a cool history. I think so, too. And slightly disappointing a little bit. Where's the magic? There's no magic. No? All right. Okay. So go ahead, Chuck. I've talked way too much for now. I guess we should talk about trees a little bit. Evergreen trees and garlands were used to decorate symbols of eternal life by everyone from ancient Chinese to Hebrews and Egyptians. And European pagans even worship these trees. Yeah. Remember we talked about the druids and sexual proclivities? Right. So fast forward a little bit. When Western Germans used for trees to represent the tree of paradise and plays about Adam and Eve. They decorated these trees with apples and wafers and stuff, and that got more and more popular until they were introduced in North America in the 17th century. And then people started decorating them with mistletoe and holly and stuff like that. And like you said, they really took off, thanks to Prince Albert in that engraving. Yeah. And Christmas lights, which were introduced in 80 also, as I understand it, gingerbread men. Yeah. That is based on Saturnalia tradition from the ancient Romans, where they would eat human shaped biscuits. Part of the special shape of biscuits. Yes. Think about that's. What a ginger mood. I love ginger cookies. Do you like those? Yeah. Are you with us? Okay, good. I'm having trouble enunciating during this one. I know, it's strange. So, Chuck, I think we've reached the big finish. The finale was Jesus born on December 25? Is that we're going to talk about and also, do you want to pop in two quick facts? Yeah, let's hear it. So where does the word Christmas come from? It comes from Mars. It comes from an old English word or term. Christ's. Mass. Right. Or put together Christmas. And do you know where Xmas came from? Saturn. No. The standard abbreviation of capital X was the standard abbreviation to represent Christ. So really it's not taking Christ out of Christmas when you say Xmas. An abbreviated version of Christmas. Did not know that because a lot of people take offense when you write Xmas. People get really riled up about this stuff. Yeah, they do. They just need to drink a little eggnog, right? Yeah. With rum. Right? Delicious rum. So, Josh, let's talk about December 25. And was Jesus really born on December 25? There is a one in 365 or one in 366 chance, depending on whether or not it was leap year that he was born on December 25. Yeah, because the Bible doesn't say that Jesus was born on December 25. No. One thing I learned from this wonderful article written by a colleague, Sarah Dowdy, who hosts stuff you missed in history class, is that the early church didn't care much about the nativity about Jesus being born. There was no celebration. It didn't pick up, like we said, until the fourth century Ad. Right. So, yeah, there wasn't a lot of effort made to really date his birth early on. Yeah. There's some clues, though, that it was probably not on December 25. In the chapter of Luke, they say that the shepherds are keeping watch over their flock by night. Day and night. Well, no, it just says they're flock by night in the Bible. Whatever. Don't challenge me on the Bible, buddy. I know my Bible. 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 only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for in demand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience, network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K. Twelvecom podcast. That's K twelve.com podcast. And start taking charge of your future today. But this suggests that it may have been actually in the spring, during spring lambing, because that is the only time of year where they do keep watching day and night. Right. Otherwise it's just during the day. So day and night. In that case, yes. Okay, you're waiting on that. So there's one Bible scholar, his first name was Dionysus. I can't remember his last name. He calculated that. I think he was the one that calculated December 25. Yes. Josh Chronographers. Here's another theory here that Chronographers reckon that the world was created on the spring equinox, and then four days later, on March 25, light was created because the Earth was created thinking God created light according to the Bible and Genesis. Right. And since the existence of Jesus signaled the beginning of a new era of Christianity or creation, the Chronographers assumed that Jesus'conception would have fallen on March 25, which nine months after that would be December 25, which would be his birthday. Yeah. There's a modern Bible scholar who has gone a little broader trying to hammer out the actual year. And by his reckoning, thanks to the presence of Herod, king Herod was still alive. He dated it back and figured out that Jesus was probably born in four BCE. Four BCE. Got you. So not too far off as far as the year goes. So bad. And again, we should remind people that this December 25 thing was largely an attempt to steal the winter solstice from the pagans to convert them over to Christianity. Right. So no one knows when Jesus was born. Yeah. And we're not saying all this to poopoo Christmas or the fact that Jesus may or may not have been born on December 25. None of that matters. No, the origin doesn't matter. What matters is that is the day that we celebrate it. And all over the world, there are different traditions. Some people open their gifts on Christmas Eve. Some people do christmas Day. Some people don't do Christmas at all. Some people don't celebrate at all. You know, there's other religions out there. Of course. You heard about this. Yes. And we're going to cover these at some other point. But this one is about Christmas. Yeah. And if you think about it from the true origin of Christmas, all these disparate cultures being brought together and molded into this, sure, it was done surreptitiously and a little sneakily, but it kind of reminds you at the very least, it explains how this whole season is based around Christmas in the United States. Kind of touches everybody. Sure. So that's Christmas. Chuck, do we have any listener mail today? Oh, yeah. If you want to know more about Christmas, you can type in the handy search bar@houseetworks.com, which then, I guess, leads us to listener mayo. Indeed. Josh, we have a couple of requests which we don't often honor here on the show we're going to this year. We love turning down people's requests because I feel bad for people that are born right around Christmas. I do, because that just stinks. So. Hey, Josh, Chuck and Jerry. Chucker and Jerry. I have a sad Christmas story followed by a huge favor. My story starts almost 24 years ago, the day after Christmas. 20 619 85. That was the day my husband Ian was born. The unfortunate timing of his birth has caused a ton of bitterness over the years. With all the gloom that comes after the presents are open, we are faced with the fact that Christmas is gone for a whole year and then it's his birthday. What a let down, right? He absolutely hates his birthday as a result. And often refers to it as the most disappointing day of the year. It's awful. He is constantly played by the yearly Christmas birthday present, of course, having his birthday gifts wrapped in Christmas paper. Just last year, he received a birthday gift with a candy cane taped to the front of it. That's awful. And he's never even had a birthday party in his whole life because no one ever wants to go out the day after Christmas. He's a complete afterthought. So here's my huge favor. He is a huge fan of you guys. And I mean huge. He watches your live videocasts every week. He must be watches the webcast. Yes. And listens to the podcast every Tuesday and Thursday. And he also does his best to spread the word of stuff you should know to everyone, including me. So by the way, now I'm hooked on what she says. So I'm hoping you could make this the best birthday ever. From Ashley, the birthday fairy. Ashley, we're going to give your husband a huge happy birthday here. Happy birthday, Ian. Happy birthday, Anne. We're sorry you were born on the 26th. Be glad you were born at all. That's what I say, but I'm sorry. Dude, that stinks. And we're sending you like a T shirt or something. She wanted to sign T shirt with a candy cane tape to it. Yeah, we should totally. So and you got something coming your way, but it's not going to be there by the 26th. But happy birthday anyway. Ian, Josh, we have another one. Okay. It's from Karen. I just wanted to ask for a huge favor. My partner Tristan is a big fan of your show. In fact, thanks to you guys, he now has opinions on a range of subjects. And it drives me crazy. He turns 30 on Christmas Eve, and that is today, if I'm not mistaken. And I'm trying to make it a little special by surprising him with 30 gifts. And it would freak him out if he was listening to your podcast and you wish him a happy birthday. Could you help me out? That would be awesome. So, Tristan, today actually is your birthday. Happy birthday. Happy birthday, Tristan. Are you freaked out? 30 gifts. I know. 30 lucky dawn. Yeah. So hopefully you're freaked out there in Australia. Tristan, we're talking about you right now. Tristan and Josh, beyond that, do you want to say a few words here? I do, actually. I want to wish my darling five foot one and a half inch, half Okinawan girlfriend yu me. Is that how tall she is? Happy birthday, to. Her birthday is December 30. So she's one of those poor afflicted people born around Christmas time. Happy birthday. Shortcake. Yeah. Happy birthday, Yuan. You call a shortcake. I call it sugar loan. Sweet. Yes. So, Josh, here we are, close to the end of the year, and we'll go ahead and say our salutations here on Christmas Eve to. Everyone raise a toast of eggnog stuff you should know, army. Yes. We're proud of you guys. We're proud of each other. Jerry. We had a great year. It's been awesome. Great response. It has been a really big year. It has been huge. Awesome. And we feel great about it. And we feel awesome about the stuff you should know, army. Coming together and being so involved and donating to Kiva. Tens of thousands of dollars donated to Kiva. That's good stuff. As Josh says on the Kiva thing, what the finest people that have never met? It's close. That's what I feel like we are. Yeah. Well, thanks to all of you out there in Syskland. We hope that your sugar plum dreams are all fulfilled, that you're all tucked in tight, you're warm beds with somebody you love and who loves you. And we'll see in 2010 after two more episodes and we will see to it that we keep you as informed and entertained in 2010 as we did in 2009. We ain't going nowhere. Exactly. Happy holidays. Is that we're going to end this? Is that heartfelt enough? Yes. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Want more housestuffworks? 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 daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder. From exactly right. Media. My favorite murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarif and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're the best pet mom when you growl 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." | ||
c4258aa6-5460-11e8-b38c-ab55bc511803 | SYSK Selects: How the Deep Web Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-the-deep-web-works | Perhaps you didn’t realize that when you search the web you’re only skimming the surface. In fact, the types of web pages that turn up in your search engine results represent only a mere fraction of the total web. Immerse yourself in the Deep web and its dark corners in this classic episode. | Perhaps you didn’t realize that when you search the web you’re only skimming the surface. In fact, the types of web pages that turn up in your search engine results represent only a mere fraction of the total web. Immerse yourself in the Deep web and its dark corners in this classic episode. | Sat, 04 Apr 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=95, tm_isdst=0) | 30669514 | audio/mpeg | "Hello, everyone. Happy Saturday. Chuck here with another Saturday selects. Pick this week how the Deep Web works. January 22, 2014. This is a good one, everyone. Deep Web is deep and dark and scary here. At least it can be, and we dove into that. It's changed a lot over the past six years, but this is a pretty good early peak at the Deep Web, and I was proud of this one, so give a listen. I hope you enjoy it. Have a great weekend. Welcome to Stuff you should Know, a production of iheartradios how Stuff Works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles. Debbie, Chuck Bryant. Howdy. And that makes this stuff you should know. That's right. Minus Jerry. But with no. That's right. We lose a Jerry gain a no. One step forward and another step forward. Oh, man. Fort Jerry. You've just been wailing on her. Well, I'm not going to say two steps back. With Noel sitting 5ft away, it could be one in one step forward with one step back for not having Jerry. You're saying it's a step forward not having Jerry, and a step forward having no, I'm just trying to make everyone like me. I'm doing a poor job of it. You do a great job of it. Everybody loves the Chuck. Not everybody. Who doesn't? I have some mortal enemies. Mortal enemies? Yes. They want to kill I'm trying to kill you. We'll Chuck. Yes. I will tell you what. If they did want to kill you, they wanted to hire hitman. Yeah. The Deep Web is a good place to start looking. Quite a segue. It's been a while. I peed that one up. You did? Unintentionally unintentionally. Yeah, I spotted it and went after it. Yeah. This is about both the deep and Dark Web, which are two different things. The Dark web is part of the Deep Web. Thank you. But the Deep web isn't necessarily dark. All dark. Right. Yeah. That's very well put. The Dark Web is the nefarious things that go on in the Deep Web. Not necessarily nefarious, but the purposefully hidden. Yeah, that's true, because there are some good things on the Dark Web I totally misspoke. Well, you know what? I think that it's great that you confess to it. You feel better. I do. Man, this is a really upfront kind of episode, isn't it? It's very honest. We're bearing it all. So do you have a fancy intro story? No. You think I would. My intro gets buried later on. It's a great intro, but I'll use it as the intro. Okay. Go ahead. Okay. Chuck. Yes. Have you heard of our favorite band, Iron Maiden? Yeah, sure. So Iron Maiden is arguably the most awesome band of all time. Oh, dude. All right. I'm not a huge fan, but you wouldn't be like, I hate Iron Maiden. They suck. Of course not. No, because they make you crazy. That's right. Iron maiden has been around for a while. They're pretty smart. They know what they're doing. And recently, they figured out a way to maximize their touring dollars. By flying their own plane. Well, Bruce Dickinson always did. Yeah, he's a certified pilot. It's got to be efficient, I would imagine. Plus fun. Unless Bruce was partying too hard and then they got to fly to the next city that night. He wouldn't do that. I hope not, because that's dangerous. Yeah. I mean, driving drunk is bad enough, but flying drunk, I can only imagine. Sure. And it's probably not just drunk. You know what I'm saying? No, he's straight. Straight? Has he always been? I don't know. I can't verify that. Well, anyway, Bruce and the boys figured out that a good way to figure out where to where to decide to tour would be to figure out where their music was getting pirated the most. That sounds reasonable. It does sound reasonable. It provides you with evidence of an established fan base. And a fan base that is unwilling to pay for your record, but would probably pay to see you live. How does that reason? Well, they like your music, but they don't want to pay for your CD. So why would they go see you live and pay? Because it's different. Like, seeing a live show is way different than buying a CD. You can't get a live show. You could get a video of a live show. It's still not the same experience a live show as a live show. Plus, everybody always knows that anybody involved entrenched in the old guard music industry. Any band doesn't make any money on their records and make it on touring. So going to see a band live also is kind of a true act of fandom because you're contributing directly to your band that you like. Yeah. So what they did was they hired a company to look at BitTorrent sites and find the regions where their music was most pirated. And they created a tour map from it and went and played those regions. Do you have the number one iron maiden pirated region? No. Okay. But we're going to say Rio. All right. They're huge in South America. That's my guess. We'll look it up afterwards, I guess. Rio. And so they were like, we're going to start our tour in Rio. Yeah. And it wasn't just that one place, but it was basically a tour that was built on the areas where their music was most pirated. It was a stroke of genius. But they couldn't have done it without harvesting the deep web. Because BitTorrent sites, when you search BitTorrent, the average search engine doesn't respond with a list of BitTorrent activity. It'll just send you to a BitTorrent site, which means that those pages of BitTorrent activity, which are web pages, they do exist. They're part of what's called the deep web. That's right. The surface web as we know it. And search engines that we all use, like Google and Bing, supposedly only have access to about 0.3% of what is truly on the World Wide Web. That's like scary and weird and thrilling all at the same time. Right? .3%. And anything else that's buried is the Deep Web. And it's not necessarily the Deep Web is not when you're purposely trying to hide things, it just may not be cataloged and indexed password. Sure. Maybe one of those timed sites that don't let you access data after a certain amount of time. It could be anything with a captcha involved, anything that's not hyperlinked. There's lots of reasons that something could find itself buried in the Deep Web. Right. You make a good point to separate the deep Web and the Dark Web. So let me give you an example of deep Web. Okay. Aside from those BitTorrent sites, there's this company called Bright Planet, and they provide deep Web harvesting, and they had this primer on what is the deep Web. One of the examples they used was if you look up government grants on a traditional search engine, it will probably provide you with www dot grants, dot gov as one of the first returns. Right. Straight up. When you go on to grants gov, you can then search and find pages of all these different government grants. You can search by keywords, you can browse. Yeah, but those pages aren't going to come up on your normal Google search. Right. You have to go to the site, which means that those pages of the actual grants are part of the deep Web. Yes. Your bank account, your checking account online. If you have mobile banking or online banking, it has a web page all to its own right now. And if I searched Chuck Bryant's checking account, it would not come back. I would not get that. Because it's behind a password. It's a website page. It's a web page, but it's password encrypted. Therefore, it's part of the deep Web. Twitter until it index tweets. Used to be you couldn't search tweets, individual tweets, now you can. So that made them formerly a part of the deep Web actual tweets. Yeah. Or every company on the planet has some sort of internal employee pages, like internal discovery that only we can access. And you can't Google search any of that stuff. Right. Or somebody could conceivably access it. Maybe. It depends on the page, but you have to know the exact URL. So the idea is, if search engines are blind to it, it's part of the deep Web. If search engines can index it and bring it back as return results, search results, it's part of the surface web. Yeah. Because that's all a search engine is doing. We might do a full podcast on search engines at some point. Sure. But the general thing is there is an index of data and they use spiders or crawlers because it is a web to crawl around and locate domain names and hyperlinks and basically index all that and what they think will be most helpful to what you're looking for. Right. So Chuck Bryant's bank account. Yeah. There are some web pages out there that contain information related to that keyword search. Yes. So a search engine will keep an index with that keyword search with the URLs, the locations, the page content, some of the page content, the meta tags or the metadata, and other very brief sketch information about those pages associated with the keyword for an index. Which means that when you type in Chuck Bryant's bank account, you got to quit saying that. Sorry. Thought about it. As I was saying it that last time. But when you type in Birds of paradise bank account. Bank account, the search engine goes and accesses the index. It doesn't have to go all the way across every page on the web that it can find. It just goes to its indices. And that's how search results are returned so quickly. It's not going across the Internet. It's already got the spider crawlers, the bots doing that constantly. This search engine is just going to the indexes that the bots have created from their searches. Yeah. And it is super shallow. I mean, we said .3%. Our whole job is researching online, mainly, and we run into this all the time where you feel like you're getting a very slim portion of what you're trying to find out. Right, because so many of the best medical journals and things like this don't just pop up, as it's more likely to be some headline from CNN.com and not like a Harvard Medical Journal paper. That could really help you out. Yeah. You can get deeper and deeper with your keyword skills and your search skills. Sure. But for the most part, yeah. The first returns, the first results, depending on what you search for, are going to be, like you said, superficial. Yeah. But even if you're a super sleuth, a Google master like we all think we are, I mean, how much can that be? Bumping it up. Yeah. Well, a lot of the problem, too, though, Chuck, is so much of science is behind a paywall. Yeah. Really expensive paywalls, too, which is like, here's the first eight lines of this awesome medical research paper. Exactly. If you want it, give us which is a problem in and of itself, not necessarily related to this, but with current search engine technology, you have, like you said, a superficial result from an inquiry on the other end of the spectrum, and this is kind of what search engines are dealing with now. The deeper you go into the deep web again, the surface web is zero 3% of all of the web pages on the entire Internet. So the further you go into it, the more data you have, and you eventually can run into the problem of what's called big data. Yeah. Not capitalized B or D, which refers to companies like Google that can dig and harvest and maintain a large amount of data. Yeah, it's basically data that's so much and so unwieldy, you can't even process and search it. It's like not even helpful. Yeah. It's like a really bad Internet search. Yeah, pretty much. So the current state of search engine design or creation is balancing that, figuring out how to get less superficial without running into the big data problem of incoherent data due to just massive amounts of returns. And you might think that these search engines do a great job because I can always find out what I need. But you don't know what you're missing. Right. So it's sort of not even correct to say that I always find out what I need. Because you may even know you need it because it's hidden. That's true. And you're missing quite a bit. Okay. There's apparently 550,000,000 registered domains on the Internet. Yeah. And I looked up just in 2012, I think they're only like 250 or something. I mean, it seems like it's doubled in the last couple of years. Right. So that's 550,000,000 domains, for example. A lot of them are garbage. Yes. But how stuff works.com is one domain. And I asked Tracy Wilson, who's the site director and runs Stuff You Missed in history class, she's one of the cohosts how many pages there are, how stuff works. She said roughly at least 50,000. So one domain out of 550,000,000 has 50,000 pages itself. Right. So you kind of get an idea of the scope. The deep web is anywhere from 400 to 500 times bigger than the Surface web. And like you said, you don't know what you're missing because you don't know what's out there, because your search returns aren't bringing you back anything. Yeah, there's a lot of important stuff out there. We talked about medical papers. Apparently there's engineering databases, financial information, a lot of things that could really help research, but you just can't find it. Right. Unpublished blog posts. Sure. Just basically anything that a person creates on the Internet, if a page is created, it's part of the deep web. Yeah. Unless you take this stuff down, it's living there forever, just gathering dust. Exactly. And it's not just necessarily engineering databases or medical information. Right. There's also a lot of shady stuff too. The dark web. That's the dark web? Yeah. The dark web is when these sites intentionally reroute you. Well, we'll get to how they do it, but basically it's an intentional anonymity. It just happens to be buried on the deep web because not index, it is purposely hidden from the surface Web so people can't track the person searching for something. Or the end website, I guess those are all just private, essentially. Right. And privacy advocates are way into it. You're not necessarily a child pornographer, although there is a lot of that kind of stuff on the dark Web. There's also a lot of good that happens on the Dark Web. Yeah. The anonymity and privacy and the desire for it isn't in and of itself proof of wrongdoing. Of course not. No. Which is frequently pointed out as that, but incorrectly. Yeah. I don't want the NSA in my business. People like, what are you doing? Right, exactly. Nothing. Yeah. I just don't want them in my business. Precisely. Yeah. That's an answer. That's good enough. That answer is good enough. Yeah. And for a lot of people, they say, well, then I need to go to the Dark Web to maintain anonymity or to hire hit man. Right. To kill Chuck Bryant. That you could do. That's crazy. You could do. There was a site for a while. I don't know if you've heard of it or not. It's called Silk Road, which got shut down and tease Chuck. I know you've heard of it. It's like the most famous dark website of all time. Yeah. The Feds busted Ross Ulbricht, who may or may not be Dread Pirate Roberts, which was the online name that they said, he's the guy running this. And he is now saying, actually, that's not me, but all those bitcoins are mine, so you can't seize those bitcoins. And it's in courts now. They're trying to determine whether or not it counts as something that you can seize as an asset from a criminal. And they're saying that this is literally a case that no court has ever heard before. Yeah. It's never been questioned whether you could seize cryptocurrency. Yeah. And you should listen to our podcast on Bitcoins, by the way, from not too many months ago. That's a good one. But it's essentially just encrypted digital currency. And they have a really fascinating circumstantial case against Ulbricht, not just for operating the Silk Road site. That's where you could buy drugs and things, by the way. Right. Which being the operator of that in and of itself shouldn't be a crime. I'm sure that they would have prosecuted them for that if they'd been able to get their hands on them for just that. But apparently they also have him for at least two hired contract killings. One, he, I guess, hired an undercover cop to do it, and the guy went to the person who he was taking the hit out on and said, this guy is trying to kill you. I need you to cooperate, and I'm going to take pictures of you dead and send them to this guy. And Olbricht apparently gave him, like, 40 grand upfront and another 40 after he saw the photos. In Bitcoins? No, I think in cash. Okay. Although, no, it would have been in Bitcoins. You're right. Yeah. So who knows? It could have been two bitcoins at the time, or 5000. Well, Silk Road 20. Launched in November. Is it out now? It's out. And there are other copycatters, like the black market reloaded, which they went down for a little while after Silk road went down, but then it went back up, I think. Yeah. I don't know, man. I hate to say you shouldn't try and fight crime, but you're not going to stop this stuff when one you cut off the head of one and another grows right out of it in its place. It's true if the structure that's allowing for the anonymity can remain intact, which is the dark web. Right, but it's not just the dark web. It's like how you traverse the dark web. Like using tor. Yeah, I guess we haven't explained the onion router. T-O-R is what it's called, and it is software that you use to access the deep web and the dark web if you choose to. And it searches for these anonymous sites for you, like a search engine, but instead of.com or.org or net, they end in onion. Right. The idea of an onion has many layers, and that's how you access it through tour. You have to buy it and install it on your computer. Right. Well, you can get it for free. Yes. Firefox had something that it was basically a tour bundle. It was the most popular one. You could download it for free. But it's not a web browser itself. It's like an add on to a web browser that allows anonymity. And it does two things. One, it bounces your trail all over the world from server to server, so it makes you and your activity extraordinarily difficult to track. Yeah, it's not just like this computer went to this site, right, that's that whole onion thing. There's so many layers. It's like we don't know who this is or where they are or what they're doing or anything like that. We just know right now that this particular person happens to be there's a user on silk road, but we don't know who it is or anything. You can't track them because they're using tor. The other thing is you can't get into onion domain sites, dark web sites, unless you're using tor. Right. Like, they won't let you in unless you're an anonymous user. Yeah. So Tor has kind of two fold thing, but there was recently a breach in it, and it turned out the FBI was using malware to break through the anonymity of tor users and found out a lot of people on some sites that were hosted by something called freedom hosting, which apparently had a horrible reputation for being the repository on the dark web for child pornography right. And knowingly basically just not doing anything about it. So the FBI had a they hacked the freedom hosting servers and inserted this malware. So if you went to a freedom hosting site, any of them, not just necessarily a child pornography, but any site hosted by freedom hosting, which is like, say, GoDaddy for the dark web, right. You would get this malware package that exploited a keyhole in Firefox's Tour bundle. It went into your computer, said, hey, give me your Mac address, which is basically like your computer hardware, like serial numbers, right. Your computers alone's, tracking number, and then also tell me where the computer is. And it sent it back to a server, a mystery server in McLean, Virginia. And finally, after like a month, the FBI was like, yeah, that was us. We have everybody who went on that site's, name and address and everything on them. So that's been a huge ripple, and Firefox fixed this loophole, but it's been a huge ripple through the Dark Web and Deep Web community. Sure thing. Like, whoa, whoa, we were anonymous before, but now it's been shown definitively that the Feds can find out who we are. So that anonymity is reduced if not taken away. Yeah, which defeats the whole purpose. Yeah. So if you don't have that, then you can keep lopping the heads off of these things and they're not going to grow back because people will be afraid because they won't feel like they're anonymous any longer. Well, Tor has sort of an ironic background, which we will get to right after this message break. All right, so we're back and we left you with the nugget that Tour has an interesting background. And the background of Tour is actually the US. Naval Research Laboratory in 2003 launched this program for political dissidents and whistleblowers so they can get their message out without fear of reprisal. Right. And this is still a use of Tour, like The New York Times, WikiLeaks, some other news agencies have tour sites that if you want to go and contact the New York Times or WikiLeaks anonymously, like you can go to the Onion site and upload documents or say, hey, I have some information I want to share. Right, and you can do it anonymously. So the government, though, is basically law enforcement is trying to track down criminals using the software that the government created to begin with. So it's an interesting loop, but like we said, it's not all badness. If you live in a country where bad things are going on and you don't feel safe getting on the regular Web as a political dissident, you can do so on the Dark Web. It offers a virtual meeting place for sometimes people are trying to combat these oppressive regimes in their countries and they can't just hop on Facebook and organize a meeting because they'll get smacked down. Right. If you're a person who values privacy for whatever reason or no reason at all, the Deep Web and the Dark Web offer file sharing services. Email is a big one, too. I can't remember the name of the one Edward Snowden's been using, but I think it got shut down like this. The whole company shut down. Sorry, you're out of business now because you're helping Edward Snowden, but there are other email services. Basically everything you have on the web. If you want to do it anonymously, you have to go to a company that operates on the Dark web right. That uses Tor to route its information or your information. Yeah. The University of Luxembourg did a study where they tried to rank the most commonly accessed stuff on the Dark Web, and sadly, what they did find a lot of things like child pornography. There were also a lot of sites and chat rooms for human rights and freedom of information and just people that don't want to type in a search for how to grow marijuana. And then the next time they go to their Gmail account, there are a bunch of ads for grow lights, and you're going, how'd that happen? Well, it happened because you're searching the surface Web with an IP that can be traced back to you. Yeah. And not even illegal activities like that. You want to research a Fitbit bracelet, and then you go and they say, hey, Chuck, are you fat? You want to lose weight? Why else? You want a Fitbit? All right. Huh? Daddy, why would you want a Fitbit? Yeah, it's definitely creepy. There's the big brother effect. I think. Everyone feels it. The existence of the Deep Web, not necessarily the Dark Web, but just the Deep Web, all of those pages of information that are out there. Some companies will figure out how to exploit it, or the fact that normal search engines aren't doing a good job of looking into the Deep web. That company, Bright Planet, I mentioned, they have a Deep Web Harvester, which is basically a proprietary search engine algorithm that goes into websites and gets everything. Like, it doesn't form an index. It grabs every bit of text off of every site associated with a URL. That sounds like big data. It is. Yeah. But they're doing it for companies like Big Pharma or big government and saying, like, oh, you want to know what your competitors up to? Well, here's every letter of every word of every strip of text on your competitors website, including all internal stuff, everything. Please give us $10 million for that search. Yeah. There's also this site called Vocative. Which uses something like bright Planets deep Web Harvesting. But it does it for journalism purposes. And it's basically. Rather than searching using Google like you or I would for a story idea. They're searching using a Deep Web harvester to find all this other information that we wouldn't be able to find because we don't know how to search the Deep Web and writing stories like that. And there's some pretty interesting stuff that that sites put together already, I bet. Well, when you think about it, if you think the Internet is cool and you're only getting 3% of it yeah, not bad. And the surface web is getting deeper. The Deep Web is getting deeper, search engines are searching deeper, and they're trying to anonymize more effectively. So it's like this cyber War is going on. Oh, yes. That was another good one we did. What do we do? Cyber War one on. Cyber War? Yeah, I knew I'd heard that before. So there you go. I would have to say that this is one of those episodes where we did it, but it is not done. No. Sometimes we do them and it's like, that's it. There's nothing more to say about this topic. Yeah, I'm interested to see what happens with Ulbricht. For sure. That's going to be a landmark case. If you want to know more about the Deep Web, you can type Deep Web into the search engine and how stuff works. It will bring back superficial results. Only how stuff works stuff. But it's pretty good, so you'll be happy. And since I said search bar, that means it's time for listener mail. All right, Josh, I'm going to call this birthday shout out that we rarely do. Okay. Hey, guys. I'm a long time listener, shamelessly writing to ask for a huge favor. Here's the pitch. I first became aware of your podcast when my last girlfriend, Natalie David, introduced me to it when we started dating and have her to thank for getting me hooked. As we spend a lot of time listening to your show and learning together as huge supporters of your podcast, we were compelled last year to make the trip up from Virginia to New York when you were putting on your trivia night. And Natalie is the one who gave us the mics on pants off T shirts. Right? Okay. Yeah. And David, her boyfriend, they were super cool, super nice. They sat at a table right near us. So I got to know him a little bit, and he says, Anyhow, here's where the favor comes in. She moved to Shanghai, China, to teach, and she's teaching little kids English. That's fine. And sadly, they separated when she moved over there, which to me are always like, the saddest breakups. Right. Like, there's nothing wrong with this moving to China. Sure. So they just thought it was probably the thing to do, because I inquired back to David, emailed them about this, and so like, oh, no, you guys broke up. And he said, yeah, but we still really support each other and care about each other, and hopefully our paths will cross again one day. So, anyway, Natalie David is in China, and because of this distance, I was at a loss when considering what to get her, he made a donation to Cooperative for Education in her name. And I know you guys like to read those names of people who contribute, but in this case, I was hoping you would just do a little something more special by wishing her happy birthday. So, on January 26, which I think should be very soon, natalie, happy birthday. Yeah. Happy birthday. We remember you. I wear that shirt all the time. My wife thinks it's funny. And. I hope you're doing well in China. And don't give up on David just because he's here in stupid United States. Her new Chinese boyfriend is like, what, that guy? Yeah. She's like, nothing. Wait, rewind that. So anyway, I hope you're doing well over there in China, and thanks again for all the support, and I hope you guys hope you pass across again one day. That was very nice. That is from David Austin Berry. If you have a special request for Chuck or me or us, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffysheanow. And if you want to send an email to Chuck, Jerry and me, you can address it to stuffpodcast@howstafirs.com. Stuff you should know is production of iheartradios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show. 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 weak. 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." | |
8a8c3bee-4a58-11e8-a49f-e7c6e81a2608 | SYSK Selects: Can Your Grandfather's Diet Shorten Your Life? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-can-your-grandfathers-diet-shorten-yo | Epigenetics is a fascinating field of genetics that studies how the epigenome and environmental, nutritional and social factors affect gene expression. Josh and Chuck explain how epigenetics works in this episode. | Epigenetics is a fascinating field of genetics that studies how the epigenome and environmental, nutritional and social factors affect gene expression. Josh and Chuck explain how epigenetics works in this episode. | Sat, 01 Dec 2018 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=335, tm_isdst=0) | 29374701 | audio/mpeg | "Hi, everyone. Can your grandfather's diet shorten your life? What does that even mean? Well, it turns out it's possible. And I remember when we stumbled upon this topic in June of 2010, really, really fascinating stuff for me. And it's it turns out it's true. There is, actually. Well, how about this? I'm not going to ruin it. Just give it a listen, everyone. Can your grandfather's diet shorten your life? Welcome to stuff you should know from houseteporkworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. And I'm Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And I'm Josh Clarke. And that makes this stuff you should know, right? Yeah, I hope so. This is our podcast. Been doing it for a while, and he's welcoming new listeners. Yeah. Here's another one. Okay. All right. And actually, I'm pretty excited about this one. I've been wanting to do this one for a while. He's been bugging me. Epigenetics. Chuck, let's do it. Let's do it. The cutting edge of research, of our understanding of life, not just human, of all life. My mind was blown. It's pretty big deal. Yeah, real big deal. So, Chuck, you've heard of the genetic revolution? Charles Darwin, he had a long beard, he loved sea turtles, that kind of thing. He used to vacation in the Galapagos. Right. He wrote on the origin of the species. And it was a pretty groundbreaking book, I would say. So basically what he came up with was, we are driven by our genes. Right. We have genetic code in our DNA, and that makes us red headed. It makes us timid, it makes us courageous, prone to cancer, right? Exactly. And it makes us thick tongued, right? Sometimes, yeah. And we are slaves to these genes. There's nothing we can do to alter, and we get them from our parents. But if we find out that over time, being thick tongued is, say, advantageous to human survival, we're all going to talk like me. But millions of years from now, at least hundreds of thousands makes for good podcasting. It definitely does. And I just look for it in the future. Yes. Okay. When we're all running around with robot bodies. Right. There is another guy, and actually, Darwin, just to show off, once came across a type of orchid, right? The moon orchid, I believe is what it's called. Okay. And it had a very deep, I guess, pistol or stamen. I can never keep those things apart. And the nectar was down in there. And he looked at that flower and said, you know what? There is an organism out there, probably a flying organism that has a probosis that fits perfectly into that flower. Was it the hummingbird? It was a hawk moth. And sure enough, a few years later, some point in time later, they discovered the hawk moth, and it was pretty much, literally made to fit. Right. There's another guy named Jean Baptiste Lamarck, who I know you've heard of as well. Right. And all his Lamarcke and stuff. Right. He was about 60 to 80. He was working about 60 or so years before Darwin. But he had his own ideas based on giraffes. Right. Yes. He said that giraffe's necks grew to reach the food, but it was just over the course of a few generations. Right, right. And that kind of flies in the face of Darwin. Yeah, sure. Who said it takes hundreds of thousands of years with this stuff called epigenetics that we're about to talk about today. Suddenly people are starting to go back and look at Lamarck, who was kind of dismissed as a quack yeah. And say, you know what? Lamarck may have been right in this one. Yeah. Prepare for your minds to be melted. That's all I have to say. Let's talk about epigenetics. Chuck okay, Josh, let's first talk about the genome. Right. I heard a computer reference analogy that I thought was pretty spot on. If you think of the genome as computer hardware, then the epigenome would be the software that tells the computer what to do and when to do it. But in this case, the epigenome tells your cells what to do, what kind of cells to be, when to activate or deactivate. So I guess every cell yeah. The DNA in every cell in the human body has the exact same DNA. Yes. You have, like, half of your mothers and half of your fathers, and it comes together and gives you your DNA. Right, right. And if you look at the DNA in every cell from the kind of cell that makes up your fingernail, what would that be? A keratinocyte. Sure. Okay. To a sperm cell. Right. Very specialized type of cell. They all have the same DNA, they have the same genes in there. But what makes them different and what makes a keratinocyte and a sperm cell? Those things are the tags on those genes. So some are turned off, some are turned on. And in a specific combination, you have either a carotenocyte or sperm cell or a neuron or a cell that makes up your eyeball. Right. All of that stuff. Yeah. So it's essentially a chemical tag that literally changes the physical structure of your genome. Right. So it'll bind tightly, let's say, to an inactive gene and make it unreadable. Or it'll stretch out an active gene and make it really accessible. Right. Physically changing it. And epigenetics means above the genome because these tags, they're called methyl tags, which is what? One hydrogen and two carbon. Carbon and hydrogen bundles. Yeah. Okay. So it's a metal group. It's a really simple compound, but they attach to the gene at a place where other proteins or enzymes normally would attach to activate it. So basically what they do is block a gene from being activated and they can silence them. Yeah. It's like a light switch, literally. You can turn off some genes and turn off others. Right. Honeybee actually is a pretty good demonstration of this. Did you read about honeybees? No. Okay. So you've got a worker bee, right. Which is a sterile kind of mindless, dumb bee that just does what it's supposed to do. No offense to any worker bees out there. Right. Agreed. Hey, I'm all down with Mayday. Alright. With a queen bee, you have this first of all, she can reproduce. She goes and kills other rival queens. Right. She does kind of all sorts of other stuff that a worker bee isn't capable of doing. And what they found was queen bee larvae are raised in this royal jelly. Right? Right. Which worker bee secrete from their heads? It's this nutrient rich jelly. So the larvae grows in it. And what they found yes, I know. Sounds kind of good, doesn't it? Just because of the jelly part of it. What they found was that the royal jelly adds a methyl tag to the queen bee larvae DNMT three gene. And this gene is like literally the on off switch. If this gene is on, it goes to the default worker B. Right? Right. If it's off, then all the genes that make a queen bee and queen bee are able to be turned on. Crazy, isn't it? So epigenetics happens in bees as well, and mice. Yes. They've done a lot of studies with mice, obviously in the Agudi gene in these mice. And they experiment with these mice affecting, basically turning on and off the epigenetic switch. So an unmethylated gene would affect the mouse's size and weight and then coat color. Right. It makes them real fat and like yellow. Yeah. Instead brown. Have you seen one of these things? Yeah, they're huge. Yes. They should all be named Wilbur. The cool thing is though, they showed the difference between the skinny brown one and the fat yellow one. But then they also did experiments where they did half and half, like turned on half of them and turned off half of them. And they literally showed them in a sequence, I don't know if you saw this picture, but they went from fat yellow to skinny brown. And in between they got thinner and was spotted coats along the way. Crazy. Like yellow and brown spotted coats? Yeah. Weird. It's that specific. Yeah. And one of the ways that they have found that they can manipulate these what is it? A guti. Yeah. The Agudi the Agudi gene. And these mice that I guess are bred specifically for this gene to be easily observed or something yeah. Manipulated too, is through diet. Right. So they've actually taken a goodie gene. Mice, mothers who are pregnant, fed them a bunch of B vitamins in their diet. Yeah. Soy, right? Yeah. Soy is a really easy grab for B vitamins, I believe. Right. Fed these pregnant, big, fat, yellow, ugly mice B vitamins and their kids came out that healthy skinny brown. Right. They had identical moms with the same, like, a guttine, same upbringing, same everything, just fed them in the normal mouth diet without vitamin B. And they had the big, fat yellow kids. Right. So diet is a really big factor in epigenetic changes. What Chuck and I are talking about right now is that science has found evidence that you can change the genetics of your children by eating B vitamins or by being abused when you're pregnant. Well, see, that's what gets me. Some of the diet makes a little bit of sense, but the fact that an environmental stimulus placed on your mom or even your grandparents can affect your children or grandchildren, something you didn't even experience at all. Right. It's kind of unfair. And actually, I have to tell you, the more I study this, the more worried I am for my own child or children. Like, really what they are finding is the decisions that you make, especially at a youngest age, are going to affect several generations because what you're doing is adding methyl types. What we're talking about is pretty much the definitive answer to the nature and nurture debate. And what we're finding is both you have nature, which is your gene, and they're very much active, but you have nurture, which is the environment, whether it's diet, whether it's stress, whether it's lack of exercise. Your body responds to these changes by saying, okay, all right, well, then if you're going to lay around and be fat, then we have to deactivate this gene. We will punish your grandkids, and your grandkids who are trying to be normal are going to be fat little kids that live shortened lives. Right. And this is where it came from. Right. Chuck? There was a study in Sweden that kind of broke this ground. Yeah. Didn't they find that? It was a very isolated group of people in Sweden, and at the time they were very isolated, at least where they couldn't get help from the outside world very readily. And I think they studied the famine. Isn't that right? How the famine affected the generations afterward? Well, they had, like, feast or famine. It was like an agricultural town. And they looked at these agricultural records that this town kept for some reason, like really detailed records throughout the 19th century. And some years there was nothing and people starved death. The next year there was everything. And they found that the grandparents, the grandfathers who feasted and starved within a year of one another right. Their grandkids lived an average of 32 years shorter or less than the grandkids are the same people who didn't have that kind of feast or famine experience right. In the same town right. With the same socioeconomic conditions. So yeah. That's three generations right there. Right? Yeah. Did you hear about the Angelman syndrome and the Pradavadi syndrome? No. Don't lean on me. Actually, it was a PBS documentary. It's called the ghost in your jeans. Did you watch that? Dude, it's on YouTube. It's in, I think, five or six sections of ten minutes apiece. It's a full show. Mind blowing. They found that there are these two different syndromes, and I won't get too deep into what they are, but Angelman syndrome and Pradavilli syndrome is what it's called. And they found it. Sounds Italian. It's pride of eating. Yeah, sorry, I dropped the ball there. Basically what causes each of these is a missing piece of DNA and it can cause two different disease well, they found it. It can cause these two different diseases that are completely unrelated depending on which parent it came from. Really? Which missing part of the gene it came from. So basically it's as if the gene knew where it was coming from. Like gene imprinting. The gene had a memory that, oh, it came from the father. So you're going to have Angelman syndrome or it came from the mother, so you're going to have privilege. Right. And this is a relatively recent discovery. We were talking about them looking at agricultural records of the 19th century in Sweden. That was a doctor named Drug Lars Olaf Bygren but he was working in the mid eighty s, and he didn't really start to lay the foundation of epigenetic research until the mid to late 90s. So this is a very new field. But what they're finding and what Chuck was just saying is that your parents can pass on these epigenetic changes that happen within themselves. Right? And your grandparents can too. Right. But this isn't supposed to happen. What happens when an egg and a sperm meet, right? And it's like, hey, here's my DNA, here's my DNA, and they get together. There is actually a process where the specialized cells go through and basically clean the DNA of methyl tags. Right. But they found that not all methyl tags get cleaned off. Yeah. So diet can affect certain genes. These methyl tags can be passed out and with abuse as well. Have you heard about PTSD? Yeah. They covered that in that special as well. They did a test with pregnant women who were in New York at the time of 911. Did you hear about this one? Yeah, it's really recent study, right? Yeah. And they basically found that pregnant women that experience that were pregnant at the time the towers came down right. And experienced post traumatic stress disorder. They found that their babies had lower levels of cortisol, just like their moms did, which helps you deal with stress. Helps you how you deal with stress. So these little babies inherited, basically inherited post traumatic stress disorder from their mothers in the womb, in utero and cortisol. It's a hormone and it would be produced by a gene or expressed by a gene. Right. And how much or how little is expressed depends on whether that gene is silenced, whether it's altered. And that alteration comes from methyl tags, which can be passed down. So PTSD can be passed down. Right. Yeah. And they're speculating now that and this is obviously speculation because these kids are still young, but they're speculating that it's going to happen to their kids as well, and that's going to be the real gold nugget. Right. They do go away eventually, they think metal tags. Well, they have in, like, fruit flies. With fruit flies, it's like 400 generations, but fruit flies have a generation every, like, five minutes. And then I think with mice, it's like 40 generations or something like that. And with humans, they expect it to be somewhere around three, maybe a few more. Oh, really? Yeah, because what's happening is our bodies are responding to environmental cues to change, and then after those environmental cues go away, the body's like, okay, well, we can go back to normal now and get rid of this methyl tag. So we've got nutrition. Right. You are what you eat. You are what your parents ate. You are what your grandparents ate. And then there's things like stress. Yeah. Which parenting. Right. Yeah. I think they found with mice, mothers that didn't nurture their kids or nurse their kids, produce kids that were kind of jumpy and I guess had the mice version of PTSD, and they theorized that the body had undergone an epigenetic change to prepare these mice for a very stressful life. Yeah. They need to be on guard, which, if you think about it, Chuck, I wrote a blog post about this. It's possible what we call PTSD is an epigenetic change that says you live in an environment where you can't relax. Right. So we're going to make you jumpy, you're going to be edgy, and you're going to have flashbacks so that you're always on point, and it's a result of an epigenetic change from a stressful event. Yeah. And the same I think you mentioned abuse earlier. They found that one out of every five suicide victims was a victim of child abuse as well. So they're still kind of theorizing now, but they think there's a positive correlation there between, like you said, stressful upbringing and epigenetic change. Right. So what else? Well, are we going to talk about what could be good about this? Potentially? Yes, because it could be really good. We're talking about and it's still early going. We're talking about potentially curing things like Alzheimer's, cancer, mental disorders, multiple sclerosis, you name it. Tonguedness. Sick tonguedness. Yeah. Potentially being able to cure this, because they found that it's really hard to fix, like, a cancer cell. And so what the doctors are thinking now is it's really hard to fix a cancer cell, but it's a whole lot easier to turn these epigenetic switches on and off, which may in turn help defeat cancer. Right. Like, you want to get a tumor suppressing gene going. Yeah. But you want to get a cellular growth gene turned down a little bit. Right. Like that and that you just cured cancer. Yeah. This one doctor put it like this. He said that it's almost like a diplomacy instead of a war. Like, you'll go tell the cell, hey, you're a good human cell. You don't need to behave this way. You should not be behaving this way. Yes. It's called Aza citadine. Looks good to me. As a citadine, it was originally marketed for something else entirely, probably Alzheimer's, everything was. And then they come up with they figure out that it's actually turning down these growth cells or these growth genes, and they say, hey, how about we use this for leukemia? Right. There you go. Yeah. People are a little sudden in remission where they hadn't been before. Right. So it's pretty startling. Yeah. It's still in the early stages, though. Right. The other thing, too, is it's easier to fix the epigenome. That's the good news. As we move forward, it's also a lot easier to mess up your own epigenome diet and smoking and things like that. Yeah. There was the guy who was studying Sweden hooked up with a guy who proposed the entire field of epigenetics in. They got together with another researcher who was running that. You remember the framinghamton farmington? Is it Farmingham? Farmingam, framingham, framingham. The Massachusetts study. The heart study. Yeah. It's 40 years long or something. Right. Remember Great Britain's version of it. Like the Avon Longitudinal Study. Yeah. Okay. So this guy had a friend who had access to these files. And what they found was that 166 fathers in this study started smoking around age eleven. And so they started looking at these guys and found that their kids were shorter and fatter and just generally unhealthier than other kids, even controlling for other factors as well. Smoking is a problem, drugs are a problem. Cocaine addicted mice, past memory problems, on to three generations of their offspring. Yeah. It said that cocaine especially triggers epigenetic changes that affect like, hundreds of genes at the same time. Yeah. Because memory is just such a complex process. Yeah. So don't do cocaine. No. And don't smoke. Just a bad idea, especially at a young age. And Chuck, there's a project underway, I remember, the Human Genome Project completed in March of 2000. Yeah. Which is now that they're kind of like exactly. Did you read this Time article? No. At the end of it, the author is talking about the epigenome project. That's the big daddy. Right. And he was saying that the Human Epigenome Project is going to make the Human Genome Project look like the homework that 16th century school kids did on their advocates. Think about this. What they found in the Human Genome Project is 27,000 genes that were mapped. Right, right. Just fiddling with these combinations increases the map that needs to be created exponentially. Right. Like Domino's Pizza has 27 ingredients. They do. I went and counted. It produces 88 million different combinations from 27. Now imagine 27,000 ingredients. How many different combinations does that produce? Sure. This is the scope of the human epigenome project that's underway now. Wow. What about Pizza Hut with all their, like, stuffed crust and eat it backwards and the ingredients are underneath your pizza? Probably even more stuff. Yeah, but I think Domino's has more pizza because they've got like the Philly cheesesteak one and they have like the cheeseburger the bacon cheeseburger sandwich is good. Yeah, they do. Like the Reuben sandwich pizza. That would be very good. That would be good, yeah. So epigenetics is changing everything. I think at its core, it's going to point out that all of our understanding of medicine is just an odd way of describing an epigenetic change, like psychology, psychiatry. I predict that our future and complete understanding of humanity is going to be a combination of sociology and epigenetics. We thought we were on something with mirror neurons, but forget what we said. Just kidding. Actually, yeah, I think that you could probably explain that epigenetically and with sociology as well. Have you heard of this guy? Dr. Bruce Lipton? No. He's got a documentary out called The Living Matrix. And at first I was reading, I was like, wow, this guy's really onto something. But then I started reading other people saying, this guy is a quack. Oh, yeah, yeah. Basically he's a big epigenetics guy, but he thinks that your brain can essentially change your genetic expression by manipulating the epigenome, like concentrating. He thinks the placebo effect could potentially be explained by this and like spontaneous remission and cancer. Spontaneous combustion. Spontaneous remission, obviously, is when you go into remission with no known cause, not from any treatment. And he says, this is explained because you have a profound change in your perception of your life and what life is all about, and that can potentially alter the epigenome. Well, you could also make a case that this guy, what this guy is talking about is decreasing stress, which stresses wreaks havoc on us and could create methyl tags and alter gene expression. So maybe he's just using a quacky way of describing lowering your own stress levels by increasing self confidence. Yes. It's interesting when you see these people, though, and you watch a YouTube video and you think, wow, my gosh, that's the secret to the future. Right? And then you see all these other people that go, that guy is such a quack. Yeah. But at the same time you could say, well, maybe those other people are unimaginative. Yeah, good point. So if you want to learn more about epigenetics, I strongly recommend the University of Utah's website. Have you been on a Chuck? Yeah. Why didn't you recommend that to me? Did you see it? I don't think so. I did, like a month ago when we yeah, you can turn up gene expression, turn it down. A lot of foods that you should eat if you want to alter yourself, epigenetically, especially if you're pregnant or go to YouTube and watch the ghost in your jeans. PBS is literally mind blowing. Well, not literally. People always say literally. Figuratively mind just explode. Talk about changing your genetic expression. And if you want to read some very beautiful pros on epigenetics chock full of flight simulator references, read how epigenetics works by typing epigenetics in the handysearch bar@housedelforks.com. Which means it's time for listener mail. Yes, indeed. Josh. Josh, do you remember Sarah, the amazing eleven year old fan not eleven anymore. Who captured our hearts when she first emailed early on in the days of podcasting? Yes, I do. Like, she was one of the first fans, actually. Yes. Sarah the amazing eleven year old fan is now Sarah, the amazing 13 year old fan. Gosh, I know. I feel so old now. We shouldn't do this a while. Well, yeah, and we should keep like once a year we should update people on Sarah's age. And then if we're still doing this in five years when she graduates college, we should go like, high school. We should go to her graduation. We should give the commencement speech. I called valedictorian. Well, yeah, and the principal would be like, who are you guys? Can we get security in here? We'll say I'm the valedictorian. He's a salutatorian. What do you mean? So this comes from Sarah. She checks on this from time to time, and she's still just as cute at 13. She's not all Brady now that she's a teenager. Hello to some of my favorite people. Today I earned some strange looks from people about my knowledge of Legos or Lego bricks. I also tried making a sphere of Lego, but I couldn't figure it out. Also, today is my birthday. I'm really excited that I'm finally a teen yahoo. Do you remember what I asked for and what she asked for? She's got a blog now, and she asked if one of us could comment on her blog. And I went to her blog and commented. And her blog is basically her and her little friend talking back and forth to each other about stuff. How cute. Do they do their eyes with hearts? No. Well, I don't think you can do that. But it is really cute. And I'm actually going to encourage people to go to her blog. I hope she gets mad traffic. And her blog, Josh, is Sarahlovesaustralcommercials Webscom. And here's the clincher. It is. S-A-S-A-R-A-H. There's no www, right. No. And she Misspells Australian all over the place. All over the place. Which makes it even cuter. She spells it austrai webs. W-E-B SCOM. And I hope people come out there and check it out. I hope so, too. So she turned 13. She says, by the way, can you please not tell Kristen, Molly or Katie that I think you guys are better than them? I think that would be kind of like bragging. It would be kind of like bragging, which is why we would never do it. We would never tell them. And I'm sure they don't listen to our show, so they'll never know. And then she closes, and this is Emily. I just thought, this is the cutest thing ever. Well, so long, farewell Alvir saying goodbye adu ado to you and you and you and then in Printhesis, she says, in case you didn't know, that was from The Sound of Music. So long, farewell. Yeah, and that's one of Emily's favorites. Well, you should sing the rest of it, too. So, Sarah, happy birthday. You're awesome. You're a dedicated fan. Clearly see it. We just think you're super cool. And good luck with the blog. If you do learn how to dot eyes with heart, we want to know. Sarah, happy birthday to you if you want to become a fan who's captured our hearts, send us something interesting. We want another super fan. And be a cute little kid. Otherwise you're not going to help as well. Broken. English doesn't hurt too. Sure, you can send an email to stuffpodcast@housestuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Want more housetofworks? Check out our blog on the housetofworks.com homepage. 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." | |
09fb6852-9986-11ec-bdaa-d37953e84036 | Short Stuff: Friends of Dorothy | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-friends-of-dorothy | The gay community had to use code not too many years ago and one way they identified was as “Friends of Dorothy.” So who was Dorothy? | The gay community had to use code not too many years ago and one way they identified was as “Friends of Dorothy.” So who was Dorothy? | Wed, 02 Mar 2022 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=61, tm_isdst=0) | 13245660 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry. And this is short stuff. The Slang Edition. That's right. And while we are not friends of Dorothy, we are friends of friends of Dorothy. Well put, man. I wanted to say, hey, we're friends of Dorothy because it seems like it could mean that you just endorsed the LGTBQ community. But that's not what it means. No, it doesn't. It means you're straight up member of the LGBTQ community. That's right. And it's slang. Like I said, it doesn't have any direct meaning. Or does it? We're going to find out. But the whole reason that you would have slang, kind of a coded phrase for being gay is just part of the shameful path of how gay people were treated in Europe and America up until very recently, of course. And so there was code that they would use amongst themselves so all manner of bad things could happen if word was out about them. So shamefully, they did need code. But like you said in this article that you put together, let's move on to the more fun stuff, which is where this came from. Right. Who is Dorothy? Who is Dorothy? That's a great question. And actually, it's never really been answered, to tell you the truth. Supposedly that phrase friend of Dorothy to me and a gay person has been around since the World War II era, says the Pride website. Okay, it's a legit source. But then we head on over to the wizard of Oz fan blog, Friends of Dorothy, and they say it doesn't appear in any gay slang books or academic reviews of gay slang in the 20th century, which is really weird because it definitely did exist. It wasn't just me and people I knew using that. Like it was widespread and exactly how old it is really kind of matters, doesn't it? Well, yeah, because we're going to talk about some Dorothy candidates. I feel like we should probably talk about these first three and then take our break and get to the big Whammy. You know exactly what you're doing. Oh, I appreciate that. The first Dorothy we're going to talk about, and there's some legitimacy here for sure, because there was a socialite named Dorothy King in early 20th century London, and Dorothy King very early on in London, was a friend of the gay community, especially gay men. She would have these big parties, and apparently they would use friend of Dorothy or a friend of Mrs. King to refer to themselves as slang to get them in these parties or just to talk about them. Yeah, the fact that there's also a friend of Mrs. King meaning the same thing, a gay man in the early 20th century, mid 20th century, that really supports the possibility that she was the original Dorothy. I agree. Okay. The next one is Dorothy Parker. She's also a great contender. She's coming out of not just New York, but also Los Angeles in the 1930s and then later on in the 60s. Those are the two times that she really had a huge impact and was kind of almost an icon in the gay community because like Dorothy King, she surrounded herself with gay people at a time when gay people were very much persecuted. And she was also a huge ardent supporter of the civil rights movement as well. Yeah, I did not know about her 60s. Come back. I know all about the 30s. Dorothy Parker was kind of into researching that for a little while quite a few years ago. Oh, yeah. But did not know about the 60s. La version doesn't surprise me. Pretty cool cause I can see her then sitting around a mid century modern pool doing the same thing. She was rocking in the 30s in New York. Yes. But she married a man who was openly bisexual. He referred to himself as, quote queer as a billy goat. So she was very much in the running as a possible Dorothy. Yes. And then lastly, the third of the first three Dorothies was a woman named Dorothy Dean. She was an African American socialite in New York, and she was very much in the orbit of the gay community, especially through Andy Warhol and his gang. And was not like right, exactly. It sounds like she's kind of like hung out with Warhol every once in while. A she was part of Warhol's inner circles would appear in his films. She was a bit of ause for him. And then also as if her cool cred in the art community and gay community couldn't get any better. I guess a doorman is what they would have called her in the unlimberted early 60s. Yeah, if you wanted to be cool back then, you could work the door at one of two places, either CBGB or Maxis Kansas City. And she worked the door at Maxis Kansas City, which was a music club and bar and hangout of the coolest of the cool in the yes. So she knew everybody. And she also had a lot of gay friends too. So it's entirely possible that she was the Dorothy that we spoke of. She couldn't have been the Dorothy if this phrase has been around since World War II. But one of the things that I figured out about this, Chuck, is that it could have been any of these Dorothys, all these Dorothies. You could use that phrase and it would still hold water at different times depending on the context too. So it's not like any of these are wrong, necessarily. They all win. I agree. But there is one that's actually the winner. That's right. And we'll introduce this winter, and I bet you know who it is right after this. Okay, Chuck, it's time for the big reveal. Who is Dorothy for reals? Somewhere over the rainbow. Keep going. I'm not familiar. I don't know the rest of the words. Something cries there's. Way up high. Way up high. Who cries? Don't cry. No, I think you've miseard it. I think you're right. We're talking about Dorothy Gail, the character in L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz book series. And there's a few big time reasons for this one really big time reason. But the movie wizard of Oz is special in the LGTBQ community because Dorothy kind of comes out in her own way and undergoes his transformation from a very sort of boring black and white world to a brilliant, colorful, rainbow filled world. Yeah. And that's just if you're reading the book. She also in the book befriends and accompanies three men, none of whom are traditionally masculine or manly. And there's even a part in the book well, not The Wizard of Oz, but one of the other books from the Oz series where another character tells her, dorothy, you have some queer friends. And she says, the queerness doesn't matter so long as they're friends. I don't know about that part, because that's not what queer meant. No, but the point is this is whether it meant no, they certainly didn't mean queer is engaged. They just meant strange, unusual. And that's, I think, where queer applied to gay people, especially in the mid 20th century, that's where it came from. You're weird, you're off, or whatever. And Dorothy's saying, it doesn't matter how they're off. It doesn't even matter that they're off. It just matters that they're friends. And I think if you felt alienated, especially if you felt alienated because you were gay, something like that would have resonated with you. And I think that's why a lot of gay people it's easy to stereotype at this point because there's probably a lot of gay people who can't stand wizard of Oz. But there's a lot of gay people who do love with wizard of Oz. That's right. And one of the big reasons why is because the star of wizard of Oz was none other than Judy Garland, who is top three gay icon. Maybe. I mean, a lot of arguments for number one, but I would say definitely top three. Who are the other two? Lanchaine Jr. Well, I don't know. That would be tough because you could throw Cher in there. You could throw Barbara Streisand in there. Certainly. Madonna who? Liberatchi. Oh, Liberatchi, of course. So maybe it might be one of those things where the top three is like a list of ten people. Yeah, I think because we just had so much trouble even narrowing it down to top three. She might be the number one, then. Maybe. But it's not for us to say anyway. No, it's not. You're right. Chuckle we can speculate, but Judy Garland is certainly a gay icon. There have been everything from her funeral which was attended by more people than Rudolph Valentino. Rufus Waynewright did an entire tour where Rufus sings Judy Garland. Yeah. And her funeral that day of her funeral. Later that night was the Stonewall riot. And a lot of people were like, well, Judy Garland's death kicked off the Stonewall riots, which kicked off the era of civil rights for gay people. And that's apparently been refuted by some people, but other people said, no, that definitely had something to do with it. I bet it was a factor, man. I mean, if you're at a boiling point and then one of your icons and spiritual leaders dies, that'll send you. And if you're at a bar drinking and you're sad about that, that could definitely be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Yeah. And if you're sad about it and everyone with you at that bar is sad about the exact same thing, that sense of camaraderie and collection, for sure. Yes, I could definitely translate into that. And there was also it's really kind of difficult to under state the impact and what an icon she was. Did I say undertake? Yeah, I did. It's difficult to overstate it, but I saw it really summarized well by this one quote. Some writer was describing a bio of her that was first put on as a stage play but was later produced into Judy starring Renee Zellweger. The stage play is called End of the Rainbow, but this writer said that it was explaining the end of the rainbow is like a gay version of The Passion of the Christ. Very nice. It really kind of gets across like what an icon she is and was in the gay community. Yeah. I'm going to end up with my final verdict being Dorothy could be a combination of all these Dorothy totally. And could have been any one of them to different people at different times. So the last thing about this, Chuck, is the slang has actually gone the way of the dinosaur, which is good because that suggests that gay people don't feel the need to encode their gayness nearly as much anymore, if at all, in a lot of places, which is wonderful. But before that happened, right before that happened, in the late 80s, there was an actual witch hunt to root out gay people in the military that was spearheaded by Navy intelligence services and army intelligence. And it was terrible and shameful and they wasted hundreds of millions of dollars doing this because in admiral named Joseph S. Donald flipped out at the idea that they were gay men in the military. Apparently, he'd never noticed and wasted all this money doing this. But the one good thing that came out of this was this amazing story that I think you should tell everybody. Well. The intelligence then I say that with quotes around it got a hold of the Friends of Dorothy usage and they thought there was a real Dorothy that was providing quarter for gay men in the military and was sympathetic to their cause and aiding and abetting them and so they spent a lot of money of your tax dollars trying to chase down who Dorothy was. Because these friends of hers were serving in the military. And they wanted to get her to inform on them. They didn't ever find her, though. That seems like a made up story. It's so great. It does. I saw it in multiple sources, though, so I think it's actually real, including the La. Times. And that's it, everybody. That's it for friends of Dorothy. Now, you can say, hey, I'm a friend of a friend of Dorothy. And people say, what does that mean? You say, Let me tell you that's right. Okay. Which, of course means short stuff is that stuff you should know is a production of iheart Radio. For more podcasts, my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
a6c25582-5462-11e8-b449-0732108c3d66 | Olive Oil: Mother Nature's Gift | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/olive-oil-mother-natures-gift | Olive oil is one of Mother Nature's greatest gifts to humanity. Learn everything you ever wanted to know about the NUMBER ONE OIL, right here, right now. | Olive oil is one of Mother Nature's greatest gifts to humanity. Learn everything you ever wanted to know about the NUMBER ONE OIL, right here, right now. | Thu, 15 Nov 2018 16:39:17 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=15, tm_hour=16, tm_min=39, tm_sec=17, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=319, tm_isdst=0) | 58135279 | audio/mpeg | "You like that, huh? Oh, I never get tired of the trumpet fair of Josh Clarke. That's right. So that means that there's a new announcement for a new show. That's right. Fans in San Francisco and the Bay Area in general in Northern California should not be surprised that we are coming back to SF Sketchfest for what is this, four years in a row? Easily four, if not five. Yes, it is one of our favorites. It is the premier comedy festival in the country, in my opinion. And we are always super happy that our buddy Janet Barney invites us back. Yes. So on Thursday, January 17, Chuck, we are going to be doing a stuffy shadow live show at the Castro, right? That is correct. And the next day, on Friday the 18th, we're both doing our own thing, too. So you can see Josh and Chuck and then Josh and Chuck. Yeah, actually, I think I'm on Saturday, but yeah. Okay. Well, mine is on the 18th on Friday, and I'm doing an end of the world live show where you can come hear me talk about the end of the world and all the reasons we should try to not let that happen. It should be pretty cool. That's right. And I'll be doing my second ever live movie Crush, with very special live guest, Busy Phillips. And we'll be talking about the great, great Noah Bombach classic film, Kicking and Screaming, one of my favorite movies. Awesome. So you can get all the information you need and tickets by going to the SF sketchfest website. And they will have schedules, tickets, all that jazz. And we will eventually have links up, I'm sure, on Sysklive. And we will see you in San Francisco in January. Tickets go on sale tomorrow. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the flowing podcast of all time. Pretty great. You're getting good at those. Oh, man. You'd think after ten years I'd actually be decent. Adam, you're getting good. Getting sharp. Ten years, Chuck. Good Lord. Going on eleven, dude. Yeah, it's true. Eventually it will be eleven. That's right. And then twelve, and then pretty much infinity after that, I would guess. When you say I feel like we're almost daring each other to keep going at this point. Instead of doing that, Chuck, instead of just going on like this, let's do olive oil instead. Yeah, man. It's kind of cool that ten and a half years in can still look around the world. Look in our pantry, for that matter. Sure. And say, man, olive oil up next. Those little cinnamon candy toppings that you put on cake. It's after olive oil, obviously. It's just intuitive. Yes. But, Chuck, I think you should announce to everybody who wrote this article for us yeah. The Grabster. We've been Lucky enough to get the Grabster to kind of pump out more articles for us here in the near future. Yes, we grabbed the grabster. That's right. It's super great because the Grabster does really good research and gives us good stuff. So we are basing this one on a Grabster article, which is just phenomenal. It's been a while. Yeah, man. So there's a lot of pressure on it during this entire episode, I guess, is what we're trying to say. I think he nailed it. This is very thorough. It is. Yeah. He's good like that, man. And it is. It's so thorough, in fact, that I think we should just go ahead and start at the beginning, the very beginning, which is basically where Ed started it. He fast forwarded a little past the cooling of the Earth, but then picks up where olives actually started. And apparently in a 2013 study of chloroplast DNA genes in olives, apparently that is a part of an olive that like from tree to tree along a lineage, the DNA gets passed along so you can actually trace the lineage of trees. Some researchers traced the lineage of olives, domesticated olives all the way back about six to 8000 years ago, somewhere around the border between Turkey and Syria. That is where the first person said, hey, I kind of like the cut of your jib wild olives, but I think I can make you a little better. Let me harness you and force you into domestication. Here you go into the ground between what will eventually be Syria and Turkey. Yeah. And that's like you were saying, just when people caught on to domesticating a wild animal. But wild olives, they've been around as long as olive trees have been around, and olive trees have been around. Like, there's evidence that fossilized pollen and evidence that shows that Tuktuk and all his gang were eating olives, right? Yeah, they were eating olives. And then so were their bird friends were eating olives, too. Sure. Wild olives are like, I think, a little more bitter, and they're smaller, which is why that early Corticulture has said, I can do better. I'm a human being. I basically own this planet, so I'm going to make this olive tree do what I want it to. And they did. Olives grew bigger and less bitter. I don't want to say sweeter because that's not quite the right word, but just less bitter, more edible. And over time, they've resulted in something like 700 different cultivars, which a cultivar is with olives or with any plant. It's a version of the same species, but it has different characteristics. Yes. Because of the human hand. The human hand. Excuse me. That's right. So when we got involved and we said, hey, let's domesticate this stuff, we did so because of those reasons. Maybe we want different kinds of olives. Maybe we want to scale this thing and have an olive grove and get a higher yield maybe we want them bigger and fatter. Maybe we want them less bitter. So depending on who was growing them and domesticating them it really kind of varied on what kind of olive you were going to get. But the point is, there were lots of different kinds of and still many different kinds of olives. Would you say 700, 700 cults of ours? From what I saw. Yeah. And they're all just a little bit different from their little buddy next to them. Yeah. At some point somebody said, oh, I'd love to see an orange olive. No one's ever done an orange olive before and they just got to work doing that. And now we have. Actually, I don't think that exists. But that's a pretty good example of what could have happened had somebody a thousand years ago said I want to see what an orange olive looks like. We would have an orange olive cultivar. That's right. But that's it. It's just basically difference in size. Shape. Also the size of the tree. The shape of the tree. All of trees. Remember in our pando episode? How could I forget, man? It was a good one. I love pando. I love pando as well, Chuck. But we were talking about long lived trees. Olive trees are like, pretty long live themselves. There's a couple that are supposed to be 2000 years old and I saw one called the Olive Tree of Vuveste on Crete and it's thought to be 3000 years old. And it's just a perfect tree. Have you seen it? Yeah, the one in Creed. Yeah. Because Creed was the seat. Crete was the seat. That's what it says on all the tshirts, the olive seed. Right. Back in the day during the Bronze Age, I believe was like the seat of olive oil production for the world. And there's a temple at Nosas, I think that's how you say it, right? In the Case Island. Yeah. It's not Kenosis. Okay. That temple is thought to have housed, I guess, at any given time 16,000 gallons of olive oil. At any point. Like, you could walk in there and you would find about 16,000 gallons in clay amphory. Yeah. And as far as the tree goes, as you said, they generally are very old. They grow very slowly. And like you said, they can range in size. It's pretty uncommon to have super tall ones because we have domesticated them to be a little bit easier to cultivate which means smaller and shorter summer like shrubs sometimes. As far as North America and South America, they are not native to our lands although they do grow because Europeans brought them over. So now the United States and Mexico, Chile, Argentina and Australia successfully produced olive oil outside of, obviously, the Mediterranean region which is still, I think, Tunisia, Italy and Spain are the people who are really pumping that stuff out. Right. The leaders, for sure. And the reason I mentioned our bird friends is because olives actually spread really easily. Birds, I guess, eat the olives, poop the seeds out, which I feel bad for a bird because all of pits are fairly big. Sure. I wouldn't want to poop out an olive pit. I can imagine if I were a tiny little bird, that'd be a big ordeal. But that's how olive trees spread. And since they thrive, actually, in fairly semi arid conditions, like too much water is not good for them. They can survive cold snaps pretty well, they spread pretty easily, and they can be grown all over the place, not just in the Mediterranean. Yeah. And Ed, I love how he put it here, basically, don't take me or anyone else to task about all these dates, because domestication of the olive tree and the beginnings of olive oil could have started in different places around the world at different times. Yeah, and he said, basically, it's not important to try and nail down a specific date and region because it is conflicting. And what's important is that the olive and the olive oil industry well, I guess it's an industry now, but back then it was just called olive oil. Sure. It was super important. It's not just oil. It was important to religion and culture and really had a big impact on these ancient empires. Yeah. He makes the point to say, like, this region that produced the world's three major religions, or two of them, at least three of them. Three of the four. The big four. I'm going with that now. The big five. Jewish, christian, Islamic and Scientology. Right. The big four. Okay, let me just say that it produced three of the world's major religions. Also some of the great earliest cultures. They all came about in this place where olives and then olive oil production was pretty widespread and plentiful. And he doesn't go so far as to say, like, one necessarily influenced the other, but they were definitely intertwined. And you can make the case like they didn't say chicken eggs are for the gods or something like that. All of them. It's special in its own strange way to human culture, especially the earliest famous contours of human culture. Yeah. And so important that even the word oil, just for all the oils, is derived from the Latin word for olive oil, specifically oleum. So you could even say that olive oil is sort of the OG, the original oil. Right. And like, Popeye's girlfriend would be olive oil. That's right. Just call her Oleum for sure. That was his pet name for it. Should we take a break? I think so. We're starting to get a little charged up. Might as well defuse it and no. All right, we'll be back to talk about how olive oil played a part in all this culture and mythology. All right, Chuck. So as I mentioned, spoiler alert. Christianity is one of the world's big three religions, and olive oil makes an appearance in it. Did you know that? I did. Well, olives do, at least. Yeah. And Ed actually over delivered here, I think. Yeah, I agree. He was kind of showing his stuff. He got excited. But we'll go through some of these. Obviously in the Book of Genesis, if anyone's ever heard the story of Noah after the flooding, noah sends out that dove and says, hey, dude, go out there and see what we have in store for us. What's alive, what's dead, and give me a report. And the dove said, sure thing, Noah, and flew away and came back with an olive branch. So it might sound like someone's underdelivering Mr. Dove, but what that meant was, there's life out there because the olive tree is growing and everyone loves olives. Right? There you go. That was the implication check. You're basically a biblical scholar at this point. Pretty much. But I mean, think about it. The dove carrying the olive branch, that's almost worldwide. Somebody can point to that and be like, sure, yeah, that's a good feeling, is what that symbolizes. We all know what that means. That means there's a fight coming, right? Or somebody doesn't want to fight anymore. Right. So here's an olive branch that I taped to a dove, and I'm throwing it at you. What else? One of the things that struck me was that olive oil wasn't always used as food. It was used as definitely as an offering to the gods. It was portioned out very exactly and precisely. And we actually have tablets with linear B writing for the messenyan culture that show that it was taken very seriously. It was like, you get this little quarter ounce of olive oil. You get this quarter ounce of olive oil, sign your name here to say you got your olive oil, kind of thing. And then part of it even goes to the gods. Right? Yeah, exactly. And they have to sign for it. They do zoos. But then it was also used in bathing culture as well. Yeah. I mean, Emily has olive oil in her soap, right? Okay, so this was a little less soapy than that. This is a little more straightforward, wherein you would take I believe this is the Greeks, right? Or the Romans. What's the difference? No, it was in Athens. Okay. So the ancient Athenians would use olive oil that was infused with, like, an herb or something like that and pour it on their body and then use a stick called a Sturgil to scrape it off. And that was bathing. Part of bathing, I should say. I just made so many Italians and Greeks mad because you said it's the same thing. Yeah, well, I mean, to be fair, rome definitely modeled its culture almost exclusively on classical Greece. Come on. I was just joking. Now. Sure, they know that I was just joking in, like, a stereotypical Italian accent that will complete it. It's just a joke, you know, perfect then. So of course, ancient Egypt was involved. It feels like any time you're talking about some great from olive oil to peanut butter well, not peanut butter. You can go find it on the walls of the tombs of ancient Egypt. And of course, the Romans just like it's. Either the Roman Empire or the Chinese are the ones who are going to make advances by leaps and bounds. And in terms of olive oil, it was the Roman Empire who really got those agricultural techniques down pat for kind of scaling it as far as their scale goes. Plus, they were the first ones to really spread olive oil production beyond the Mediterranean and I think the Middle East, because the Roman Empire spread so far and because olive oil is such an integral part of that culture, they took olive oil basically everywhere with them. And olive oil cultivation or production olive cultivation. And olive oil production went far and wide because of the Romans. That's right. And again, one of the reasons why they were able to spread this stuff far and wise, because all of trees grow pretty well in all sorts of different climates. As long as they're not overwatered, they're going to do okay. They like bright sunlight, they're hardy, evergreen, shrub like trees. But you do need a lot of water, though. You can get more olives by watering them more than just neglecting them, but you don't want to over fertilize them. From what I understand, they're really low maintenance, fruit bearing trees, from what I can tell. But, yes, you step up the fertilizer, you step up the water if you want to do commercial olive oil production. But if you just have like, an olive tree at home and you're just growing it for fun, you can go out of town for a while and not have to worry about your olive tree. Do you know who is into this big time? Who? Chad Crowley. He's into growing olives? Well, he's into olive oil and to the point where his retirement job might be olive oil, like olive farming and growing and cultivating. Does he grow olives? No, but he's into it to a degree that I didn't fully understand until I talked to him about it. That's really cool. We should tell everybody, all the millions of people listening who don't know who Chad Crowley is. He directed our TV show. That's right. Stuff You Should Know. The TV show. He was the director, producer. He had a lot to do with it. And that scarred him so much that he just wants to go live on an olive farm. That's pretty much right. So the fruit of the olive tree is the olive, right. And they ripened to black, purple, sometimes a little red. If you see a green olive, that means it's not ripe yet. I did not know that. Did you? No. Because I hate olives. Yeah, that's right. I was kind of hoping that I had imagined that. But no, I don't like olives. That's crazy, man. I love olives. A lot of people don't like olives. Dude, whatever. They're crazy. They're crazy. They're crazy. All of you crazy. No, it's called personal taste that we respect, I guess. Remember? I guess I keep forgetting when it comes to olives. Yeah. So as the oil in the olive increases as it ripens, so you want them it's kind of a very tight line that you walk as an olive farmer because you want these things to ripen as much as possible to get the most oil. But if they overripen and then just start falling off the tree, they're no good. You got to pick it off the tree. So, like winemakers. It's a very stressful thing to watch that crop. I can imagine. And it comes down to sometimes the day or the hour of the day to really maximize your yield. Yes. Because if you think about it, you have an olive tree with a bunch of olives growing on it. You have to time the ripening of those olives. Not under ripe, not overripe, but also not every olive on that tree is going to ripen simultaneously. Not only do you have to time it so that they're ripe, but the maximum number of olives on that tree are ripe at any given period, too, for sure. I'll bet that is super stressful farming. Way more stressful than corn farming. Corn basically grows itself. You just sit around in your easy chair and say, hurry up, corn. Get in your basket. Yeah. And then it just farts it off the tree right onto your plate, the stalk, and does the little bow and says, how do you do? You just clap from your easy chair and say, I love corn trees. Yes. If you have a small farm and you're like an old family business in Italy, let's say, you might still be hand picking these things, which is great. But big major operations, they have what they call shaker machines, and they drive through the farm and shake the tree. Have you ever seen one of those things? Yeah. And shaker machines, it's not just specific to olive trees. They use them for all sorts of fruiting trees. They just shake it. They do it's like the trees. It's like, okay, that's over. Yeah. It's kind of interesting to see. And then there's, I guess, a catch that catches the stuff falling off the tree, and then it shoots it up a conveyor belt over into, like, a truck driving beside it. There you go. You just harvested a bunch of olives. Boom. But that's like a commercial thing. That's a commercial operation. Right? If you're like a mom and pop operation, like you were saying. Or if you're harvesting from very old trees, you would not use one of those machines. Yeah, you wouldn't want to go to 1000 year old olive tree and introduce it to the shaker machine. That'd be mean. That would be so mean. It's like I've seen empires rise and fall and now some jerk has got a new haul and shaker machine running right over me. That runs on diesel. Yes. Thanks, Todd. So flavor of an olive oil is going to depend on a lot of things. And olive oil and wine, they grow in similar regions a lot of times and they have a lot of similarities, which is why often when you go to wine country, there'll be a wine shop that also sells olive oil or an olive oil store that also sells wine, and you start to wonder, where's the line? You mean? I went to Calistoga in either Sonoma or napa. I cannot remember. I think it's Napa. And it's absolutely true. They're almost one in the same. You just go from a wine shop to an olive oil shop, but it's the most amazing olive oil you've ever tasted in your life. It's the best. So just to be clear, you hate olives, but you like olive oil, and I understand they're totally different. Oh, yeah, I love olive oil. Okay, so have you gone to olive oil shops and just done like, little shots of olive oil? Dozens and dozens. Aren't they just amazing? Yeah, man. I like the grassy kind. I like the nutty kind. Yeah. And I think I've told you this before, really good olive oil can really give me like a chemical burn on my throat. Oh, really? So it has to have kind of a buttery quality to it, I guess, for me to really like it. Yeah. And this is the kind of olive oil that you're not like even cooking with, necessarily. You're drizzling it on your salad or you're dipping your bread in it and stuff like that, or you're injecting it for its anti inflammatory properties. Hold on. Okay, we'll get there. All right. But that flavor, like I was saying, like wine or the grapes that make wine is affected by the soil that you grow it in, the climate, how much rain it got, the general terroir. It really can change the end product of that olive and thus that oil that you're going to get. And you know, the old school oiled people, olive oil experts, let's say. Sure. They'll say that if you really want a great olive oil, you won't even find it on some big mass farm. It's like you can find it the best stuff on like, just an olive tree that's growing somewhere in Italy on somebody's property right. That wasn't necessarily raised for that purpose. And it's growing alongside other kinds of trees and not like smashed together against a bunch of other olive trees, which is basically permaculture, is what he's describing. Yeah, I guess so. Remember in the permaculture up where it's like you grow crops around other trees and other types, just a bunch of different types of plants together produce better crops. Yeah, but over there, they just say it's Italy. Right. Man, they're going to really be happy with this one. I hope so. Apparently they also hybridize, too, which explains how we've gotten 700 different cultivars of domesticated olive plants. You just take a tree that does one thing really well that produces big, fat orange olives, and you take another tree that does really well in a closet and you graft them together. And now you have a tree you can keep in the closet that produces big, fat orange olives. And it's the biggest freak of nature olive tree anyone's ever seen. Pretty amazing. So, Chuck, I think we kind of beat around the bush, as it were, the tree long enough. Let's talk about how you actually make olive oil. It's pretty cool because it's so easy in practice. As that points out, it's a stone fruit. It's a droop, like a plumber, a peach, where you have that paracarp, that flesh on the outside and then that hard seed right in the middle that you were talking about that a bird's anus cannot handle. No, but unlike those other kinds of, like, say, stone fruit, you don't get the oil from the seed. There's some in there, you can get some from there, but it's really hard to do. What makes olive oil different from other kind of fruit oils or vegetable oils in general is that it doesn't come from the seed. The oil comes from the actual olive itself. Which I guess is what I would have thought, but I didn't realize that most of the oil we get comes from seeds. Although it makes total sense because sunflower oil doesn't come from the flower petals, it comes from the seeds. Yeah, but olive oil is different. It stands kind of on its own in that way that you get the oil from the part of the olive you eat the fruit. That's right. And the process of getting that oil is startlingly old fashioned, simple. You mash that olive, we'll call it the flesh or the paracarp. You mash that into a paste. You press that paste to get the oil, and then you clean it up. There's a little bit of solids and a little bit of water leftover and you remove that. What has changed over the years is how we do that. Because back in the day, they would use stone wheels. Like when you see, like, a donkey walking in a circle attached to a contraption, just hating life. Hating life. That's what that donkey is doing. It's rolling a big wheel in a circular path over and over all day long, smashing these olives into a pulp. That pulp is called a promise. And then finally, in the 20th century, they started using things like steel drum grinders or and this one would surprise me, hammers. Mechanized hammers. Which is not a good idea. No, it's not. It probably seemed like a good idea in the 50s when they introduced it, and now they're like, this makes terrible olive oil. And somebody said, I know we'll deal to sell it for really cheap in the supermarket. And they said, Genius. Yes, because of the friction. Right. Because heat is no good. That's why they call it cold pressed. Like good stuff is cold pressed. Heat is no good for olive oil. It makes it just changes the taste. It does, very much. So it introduces tastes you don't want. It can also, paradoxically, get rid of tastes you do want. It's not good at all to introduce heat. And that's another reason why olive oil kind of stands on its own as far as vegetable oils go, with just about every other oil, you cook with, like a vegetable oil or seed oil, heat is necessary to get the oil out of the seed. With olive oil, you don't use heat. And so it preserves a lot of the flavors that you lose with other vegetable oils, which is why so many vegetable oils just taste exactly the same. Does this all just come from the same VAT, where if you take a sip of olive oil, you know that's olive oil, there's no mistaking whatsoever. Yeah. You don't want to take a sip of, like, just standard vegetable oil. You don't want to, but you can. Well, I'm sure you could, but they're not going to put that on your plate with balsamic vinegar to a restaurant with a little pepper grind on top. It depends on the restaurant. You think. Yeah, I could see it. So the grinding process, you have to do this long enough so the malaxation process emerges. And from what I gather, that's when actual oil is released from these cells, and then they start to combine with one another until it's like recognizable oil. Is that about right? Yeah, like tiny, tiny little particle droplets start to combine into larger fat droplets of oil, and you just get more oil out of the actual olive itself. Right. And that's just to get the pulp. Yes. Pomace. Right? Yeah. But that's not the actual pressing of the oil that comes next. Right. That's just the crushing of it to loosen things up, to kind of get the party started. The pressing is number two, so the promise or the paste is put in. Traditionally, it's put onto mats or wooden boards that have holes all over it and then stacked. So you put like, say, a mat down, put some of that pompeo on top of it, put another mat down, put some more palmas on top, and then you got a nice little stack going, and then you get a board. And then you go get the human giant to lay on top of the board and press down, get the largest human in the village to come and sit on it. Right. And then that actually you're pressing the oil from the promise and all that oil. Is collected. And, buddy, you've got the first hints of olive oil and you could actually stop right there. And some people do. Yeah. Today, of course, the first thing they started doing was hydraulic presses because Giuseppei was busy. There weren't enough jessepis to go around. I guess that's true. But today a centrifuge, which I didn't know is used, which makes perfect sense because you get a centrifuge spinning and it's going to swing all that pulp to the outside, and the oil is going to separate and leave that pulp behind, and there's no heat whatsoever. They still call it cold pressing even though it's not even being pressed, which is interesting. Yes, I guess it's true. I hadn't thought about that. Like, they don't call it cold spun olive oil. They could, I guess. Right. But they still call it cold press. So when you see it on the bottle, that's what that means. There's been no heat or chemical processes to make that oil that you're about to delight in. It's all strictly mechanical. Yeah. And it doesn't take long with these centrifuges. It happens in minutes. Yeah. Almost disappointingly. Like you're like it's ready. I was going to wait for a little while after that first press. Whether it's with the centrifuge or whether it's actually pressed, you have olive oil technically right there. But there's usually a second step involved because most olive oil is very clear and see through and beautiful, sure. Maybe with a little bit of a green tint to it, most likely some sort of kind of golden color. But there's another step to get to that part. It's just basically a filtration step. And for many years, several thousand years, I would guess, they basically just set the olive oil out to sit and filter on its own, to let the water particles that were suspended in there and any little bits of solid matter from the olives leftover that were still kind of floating around, they would eventually settle down to the bottom of sediment. And then everything on top was pure, filtered olive oil. It's called decantation, and it took like, four to ten months to get to that point, depending on the type of olive use. Right. So if you want a mass market olive oil, you can't wait four to ten months. I'm sure plenty of people do, but you pay for that. That's the really expensive stuff that you're getting. What they figured out is you can use a centrifuge again and you can filter out the particulate matter in the suspended water. And now you have fully filtered, decanted olive oil that's ready for market. That's right. Then you've still got this pulp left over, this stuff that you've extracted the oil, but there's still a little bit of oil in there, and they want to use everything. So this is when they actually use the heat. They use heat in a chemical process to get every single bit of that oil out. And that oil is not something you want to ingest. That's called lampanta. Right. And that is like fuel oil. And I love that Ed always puts in there in the industry, if you call someone else's olive oil and ponte, that's like what it calls a sick burn. Right. You're saying that their olive oil is inedible it's only good to be used for fuel oil. Yeah. Man, that's pretty rough. Really? I think so, too. Jesseppe would he would smash if he heard you call his olive oil lamponte. Just stepping smash. So you want to take a break and then come back and talk about whether olive oil is healthy or not? Yes, and yes, it is. All right, Chuck. So everybody knows olive oil is healthy. Unless you've read articles that say that it's not healthy. There are very few things that demonstrate terrible science, nutritional reporting than olive oil. It's all just very sensationalist. Yeah. Here's the deal. Olive oil is a much better alternative than most other oils. It is a mono saturated fat, which is always better than a saturated fat. It'll reduce your LDL cholesterol, which is the bad stuff. And so if you're replacing other oils with olive oil, they will say things in studies like, you have a reduced rate of cancer or cardiovascular disease or inflammation. Yeah, it'll help reduce inflammation, which we talk a lot about. It has vitamin E and vitamin K, and all those things are good for you. But that can't be good enough to the writers of health books and newspaper articles or web articles. Right. Because they champion it as this miracle oil that will make you live forever and lose weight all at the same time. And that's not the case. Right. And it really kind of ascended in the modern west and the 90s, thanks to the Mediterranean diet, which is basically like, look at the Italians. Look at how much pasta they eat, and they're all skinny and healthy and they live forever. What's going on over there? Yeah, there's a lot going on over there as the answer. There is. But a lot of people settled on, no. Olive oil is the key. It's the magic potion, as it were. Right, right. It's not it's good for you, but it's good for you in the sense that if you're eating something and you're going to be using, like, vegetable oil, canola oil, and you replace it with olive oil, you've made a very good decision. If you sit around and just eat olive oil by the tablespoon all day long, that's bad for you. That's too much of a good thing. Olive oil is a really good standing for stuff that's far, far less healthy than olive oil is. Yeah. And if you're on the Mediterranean diet and you say, looking at those Italians, they're eating fish and they're drinking red wine and they're eating lots of fiber and they're walking up and down the steepest hills on planet Earth, and they're strolling the shores of Lake Cuomo and have a great family structure, like low stress, like all these things combined. It's not like they shouldn't even call it the Mediterranean diet. They should call it being Mediterranean. Right. You can't be from Atlanta and slurp down some olive oil and then pretend you're from the shores of Lake Guoma right now, where's that bag of pork cracklings? Exactly. So it is healthy, but it shouldn't be overstated how healthy it is. Right. But on the other hand, there have been studies that say, no, not only is olive oil not healthy, it's actually bad for you. Yeah, I don't know about that. Those have not been borne out in follow up studies. But the basis of that whole line of thinking was that when you apply heat to olive oil, eg. Cook it or Ie cook it. I'm sorry, everyone who loves Latin, that you're actually creating toxic compounds in the olive oil. Right. So you're actually hurting yourself. That apparently is not the case, that the amount of heat that we apply to olive oil to cook isn't enough to actually build up toxic compounds. And if anything, olive oil's smoke point is high enough, higher than other kinds of vegetable oils, that it actually is less likely to build up any kind of toxic compounds through cooking. So the jury is still out as it is on just about everything we understand about nutrition. But from what we can understand, olive oil is not actually bad for you. Agree. It's not going to give you lasting life, but it's also probably not going to bring you to an early grave either. Yeah, okay. That's a good way of putting it. Thanks, man. So when it comes to rating olive oil, because you go to the grocery store these days and there is a wide, wide range of olive oils you can buy, and this is just in your everyday supermarket, I'll get some of that good stuff there to cook with, but Emily and I have a store in Bucket. We go to this lady that we know that makes her own olive oils, and that's where we get our good stuff. Where Jeez? I haven't been in a while, and I think she moved locations, but it's somewhere in Bukhead. Okay. There's one decatur too, right? In downtown Decatur, a great olive oil store where you can taste shots and stuff. Is that Chad? Yeah, it probably is, but the different grades, they all have to do with the level of refinement. And in this case, the less refined, the better, because that refining process is what we talked about that will strip away that flavor over time. So extra virgin is unrefined olive oil. It's cold pressed, never heated, no chemicals. Sometimes you can find bottles that say first cold press, which means they didn't just keep pressing it, they just had the one single press that is the good stuff. And we'll get to whether or not you can trust this in a minute. But that's the top quality. Yeah. Apparently the highest top quality extra virgin olive oil is actually unfiltered. It doesn't go through that second step to remove the water suspended in the little particulate matter. It's unfiltered extra virgin olive oil. As far as health is concerned, if it is a healthy product, it bestows the greatest health benefits. That's right. And supposedly it's the tastiest. That's right. Then there's virgin olive oil, which apparently I've never seen in real life. It's apparently very rare, but it's unrefined. But not as high quality as extra virgin olive oil. Yeah, maybe it's just what's the point? So people don't even make it, right? I don't know. And then there's straight up olive oil. If you've ever picked up a bottle of olive oil, like, say, in the supermarket and been like, $0.99, it's a great price on olive oil. And you're looking all over the label turning it, what am I missing? And you can't quite find where it says extra virgin anywhere, and it just says olive oil. What you have is that's the grade of it, olive oil or pure olive oil, and it's been Bleached and Lye has been added to it. It's been heated, filtered, smacked around, just treated very poorly, and then ended up on your grocery store shelf for nine months. You can use that on your bicycle chain. Yeah, there you go. And that's about it. Or if you go to a terrible restaurant and they ran out of canola oil, they might use this kind of olive oil for your little plate with some bread. Then you have light olive oil. This is more refined, even basically no flavor. We should mention, though, that standard olive oil, sometimes they do mix in a little extra virgin to give it a little flavor and try and charge a dollar. $19. Yes. But they probably call it extra virgin olive oil. Yeah. Well, again, we'll get there. Okay. Don't believe the hype, everybody. All right? But the light olive oil basically has no flavor, and it is not lighter in calories. So that's somewhat misleading. That's a big deal, because you would think that if somebody sees a bottle of light olive oil, I would think, like, oh, it's good. It's diet olive oil, it says weighs less. Right, exactly. Apparently here we start to get so there's also pomas olive oil, which that's lompante. It's not for eating, it's for burning, basically. Yeah. And then organic, like with a lot of organic things, there's no standard enforcement body for organic in the case of olive oil. So maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But definitely you shouldn't bank on that. But that kind of opens the door to this controversy in the olive oil world, where somebody can slap organic on their olive oil bottle and charge you more for it. But there's no way for you to verify that it is organic. There's nobody watching things like that. Even though there's the International Olive Oil Council and the North American Olive Oil Association, and both of them are the standard bearers for the olive oil industry, but they're just not big enough, and I guess their teeth aren't quite sharp enough to regulate this giant industry that's really boom since the 90s. So there's nobody with the ability to actually make sure that the olive oil that's being sold, say, like the purest extra virgin olive oil actually is extra virgin olive oil, or is even olive oil at all. It could just be like plain old vegetable oil that has nothing to do with olive oil and never has with just a little bit of extra virgin olive oil mixed in for taste. Yes, because they have standards. They have like, actual standards for the number of chemicals, minimums and maximums and stuff like that. But it really comes down to human tasters. People that actually taste this stuff and say, no, this is metallic or muddy. There's no way this is extra virgin olive oil. Fail or fusty. That's another one. I love that word. Yeah, fusty. Olive oil is fusty. But there just aren't enough mouths in these associations to keep up with the massive industry that is the olive oil industry. And so the most pessimistic people out there will say 80% of the olive oils that say extra virgin are not right. 80%. And that's, again, the most pessimistic. But let's just say it's 50 50. That's terrible. Yeah, it really is, because it's terrible for a couple of reasons. One, you're getting ripped off. I mean, you might be paying for olive oil that is just not up to snuff, and it's not as good as you think it is. That's bad enough. But if you're getting olive oil because you want to be healthier, right? And it turns out that it's not only not good olive oil, it's not even olive oil, you're not getting those health benefits. You may even be eating something more than you should. And it's actually just vegetable oil, which is actually not good for you in any way, shape or form, really. That's just bad. So you're getting ripped off and you're being abused HealthWise. Yeah. We kind of made fun of the 99 cent bottle that says extra virgin olive oil, but you can get the $14 bottle. And that could be fake. It's not just the little cheapies. I mean, that's a pretty good warning sign. But you would think that if you paid for the $15 bottle next to the seven dollar bottle, that's the real deal. And that's not always the case either. Right. Really BS. I know. And I didn't run across how you can be sure. I think there is no way to be sure. I better do a little research on your own. Find out about get a few brands that you know are doing the right thing and seek those out. And I want to say, like, well, if you go to Sonoma, Napa, Provence or somewhere where they know what they're talking about with olive oil, you'd have to have pretty iron cojones to open up, like, a high end olive oil shop and sell vegetable oil. So surely that'd be a good place to do it. But then remember there was that whole Mass Brothers chocolate thing where they were just selling, like, melted down hershey's to everybody for $8 a bar, and everybody went for that. So I don't know. I would guess you would have to befriend an olive oil producer who you knew and trusted, maybe let them hold some of your money for a little while, see what they did with it, and then when they gave it all back a couple of years down the road, then you could confidently start buying olive oil from them. That's the only way. Or just maybe we'll throw Chad a little seed money and partner with them. Sure. And then we'll just have our own supply. He's a trustworthy guy, for sure. Yeah. Okay, cool. There we go. Nice. And then the final thing we got to talk about and again, I think Ed did a thorough job, but I feel like we could do, like, three or four more shows on olive oil. Why not? But we're not going to. Okay, but the final thing here is olive oil is great. We all love it. It's the best oil to me, aside from sesame oil, which I also love, but it is not great for the environment. The mass production of olive oil has some pretty big drawbacks to it. Yes. I had no idea about this. Yeah. And it made me, like, go, oh, man, I knew it was a catch. Always something. So when you produce olive oil, that stuff that you press all the oil out of the leftover olives, that's called olive cake. And apparently one of the things that's left over from this stuff are phenols, which polyphenols are actually kind of good for you. Phenols can be toxic. They can be irritant. They can be really bad for you if you ingest them orally. And when you make olive oil, you have all this leftover olive cake, and when you spread it out there in the fields to just kind of get rid of it, it runs off and contaminates the local water supply. The water that's used to create olive oil, it uses a ton of water. And the wastewater can't actually be treated in typical municipal wastewater plants because it's too toxic. This does not mean that your olive oil is toxic. It's the stuff left over that comes from the production of olive oil that can be toxic to people and bad for the environment. So, yeah, there's, like, a big environmental impact, especially in small rural areas where the whole local economy depends on olive oil. They don't have the means to dispose of the stuff properly where it has the real environmental impact, but it's bad for everybody. Just because it doesn't impact you over here where you're enjoying the olive oil, doesn't mean you're not also still responsible for the impact that's going on halfway across the world where the olive oil is being produced. Isn't it amazing that they can treat human poop wastewater, but not olive oil wastewater? We can put a man on the moon who can poop up there, and we can treat that, but we can't treat olive oil wastewater. The good news is, as we speed into the future, there are new methods of reducing the amount of waste, and there are new methods of detoxification for that waste to be a little less harmful. And they're looking at other things that they can do to help put some of that waste to actual use, like as fuel or stuff like that. So, I mean, they're trying to get it under control, but it is a black eye for sure. They are feeding as much as they can to Giuseppe, who's just suggesting it and metabolizing this stuff, but he can only eat so much poor dusepi. You got anything else? No. Although I have a feeling if I traveled through Southern Italy, somebody would grab me at some point and say, hey, come on, sit on the olives. You'd be the giuseppe standing. Sure a second. If you tour Southern Italy, bring me back some olive oil, will you? Okay. Well, if you want to know more about olive oil, you can. There's nothing more to know because Ed covered it all for us. Good job, Ed. You can type the words olive oil into the search bar of your favorite search engine, and it will bring up a whole world of stuff for you. Just beware remember, about 80% of it is not real. Since I said that's, time for listing or mail. Oh, no, it's not. You know what it's time for? Yeah. You want me to say it? Yeah. That's right. Josh this is when we thank listeners for small tokens and large tokens of love and appreciation they have sent to us here at the Atlanta office. And I'm going to start it off with Laurie from Minneapolis, Minnesota, who very sweetly sent my daughter a free to carlo action figure. Sweet. Because I talked about how much she loved frieda kahlo, and she loves, loves it. Thank you, Laurie. Thank you, Laurie. That was very nice of you. I'm going to start off with Jim Cyth and the Crown Royal team who styled us out again. Yeah, man. With some fifths of Crown Royal and some very cool rocks glasses that have, like, the little crown on the pillow, like in a hologram etched in the middle. Yeah. And it weighs like a pound and a half. Yes. It's got some real heft to it. Plus it's in a candy, too, which is pretty nice. That was very nice. John. Nordskog sent us. Boy remember, John? He calls it a code wheel. What we should probably do is just put a picture of this thing up. He built it for, I think, a Boy Scout troupe, and then repurposed it as a wonderful gift for us. But we now have it hanging up on the wall of the office. John we finally got it up. It is this huge handmade thing of wonder, of interlocking gears and cranks that turn and eventually will spit out a paper code. I don't even fully understand it yet, but it looks like something from the ancient past, and it's just pretty amazing. It looks really cool in our office. It's daunting. Yes. We can't understand it. So it's definitely going to be a wallpiece from now on. Yeah. And I imagine John's spent a fortune shipping that thing, too. So many things. John. Yes. And I think we thanked John last time, but that was a far better thanks. So. Way to go, Chuck. Okay. We got a lot of great gifts when we went to Australia for our tour. Yeah. One of them was Janet from Nano Girl Labs in New Zealand gave us a beautiful hardcover edition of their book. Nanogirl labs. Book the kitchen science cookbook. You can look up kitchensciencecookbook.com, and it has all these different recipes in it. And each recipe is a science experiment that uses ingredients that are super easy to find and super cheap. And it turns out Janet, the chief operations engineer for Nanogirl Lab, has been listening to us since her teens. Since she was in her teens. So I feel old. But thank you very much for that awesome book. Yes, for sure. Emily Cole and Joseph Baxter sent us an invitation to their wedding in Idaho. Nice, mausletov. Wish we could have gone. And Cam and Sonya. So they came to our Melbourne show. And remember, they gave us the Tim tams and the eight year old tawny port. Oh, yeah. So we could do grown up Tim tam slams. And I tell you, that's the only way to do Tim tam slams with tawny port. It's amazing. If you don't know what Tim tams are, go to your local world market and buy some and thank me later. Yes, for sure. Christa. Alan Steen since art, here's what she does. She takes prints of atlases, road maps and stuff like that, and then paints over them with little sort of throwback kitschy motel signs. And she sent us the Ohio and Georgia. Beautiful. You're from Toledo and I'm from Georgia. That's right. They're very cool. Yeah. Thank you for those. Jack Hawkins. Works at Star Wars. Whiskey. Remember that the Star Wars Whiskey that we got at the Melvin show? We got some from him. And it is beautiful stuff. You could check it out@starwood.com. Au alison Gallagher. She's one of my movie crush buddies. She sent me a mug. So this is probably a movie crush thing of a triceratops that says crushing. It nice. That's awesome. That's very cool. This has to do with movies, but I don't know if it was movie crushed. Bill Wagoner sent us the DVD of Mongol. Oh, yeah. Remember, that was for us. The one version of the Genghis Khan story that didn't star somebody like Omar Sharif or the Duke. That's right. It was actually a good movie. I haven't watched it yet, but I'm looking forward to it. Ben Floor. F-L-O-R sinnes. This is very cool. Reusable carbon fiber drinking straws. Plastic straws are a very caused dejure. People should stop using them as much as possible. I saw a little stat the other day that said they take like, ten minutes to make, 20 minutes to use and stay in the environment forever. Wow. So Ben has a company called Luster, L-U-S-T-I-R where he makes these carbon fiber drinking straws. They come in a little carrying case that you can just throw in your car, your purse, and if you like to drink out of straws, then you can carry it around and bring your own straw and say, no, thank you, I have my own straw. Yes. It would be like medieval times where everybody had to walk around with their own spoon. And if you lost your spoon, you starved to death. That's right. Big thanks to Brad Ashmore for sending us his book of short, weird fiction, had He Worn a Different Body? I remember that one. Angela from Tasmania sent some lovely, lovely knitted hats from Australian Wool. Nice. Thank you, Angela. We got an awesome drawing of us from Eugene Gorman. He did an awesome pencil drawing of us, and you can see it and all of his other stuff on Instagram at Gorman. Eugene, check them out. John D sent his handpainted portraits. You can go to John D.Com, actually, Johnd.com, to check out his art. Thanks, John. Those are very cool. The last one I've got is from Ryan N, the 30 year old engineer who apparently still tells people his age when he says hi. He sent in a pack of Pilot Friction erasable pens. They disappear with heat and reappear in the freezer. And they are pretty awesome. Thanks a lot, Ryan. That's pretty cool. I'm still a G Two guy, but those are nice pens. All right, I just got a couple of more. William Dawson sent ukulele for music teachers and music therapists. It's a book that he put together about how the ukulele can be used as music therapy. That's awesome. And it's very cool. And I do have a ukulele, so I'm going to take a look at that for sure. You got a future side career ahead of you. Then finally, of course, our buddies Hillary and Mike Lowzar sent us along in their collaboration with Flathead Lake Cheese in Montana. They sent us stuff you should know. Stuff You Should Know. Specific. Hopping mad gouda cheese so good. And we always get that flathead like cheese from them every year. And it's just super kind. It's the most wonderful time of the year. It is when we get that cheese. Also, I want to say we haven't heard from Little Bit Sweets in a long time. I hope they're doing all right. Hint, hint. Yeah, I'll hit her up. It's been a minute. Please do. Well, if you want to send us something, that is very nice of you, but you don't have to send us anything. You can just drop a line to say hi. You can go to our website, stuffyturno.com, and check out all of our social links. You can find me hanging out on my website, the Joshclarkway.com. And you can send me, Jerry, Chuck, Noel, Matt, Frank, the Chair and everybody in email at stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housedeepworks.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, 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." | |
c47e9dee-5460-11e8-b38c-8b69a5d056ff | SYSK Selects: How Lobbying Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-lobbying-works | Lobbying is an entrenched part of American politics and one that many people think is breaking government. But petitioning the government is protected in the Constitution. How can this system be fixed? join Josh and Chuck as they explore the topic in this classic episode. | Lobbying is an entrenched part of American politics and one that many people think is breaking government. But petitioning the government is protected in the Constitution. How can this system be fixed? join Josh and Chuck as they explore the topic in this classic episode. | Sat, 25 Jul 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=207, tm_isdst=0) | 52199842 | audio/mpeg | "What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively, complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can and serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate cover goodness with real time, data driven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting. 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 Barrettunde 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. Hi, folks, chuck here with your Saturday select. Because it's election season, I thought we'd dig back into the archives from October 6, 2015, and find out how lobbying works. You may think lobbying is awful, and it certainly can be, but it also serves a purpose. I'll let you make your own mind up about it, but here we go with how lobbying works right now. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Crickets. So weird. Yeah. We're doing this ghost style. Yeah. So what happened was and you explained to me, but I don't know, maybe my mind was elsewhere and I didn't fully understand, but what happened is guest producer Noel got the record, he put the mouse on the hamster wheel, got the computer running and left. And now you're a little freaked out, aren't you? Right. Well, this is out of close to 800 shows. This is literally the first time it's ever just been you and me in a room. Yes. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, it really is, isn't it? I don't know. I feel like with no one in here, even though no one ever guides us, that we should just I don't know, that we're going to cut up and curse. And it's like when the teacher has left the room, it feels like there's a vast field, a portal to another dimension to my right, where I had no idea what that extra silent human three beat round is meant. Now this means that we've been put out to pasture. Wow. This is disconcerting. All right. I feel like you're going to, like, knife me or something. I could right now. No one would ever know. Until we publish the episode. No one would ever know. Wow, man, that's gruesome. All right, this is just weird. Let's do it. Are you ready? Yeah. Good choice. By the way. Yeah. I don't remember what episode we picked this and we were talking about something and lobbying came up. We were like, we should just do one on lobbying. Well, here it is. Yeah. I'm glad we're doing this because we'll clear up some misconceptions. It's not always evil. Just 75% of the time, maybe more. Yeah. I remember when we said we were going to do a lobbying when we got a lot of emails from lobbyists who were like, please don't just trash our profession like we ever would. They were like, lobbying actually, it can be a really good thing. So we got a lot of feedback before this thing even came out. Yeah. Which hopefully will help us. Well, they're understandably a very defensive group. Everyone thinks it's just rotten and corrupt across all channels. And again, it's not true. 75% is rotten to the core. And the reason I and just about everyone else walking the planet thinks that lobbyists are rotten is because of some very high profile cases, like member Jack Abramoff, who can forget what a and I usually don't publicly trash people, but that guy was a pile of garbage. There's really no, I was trying to find some other way around it. It's like no, it was awful. And just ripped people off unabashedly, ripped off Indian tribes, bribed officials, bribed people, pocketed money. And he was a highly successful lobbyist. Turned on people he was working for. Yeah. He's not a good fellow. No. But again, he was a successful lobbyist. He was at the top of his field for many years, actually. And it wasn't until 2006 when he was convicted of, I believe, like bribery and corruption and all sorts of stuff. Tax evasion, all kinds of stuff. Yeah. And ended up serving three years. I think he did three years in the pokey. Yeah. And supposedly had to pay a lot of restitution and tax fines. But who knows how this stuff works out? No one ever follows up. Right. We'd say, oh, he's supposed to pay all these people back. Sure. It happens. Yeah. Who knows? He probably found a loophole to work around. He's probably working on a lawsuit against us right this moment. Chuck, can you not publicly call someone garbage? I think you can. Okay. Yeah. We'll find out. Can we read this opening statement from 1869? Yeah, because I think it makes a pretty good point that Jack Abramoff wasn't the first despised lobbyist. No. This is written by Emily Edson Briggs who is a Washington DC. Newspaper correspondent at a time where there weren't a lot of women doing that, which is kind of cool. I think she was the first allowed into the congressional press room. Yeah, they should let her in. She'll never say anything bad because we gave her this job and she's like, you fell for my baked cookies plan. She wrote a column called the Dragons of the Lobby. So you probably know where this is headed, and the opening line of the column said, winding in and out through the long devious basement passage, crawling through the corridors, trailing its slimy link from gallery to committee room. At last it lies stretched at full length on the floor of the Congress, this dazzling reptile, this huge, scaly serpent of the lobby. That could have been our Halloween episode. It really could have. Maybe we should gussy that up. I think we should. With horror. A little bit of sound effect. Yeah. That was in 1869. Yeah. Not very flattering. And it was actually it did come at a time when lobbying and lobbyists were really getting a chokehold on Congress, on legislation, on sweetheart deals from the federal government. But lobbying goes further back than that, and lobbyists have been despised even further back than that, as a matter of fact. Yeah. And again, it's something this article makes, I thought this is a really well written article, actually. Yeah. This is Dave Ru's article. Andrews he did a good job. He points out that the knee jerk reaction for your average person might be to say, just make it all illegal. Get rid of the lobby. But it's awful. But he makes a good point that it is necessary. The First Amendment in our own Constitution says the right of the people to petition the government for a redress of grievances is necessary and constitutional and mandatory. Yeah. And that's what lobbyists do. It's not always a huge corporation. A lot of times they'll speak for the Girl Scouts or the Boy Scouts or all kinds of special interest groups, and we all have them. So you, me, everyone listening in America has a constitutional right to go and petition Congress to say, hey, guys, you guys aren't paying enough attention to government waste, or NASA deserves way more funding than you're giving it. Yeah, whatever. You can go do that. That's lobbying, technically, but unfortunately, almost from the beginning, corporate and big business, special interest groups figured out a way to basically exploit that to their own benefit. Yeah. And Rus also points out and we'll get to this later, which is one of the big problems. It's necessary because Congress and their staff don't have time to well, again, we'll get to that later. Okay. Yeah. I don't want to spoil it, all right. But they don't have time to go through the myriad requests and information, deluge of information that's necessary to make an educated decision. Right. And so much so that Senator John F. Kennedy in 1956 said that we are, in many cases, expert technicians capable of not we are I'm sorry, lobbyists. He wasn't a lobbyist. I'm sorry. In many cases, expert technicians capable of examining complex and difficult subjects in a clear, understandable fashion. So that's the reason we need them in many cases is to literally explain stuff to Congress people and staff strapped for time and resources. It should be said, though, that when Kennedy wrote that in the mid 50s, lobbying was not much of a thing. It was established. It had been established for a couple of hundred years. People hated lobbyists. There were huge lobbyists scandals in the gilded age, from the civil war to the 19th century, but in the mid 50s, lobbying was not a huge thing. It wasn't. So what he said, though, was accurate, and it still is accurate today. If you are an incoming congress person, you make your name both to your constituency and in your party by getting bills passed, by coming up with bills and passing them. Right? Yeah. Look at all the work I accomplished. Right. And then if you get enough, you may end up on a nice committee, maybe even a committee chair, and then eventually a party leader. And all that is because you introduced legislation that was favored and got passed. The thing is, you don't have the time or the staff to research and write legislation. So you have to turn to lobbyists lobbying groups and say, hey, you guys are literally experts on this topic. I need your help. Educate me. Help me write this, and then we'll be friends. The problem is, there's not a special interest group like you said, whether it's the girl scouts or whether it's the chamber of commerce that doesn't have a slant, that isn't going to try to slant the legislation in their favor. So that means that the laws that are written in this country today are the legislative equivalents of evertorials. Yeah. Kind of thin on actual content and really heavy on stuff that benefits the corporations running the show. You know who would make good lobbyists? Who they are in this room right now. Do you think so? I was just thinking, like, generally unbiased research presented so someone can make a decision. That's kind of what we do, except we're not paid. Like lobbyists. No worries. Lobbyists make a lot of dough. In fact, in 2014, lobbyists and these are people that are officially registered as lobbyists, which we'll get to. There are a lot more people doing lobbyesque work that aren't officially registered, but official registered lobbyists were paid out $3.24 billion in 2014, and that is only divided among how many people was it about 10,600 people. What? Are you kidding? That's how many registered lobbyists there were right. This year. But again, just the registered one from a high of about 14 and change in when was that? 2006 or seven. Yeah, the 2007 changes came along, and it's not because there are fewer lobbyists that just gave rise to people or give people the ability to be like, oh, I'm not a lobbyist anymore. Because here's the thing. If you are a registered lobbyist, you are subject to some very strict ethical guidelines, legal guidelines, scrutiny of your business practices. Sure. And there's a lot of stuff you can't do. You're just completely outlawed from doing certain things. If you can just skirt the definition of a lobbyist. It's like open season, man. It's the Wild West on Capitol Hill for you. And you can make as much money as you possibly can while doing the same thing, just not having to register as a lobbyist. All right, but that's a lot of teasing. This is the current state of the American legislative process. Our legislators rely on special interest groups almost entirely to tell them what they need to know from their slant and then actually writing the legislation for them to go take the Congress and be like, what? I got? Yes. I want to make my name with this. All right, there's one other thing, too, that we should say. Yeah. And this is one reason why lobbying is so pernicious. Lobbyists also serve as major fundraisers for the very politicians that they're lobbying. Yeah, I didn't give them money. I just held a fundraiser that raised four and a half million dollars at $3,000 a plate. But, hey, they gave them the money, right? They don't owe me anything. I'm just doing this because I'm a patriotic citizen of the United States. And I'll see you Monday, Senator. And I like to overcharge for salmon. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. So that's the current state. Everybody, let's go back to the beginning, because lobbyists have been around basically as long as America has. Yeah. Let's take a little break, and then we'll get to the tease stuff and start off with a little bit of history. 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 an actual overalls. Let's create It systems that roll up their own sleeves. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com It automation. You know you're a pet mom when you growl back during playtime and you insist on feeding them the highest quality food you can find. Enter Halo holistic made with only whole meat, no meat meals, and probiotics for digestive health. Our first ingredient is always responsibly sourced protein raised with no antibiotics. And bonus, our fruits and veggies contain no GMOs. It's a lifestyle and a pet bomb thing. Find Haloholistic at Chewy. Amazonandhalopetscom all right, there's some misconceptions about the history of the word itself. Yes. Laura says that it was invented in the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC. In that lobby, when Ulysses Grant would kick back and have a drink like he so like to do and would get disgusted by what he called those damn lobbyists that were hanging out there. Yeah. Asking them for stuff that may have given rise to the term popularity wise here, but you can trace it back to England in the 1640s when they talked about the lobby in the House of Commons, where you could go right up to your representatives and your cute little wig and say, here's what I think you should do. Right, and here's some good old fashioned English pounds in your pocket. Yeah. I mean, that's always just gone with it part and parcel. If not outright bribery, at least favors or quid pro quo or tip for tad or football tickets, jekyll and Hyde, Beyonce tickets, all sorts of stuff. Yeah. First class. No one flights first class. Talking about the Learjet, the true first class, the private jet. Didn't they do away with first class? Announced it's called business class because of class resentment in the United States. Yeah. And now they've it depends on the airline. There's all sorts of new rules and special things you can pay for. All right. So in the United States, from the very first session of Congress, there were lobbying efforts and people treating Congress I'm going to say congressman for this one, because this was in 1789. Yes, we're going to say Congressperson for later on. The women were at home brewing beer in their households, but they were playing Congressmen with treats and dinners. And that was a direct quote from Pennsylvania Senator William McLay from the very first session of Congress. He was saying, yeah, they're lobbyists here. They're basically trying to bribe people. They're trying to install the terrific of 1789, which established Congress's ability to basically extract duties and taxes on goods in the United States in order to support the government. Let's go out to dinner instead. And the New York merchants were like, let me get you hammered three ways from Sunday. What are you doing later? I tell you what you're doing. You're going to finish a casket. Rome in one city, then apparently, the bank of the United States was one of the first big corrupt organizations as far as literally having politicians in their pocket paying the money. Yeah. The United States used to have things like an actual centralized bank. And Andrew Jackson came along. He was like, this thing is just way too corrupt. We need to get rid of it. And put me on your money. Yes, but the scandals associated with it were things like the National Bank had on its board as board members who are being paid by the bank sitting congressmen who are writing legislation in favor of the bank. Yeah. This quote is the best. Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster sent a letter to the bank of the United States that said this, among other things, since I arrived here, I have had an application to be concerned professionally against the bank, which I've declined, of course, although I believe my retainer has not been renewed or refreshed as usual. If it be wished that my relation to the bank should be continued, it may be well to send me the usual retainer. In other words, I've noticed that you're not paying me now. People are telling me to write legislation against you. I'm turning them down for now. You may want to send that money again if you would like this. Love, Daniel. Yes. Like, he flat out said the bribes have sort of dried up. I've noticed. Right. So why don't you start sending those again? Unbelievable. Yeah. History. So you talked about the Gilded Age, post Civil War until the close of the 19th century. We like to think that America's railroads were built on grit and determination, but in fact, it was rife with insider deals and scandal. What was it called? The Credit Mobilize scandal. Yeah, I looked into this a little bit. It's mind boggling, basically. Union Pacific. Mind boggling how overt it was. Yeah. But even just like, it was not just crooked in one way, it was crooked in a number of ways. It formed one big, huge crooked thing that Congress was involved in. The Union Pacific Railroad started a company that served as the sole agent of building and managing the Union Pacific Railroad. Okay. And then they issued stock in this stuff, and they use Credit Mobilize and Union Pacific itself to basically overcharge and overpay one another so that the value of the stock went through the roof. Okay. So it's a stock massaging scheme to begin with. It's like an insider deal with yourself right. To raise the value artificially of your stock. Right. Yes. And then they took these shares in this company and started handing them out to Congress at a discounted price. So what Congress had to do was go sell them on the market for their face value, which was again, artificially inflated, and they made a bunch of cash, and they were taking these as bribes for giving, like, land grants or breaking treaties with Native Americans so that the Union Pacific Railroad could build their railroad across the western states. Yeah. And they did this because, believe it or not, at the time, there wasn't a lot of private investors ponying up money for this railroad because it was sort of a new thing and it was risky. Yeah. They didn't know. Although it was a great idea, they didn't know. Like, all investors, what they care about is getting their money back in quick fashion. Right. And they just didn't know if that was going to be possible. Yeah. And I mean, there's definitely something to be said for the federal government to step in and be like, look, we think that this is really going to help things out. We really want to fund it. But does it have to be totally fraught with corruption while that happens? Yeah. No, it's the answer. Not yet. And then there was the famous Gilded Age lobbyist, Sam Ward, who he basically invented the social lobby. So while he wouldn't we'll get into direct lobby versus social lobby, but social lobby is basically in Sam Ward's case, he was a great chef, and he was like, I'm going to throw these great parties. I'm going to have great food and fine wine. I'm going to invite special interest groups and corporation heads and politicians and get them in the same room. But we're not going to talk about that stuff directly. We're just all going to get hammered together and have a great time, become friends. That was his job. Friends do things for one another, right? Yeah. I don't think we ever even said what K Street was. By the way, K Street is literally K, the letter K Street, where just about every lobby in the country has an office. Yeah. So that explains that if people are going, what the heck is Cave Street? Yeah, you're right. But it's like saying Madison Avenue when you referred to advertising. Yeah. Or Wall Street. So lobbying just kind of after the Gilded Age, america was sick to death of lobbying and lobbyists and didn't want to have anything to do with it. So lobbying didn't go away, but it fell to the wayside a little bit. It was still a thing throughout the 20th century. It just kind of waxed and waned in the mid forty s, I believe congress was like, we actually kind of need these guys, so let's set up some rules for dealing with them, because at this time already, what John Kennedy was writing about was true. You had a brain drain going on from Capitol Hill to K Street. Where people would go and become an aide to a senator or a Congressperson and make contacts. Get a little bit of experience. And then after a couple of years. They would move on over to K Street. To a lobbying firm. Make anywhere between five to ten times what they were as the congressional aide. And K Street was sucking the talent away from Congress. And so these Congress people in the 40s said, hey, we need to work with these people because we need them, so let's make up some rules. Even still, lobbying was nothing like you would recognize it today. It wasn't until the when business did an about face of dealing with the government. Up to that point, it was like government to stay out of our business, that's the lobbying we want to do is to keep you off of our backs, keep you from regulating our stuff to stay out of our business. And then at some point, and I'm not exactly sure who figured this out, but some lobbyists convinced corporations like, hey guys, you're doing this all wrong. You guys could get mind boggling amounts of money from the government in the form of subsidies or great contracts or sweetheart deals just by using our services, and lobbying exploded. We'll just take comparatively a tiny bit of that. Right. Even though it's a ton of money for individual lobbyists, it's nothing to these corporations. Right, exactly. Yeah. The Dave Ruse gave a really great example of Northrop Grumman in 2012 or something like that. I believe. Thunder Mifflin. Yeah. They spent $176,000,000 from Son lobbying in 14 years, from 1998 to 2012, which that's nothing to them because in that time, in 2012 itself, northrop Grumman got $189,000,000 contract for a cyber security system for the DoD. Yeah. That one contract paid for 14 years of lobbying expenses. Right. Yeah. And then they got a $1.7 billion contract to build five drones. Right. And that's just Northrop grumman. Yeah. I can't really pick on them. The reason why we called them out is because during 19 98, 20 12, they were the 9th biggest spender on lobbying. Not just corporations, but industry as well. General Electric was the single entity that spent the most. Yeah. As far as the corporation goes, there's a great website if you want just good information and stats, called OpenSecrets.org. And this past year, 2014, the top ten spenders were the US Chamber of Commerce, which is always number one by a long shot because they represent a lot of businesses. The National Association of Realtors was number two. Blue Cross. Blue Shield was number three. American Hospital Association, four. American Medical Association, five. I'm seeing a trend here. I wonder why. National association of Broadcasters, national Cable and Telecom comcast. Again, you can literally look at the years where there's the most spending and what's going on in those industries. And then Google and Boeing round out the top ten yeah. At just the 16 million each, the amount of money spent has, I believe, tripled in the last few years. Right? Yeah, I think so. This is fairly new, but it's not new. It's basically a return to the lobbying of the Gilded Age. The amount of money, attention, time, questionable stuff that's been going on is just a replay of what happened 100 something years ago. Right. Yeah. And one of the reasons that it's become so rampant, it's been ratcheted up so much, you can actually lay it at the feet of Newt Gingrich. So Newt Gingrich, Chuckers, was speaker of the House in the 90s, when Clinton was president, if you'll remember. Sure. And he decided that Congress was doing too much, right? Oh, yeah. I know what you're talking about. So he cut staffs, which means that lawmakers that were able to they did have enough of his staff or enough resources to write their own legislation definitely could. Not any longer. He also cut staff at some resources that are dedicated to providing research for Congress, like the Congressional Budget Office, the Congressional Research Service. All of these things that have been built up in response to dealing with lobbyists from the 40s on were cut by Gingrich, and all of a sudden, our lawmakers are relying strictly on lobbyists for money. Yeah. And there's a direct correlation. I know people, you hear about government spending, let's cut government spending. Which in theory sounds great. Sure, let's cut government spending. But what that means is now you don't have staff to do unbiased research and get the facts. Like you said, you've got lobbyists to do that right, exactly. And the idea behind that tactic by Gingrich, if it was just based on, I'm cutting government spending by cutting jobs, or I think government's doing too much, there's actually a misstep because another senator from Oklahoma his name escapes me right now. He had the Congressional Budget Office do an annual report starting in 2011, and they found that the Congressional Budget Office found that for every dollar spent on the Congressional Budget Office, the Congressional Budget Office managed to come up with $90 of recommended cuts to government waste. Well, so for every dollar you spent, you saved $89 just from the Congressional Budget Office. So cutting their staff is the opposite of what you want to do. You're against bloated wasteful government. Yeah, it's pretty interesting how it works out. It specifically is interesting as far as Newt Gingrich goes, too, because him cutting Congress's ability to not rely on lobbyists really left a sour taste in a lot of people's mouths during the 2012 primaries because he refused to admit that he was a lobbyist. Oh, yeah. And he's not registered as a lobbyist. What he has is one of the things he does. He has a healthcare consulting firm where you can pay $200,000 to become a member, quote, unquote, which you're not a client, you're a member. It's a membership group. Right. And he's not the only one. I think they have in here. They call it the revolving door. Basically, when you leave your position as a congressperson or senator, you go directly to the lobby. The New York Times says there are more than 400 former legislators who worked as lobbyists in the past decade. Let me go make some real money now. Not just legislators, either. Like, there was very famously a guy who was running the Pentagon, I believe, Ed Aldridge, and he was a longtime critic of Boeing, and then Boeing hired him, and on his way out, he approved a $3 billion contract to Boeing. That's the revolving door at work. There was a Massachusetts representative named William Dellahunt, and he took a job lobbying for a wind project that he had just earmarked a bunch of money for right before he left. Yeah. So, I mean, this revolving door, people say, like, well, let's just shut the revolving door, and it's a proposal. But at the same time, if you do that, then you're anti job, and you can't even appear anti job. So there's other solutions that I think are better for dealing with the lobbying crisis, I guess you could call it. Yeah, well, we'll get to that later. That great article you sent. You know what show actually does a really great job, realistically, with this is Veep. I haven't seen a second of that. It's fantastic, man. I mean, it really shows. You Amy for best actress. Yeah, she won. And Veep one. And I think. The writing team won. Good. I think it's the best written show on TV right now. Or the best written comedy. Oh, have you seen Narcos yet? No. Check that out. Okay. But Vipers, really, even though it's a comedy, really shows that everything in DC is just about deals being made. Right. Like, well, you do this for me, and I'll give you support on this bill. Right. And they're pulling that bill. And what did that lobby say? Because they were my friend, and it's such an insider's game. It's staggering. And that's a comedy written by English people, which is weird. Yeah. The producers got there, and they're all from England. Wow. I don't know. For some reason, it's so interesting. And they even in their speech said, it's kind of funny to be able to make fun of the American political system being English folks. But thank you for this award, for that. All right, so let's talk a little bit about we keep saying registered lobbyists. Since 1876, Congress is required that all professional lobbyists register with the office of the Clerk of the House. And since 1995, with the Lobbying Disclosure Act, in 2007, honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, they narrowly defined a lobbyist as someone who has one paid by client. Two services include more than one lobbying contact, and three whose lobbying activities constitute 20% or more of their time on behalf of that client during any three month period. It seems broad. That's actually a really narrow definition of a lobbyist. Yeah. And it's so narrow, as it turns out, that it's really easy to skirt those rules and not register, because there are many ways you can say you can really budget your time and say, no, I worked 20.9% in this three month period for this firm, or I have so many people I work for, I only spend about 15% of my time. Right. Or if you're on any one group right. Or if you're like Newt Gingrich, you're not working for a client. It says client. I got members, so I'm doing all this. But it's for members, not clients. Or if it's educational, it's not called lobbying. So, hey, let me just hire this former senator. Pay me a lot of money to go around and give speeches on education that are really trying to generate interest in legislation or to educate the government on why the 37 and a half billion dollars in fossil fuel subsidies that shelled out in 2014 is a good thing to redo and then double. Right. But that's just education. That's not lobbying. So those are just some of the ways you can skirt officially registering as a lobbyist. And actually, Chuck, so you said that that was from the 2007 act total. It was 95 and 2007. Right? Yeah, two different acts. And in 2007, when they added I guess they added that third one about the 20% the time measure, like 3000 lobbyists deregistered. Yeah. It's registered loophole. Good. Oh, really? All I have to do is account for my time in this way and all the rules don't apply to me. It's pretty amazing, as a matter of fact. The American bar association said if you just get rid of that third one, the time thing, that would help a lot. Yeah. And actually, when Congress first started to deal with lobbying well, I shouldn't say first because it was the 19th century, but in 1945 or six, when they passed an act about lobbying rules, they said that someone who had to register as a lobbyist was anyone who AIDS in the passage or defeat of legislation. That's it. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm sure there are loopholes in there and ways around that, too, but it was much more vague, which in fact would sound it's counterintuitive, but that's actually better to be more vague in the description because you can't skirt it as easy. So let's take a break and then we'll talk about all of the stuff that lobbyists do, including some good stuff, too. 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. You know you're a pet mom when your camera roll is all pics of your pet. At Halo, we get it because we are pet moms, too. And just like you, we know their nutrition is one of the most important decisions you'll make. Halo is natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science and thoughtfully sourced. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Find Halo at specialty pet stores and online. All right, lobbyists. Who are lobbyists? What do they do? They are fulltime dave puts it full time advocates for their clients. It's a good way to put it. There's no job description you're going to get, but you better be a people person. You better have a stuffed roll of decks. You better be good at networking, be super good at networking. Smooth talker. Yeah. You should throw a good party. Be good at fundraising. Yeah. And like we said, you got to know a lot of good people. You got to be a great communicator and persuasive. One might say slick. Slick, I think is probably right, but I imagine that those are good qualities to have. Just about any. But I also have the impression that there are lobbyists who are just like, just strictly grinding out research and stuff like that. Yeah, I think there's different types of lobbyists. Some are probably like the gladhanders. Yeah. Like the front person, maybe. And then there's like, wonks people who are literally technical policy experts on a certain topic. They know the ins and outs. They know both sides of it. They know what senators care about it. They know what Congress. People could be persuaded, maybe. They know everything about this particular issue. Yeah. And up to the minute, they have to be really up on the very latest policies and laws. They have to be experts, like you said, like, inside and out, because they get paid a ton of money to do that. Yeah. And there's typically three kinds of lobbying that people undertake. Again, whether it's the girl Scouts or Greenpeace or the Chamber of Commerce or whoever. There's direct lobbying, indirect lobbying, and then grassroots lobbying. And probably any lobbying group takes part in all a combination of all these yeah. Direct lobbying. When you can get a meeting with a congressperson or senator or their aides yeah. And you sit down with their staff or them and say, I'm experienced, clearly, because I'm in the room with you, and here's what we think is a good piece of legislation. Right. It's good for the country. Wink wink. Yeah. So that's direct lobbying. Indirect is if you well, what's the difference between indirect and social? Aren't they kind of the same? Yeah, it's the same. All right. So that's, like we said, Sam Ward, we would throw parties the king of lobbying. Yeah. He invented the king of the lobby, social lobbying. And that's still true today. You throw a big swanky DC cocktail hour and get people in the same room and just connecting folks that's indirect lobbying, goofing them up with a little Scotch, maybe. And all of a sudden, you're like you just sit back and you're like, yeah, this is working. Look at them talking to each other. I love myself. And then there's grassroots lobbying, which is kind of misleading, actually, because it can be employed by deeply entrenched, deep pocketed interests, but it still appears grassroots. And folksy, things like paying somebody who's an expert in a field or a recognized figure may be a former congressperson or whatever to write an op ed. And, I mean, name recognition counts for just about anything. So even op ed. And if somebody's saying, if a former treasury secretary is like, this is a really bad idea, we shouldn't pass this legislation that's going to inform voters minds. It also is a huge message to the legislators who are also reading it that Washington Post published this, so a lot of people just read it. You may want to listen to what I just said. Yeah. Or grassroots in the purest sense of the word, in the more traditional sense, could be a small, little NGO that's all they can afford is grassroots campaigns. And sadly, the dog that barks the loudest is the one that's going to get the most attention, and you're barking the loudest if you have the resources to, I guess, get a bunch of dogs barking at once. Which is a really good point, Chuck, because this article goes to great pains to make it clear that not all lobbying is bad, that lobbying in and of itself isn't necessarily bad, and that there are plenty of public interest groups that are dedicated to serving the common good that engage in lobbying. So it shouldn't be outlawed, it shouldn't be cut off. We should figure out how to fix it. The thing is, they found that for every dollar that a union and public interest group combined spends, corporations or big business spend $34. Wow. 95 of the top 100 spenders were all corporate interests. So the field is very much skewed toward whoever has the most money or whoever is willing to spend the most. So to register as a lobbyist, which is required, like I said, since 1876, and then a few years after that, they required that members of the press register with the House and Senate because they had lobbyists posing as journalists. So they had to take care of that pretty early on. But if you are registered, there are some things that you have to do according to the law. Well, first of all, you can't give gifts. Blatantly give gifts? Yeah, it's one of the things that got Abramoff in trouble all sorts of ways around this, of course, but you can't blatantly give gifts. You have to register. You have to file quarterly reports that detail the contacts you've made with elected officials. You have to disclose how much money you were paid. You have to file semiannual reports, at least contributions made to political campaigns. See that? I have a question about that, because from what I understand on the federal level, if you're a registered lobbyist, you cannot contribute to a political campaign. Yeah. Maybe it has to do with these $3,000 plate dinners or something. I don't know. Yeah, I wasn't sure about that either, actually. Yeah, but you mentioned the American Bar Association. A lot of attorneys are lobbyists off and on during their career. My uncle is actually a lobbyist. Is that right? Yeah. Congressman, my congressman uncle. Really? He went through the revolving door, huh? Yeah. I don't know much about it. Oh, man, you got to ask him. Yeah, I should. And I will say this, even though we're not on the same side of the political spectrum, which I won't even say who's who, he's a Democrat, but he's a good dude and an honest person. So even though we don't agree on things, I always felt like he's not taking kickbacks. He's not one of those guys, and I really believe that. Right. He's a man pure of heart, in no way disparaging your uncle for going through the revolving door. One of the problems with that revolving door is not just that it causes this brain drain from Capitol Hill to the lobbying companies or the law firms, but it also makes Congress not really interested in passing any kind of lobbying reform or revolving door reform because pretty soon their term is going to be up and they can go get that job. Exactly. Yeah. Because as a public servant, I mean, you don't make a lot of money. No, you don't. And especially well, we'll get to this in a second. Okay. All right. But finishing on the Aba, the American Bar Association has a real interest in trying to keep lobbying as above board as possible because a lot of them want to be lobbyists and they don't want to be tarnished. Right. So like you said earlier, they think the biggest thing you can do is to separate and have really strict lines drawn between fundraising and lobbying. They think that's where it's the most corrupt. Yeah. So get rid of the time requirement, the 20% of your time to be a registered lobbyist and just separate fundraising from lobbying. Yeah. I get the idea that that's where most of the hinky stuff is going on. So the thing is that makes sense, but it's also kind of like trying to remove a hornet's nest by picking the hornets out one by one. Yeah. Not the best idea. You need to smash it and set it on fire. Pretty much. And then pee on the ashes. Actually, you should leave a hornet's nest. You should never destroy hornets nests, apex predators and all. I get you. So the other idea to just shut the revolving door or to just outlaw lobbying altogether again, not only is that a bad idea, especially if you just did it wholesale out of the gate, you can't do that, but it's also unconstitutional. Right? Yeah. So we read this really great article, and that was good in Washington Monthly. So who wrote this thing? Lee Drew. Probably Dropman and Steven tales. They wrote it in Washington Monthly. It's called a new agenda for political reform. It was a great article, lengthy, but it just and it made really good sense to me. Yeah. And it's not too wonky, but I mean, these guys clearly know what they're talking about, people the long and short of it and what they think is the problem is what we touched on earlier, which is staffing of congressional offices has been cut and slashed so much, and there are so much more information now to ingest than there used to be. They just can't do it. There are not the resources to do it. So we have no choice but to turn to lobbyists, to act as the experts and to write legislation. Right. So they propose and we have some stats in here, actually, that I thought were pretty striking in the 80s, around 1980s, is when they started cutting everything. The Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Research Services, what they do is they provide nonpartisan policy and program analysis to lawmakers. Right. There are 20% fewer now than in. Those are the very experts that were dedicated to serving Congress in a nonpartisan way so that they had all the information they needed to create legislation to actually make the government operate. 20% fewer than the 1970s. Yeah. So gone starting in the, again in the mid 90s, gingrich cut congressional staff. Yeah. And while this is going on, it's a two way street. Lobbying is increasing. It's staggering how much lobbying has increased in money and just human power. And then one of the things about lobbying is that lobbying begets lobbying. The more a lobbyist can get legislation pushed through, the larger the Federal Register grows, the less ability any given Congress person has to read and ingest and understand federal law. So the more they need lobbyists who do understand it. Yeah. And so what you get is what we talked about the revolving door. Well, actually, that's politicians themselves going to lobby. Well, but there is a brain drain because their aides are being sucked away by K Street as well. There's another cycle where there's no incentive to be a congressional staffer for very long because you're not going to make much money. I think they said the top 90th percentile of a congressional staff makes $100,000 a year. That's the top 90th percentile, which sounds like six figures. That's good. DC. Is not cheap. No. And take out taxes and everything, that the median income was 50 grand. Right. So you're making what, like 35 after taxes. Right. You can't live on $35,000 in DC. And they found that the median income for a lobbyist in Washington DC median is $300,000. That's pretty attractive, especially if you're in your twenty s and all of a sudden can go double or triple your income, like right out of the gate. Well, it's the career path, right? Like it's laid out there for everyone. Here's what you do. Go working on the staff for a little while, make contacts, which is invaluable that's why you do it for not a whole lot of money, right. And then boom, you can get rich, make a lot of money as a lobbyist. So drop man and Telus suggest first and foremost that the solution to the lobbying conundrum that we have now is basically equip Congress with the information, research, and policy experts that they need and that they can get the stuff that they're currently getting from lobbyists. And the way you do that start is just increased salaries. And they make a really good point that you don't have to necessarily increase the salaries to be completely on par with what K Street is offering. No, of course, because K Street would probably just start to outspend and just raise salaries. But if you can do it so that a person could make a pretty decent living, they would possibly choose congressional work over K Street. Because with congressional work, they're in there. They're like part of this machine that's really making decisions and policies and laws that are affecting the country rather than working for a law firm that's trying to get some legislation passed that will benefit this one corporate client. Yeah. So if you just factor in idealism, along with a really good salary, these guys say you could attract the right talent that you need. So their recommendation simply it's multifold, but they say double committee staff, triple the money that they make, and you might be stepping in the right direction. Yeah. And again, if you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's a lot of taxpayer money. Well, again, if you look at what, the CBO alone, spending a dollar on the CBO, comes up with $90 worth of places to cut government waste. These are good things to spend money on. Yeah. And you may have a cleaner, more legitimate government as a result, too. And that's priceless. Yeah. I mean. They made some excellent case that in the 70s. When the government had a lot of staff that was smart. That had a lot of institutional memory and knowledge that they got things done. Like the Church committee and the Pike Committee. Both of which revealed massive horrible stuff that the CIA was doing. Like dosing Unsuspecting Americans with LSD that came out at congressional investigations that you do not see any longer. No, if you had committee staff that were well paid, they would hang around and you would have a lot more laws being passed, a lot more deliberations being passed right now. It's all fundraising going on. That's what your legislators do. They get elected, they come to Washington, have their picture taken there, and then they go back out and start raising money for re election. Right? Yes. And they're raising money from the very people who are working as lobbyists. So, yeah, all you have to do is create good jobs and the congressional researchers and you've got your lobbying problem largely licked. Yeah, I agree, man. I don't see any problem with this idea. It's sad. Whenever we dig into stuff like this, like I talked about the Insiders Club, I don't know, it just seems like it's such a broken, messed up system. It is. There was another thing I read about something called rent seeking, which is where, through lobbyists, the corporation will go and just try to get a piece of the pie. Not for doing anything, not even necessarily a contract, but just say, like a subsidy. And like the fossil fuel subsidies amounted to 37 and a half billion dollars in 2014. That was just stuff that the government gave just money the government gave oil and other fossil fuel companies just for existing. Right. Yeah. And that's called rent seeking. It doesn't do anything. They're not producing anything to generate that income. They're spending a bunch of income to go suck it out of the federal budget. Right. And I mean, if you want to talk about wealth redistribution, that's the clearest version of it you can possibly imagine. Yeah. And that's through lobbying. Yes. And this is just lobbying. Like, don't get me started on things like campaign finance and all the other ways. That's another one we should do. Yeah, I actually wrote that article, man. How was it? I'll bet it was depressing. It was depressing and tough and it's probably way out of date. We will update it. Yeah, it would need a lot of like, updating. Let's do it. Campaign finance reform, big thing. Remember our presidential debates? One that was eye opening? Remember there's like a whole commission that has a stranglehold on presidential debates? Yes. I have no right. I got to go back to good one. Most of them are like, oh yeah, I remember that. I'll be tweeted soon. All right, well, if you want to know more about lobbying, you can type that word in the search bar, how stuff works. And it will bring up this fine article. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. All right, I'm going to call this binge listening colon newest to oldest, dudes and Jerry. By the way, I labored over that subject line like a publicist and it's still awful. It's pretty bad. Is what Colin said pretty bad? Colin, dudes and Jerry. I've been slowly making my way through the catalogue of episodes, and for any new listeners, I'd like to advocate for listening through them from newest to oldest. In other words, reverse order rather than oldest to newest, which is how I assume most would listen. While the references to old episodes might be a little confusing, they also build a sense of anticipation once you get there. I can see that. For example, I finally listened to the infamous episode on The Sun. You made so many references over the years to how bad that episode was that by the time I got to it, I was literally laughing from beginning to end. So it becomes like a comedy episode at that point. Yeah, that's kind of cool. You could almost hear Chuck's brain sizzling and melting as the episode went on. True. Mine did too. If I didn't have that sense of anticipation, your agony wouldn't have been as sweet. I like this idea. I think it makes a lot of sense. I dread the day that I run out of episodes and experience of withdrawals, the shakes, the jimmy legs that will inevitably come when I'm jonesing for new stuff. And that is Collin in Orlando. All right, Colin. Great email. Terrible subject line, but totally forgivable because of the body. I didn't think it was that bad. Binge listening newest to oldest succinct, I guess. Do better, Colin, but great email, Colin. Oh, but if he's listening, he hasn't made it all the way back. Well, if he's listening to us, to oldest, though, does he just make time each week to listen to the newest one and then go back to wherever he lives? I don't know. We need to hear a follow up. God knows when he'll hear this Chuck. We need to contact him directly. I'm feeling a great sense of regret. I feel bad for him because he's just heading straight for Disappointment land as he goes further and further back in the cattle. Oh, man. There's some episodes I just like to just redo, which we have done. They were like five minutes and they were cool topics. We should just remove those from the Internet. I would like to redo the trolley problem. One you and I didn't do, I do with Chris Paulette, and it deserves, like, its own big, current, modern incarnation of Stuff you Should Know episode. We should probably redo all the ones I wasn't on. How about that? That's fine with me. Let's do it. We'll call it the Summer of Chuck. Yes. If you want to be, like, calling and get in touch with us and let us scrutinize your words, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffagenow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web. Stuffyknow.com. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that, we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural science based nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs. Better than leaving brands? Find Halo Elevate at petco pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores. Are you looking for an escape? An immersive getaway experience? 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How SPAM Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-spam-works | SPAM is a canned meat product made from pork shoulder and ham. First introduced in 1937, this iconic food has spread to stores across the world. But what exactly is it, how did it get here -- and why is its shelf life "indefinite?" Tune in to find out. | SPAM is a canned meat product made from pork shoulder and ham. First introduced in 1937, this iconic food has spread to stores across the world. But what exactly is it, how did it get here -- and why is its shelf life "indefinite?" Tune in to find out. | Thu, 28 Jul 2011 15:05:06 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=15, tm_min=5, tm_sec=6, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=209, tm_isdst=0) | 38079073 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. I am Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant and that's stuff you should should know. Let's all go home. Some people are probably already home. Well, go to bed. Okay. Told me that in the email the other day. Go back to sleep. I don't get that. You're just being goofy. Yeah. Okay. Just lightening the mood. I got you. Yeah. Hey, buddy. Hey, Josh. I have a story for you. All right, let's hear it. So last November, not too many months ago stop looking. Just listen. All right. There was a Carnival cruise liner that had a little fire. The Carnival Splendor was on a seven day trip to the Mexican Riviera and about 44 miles off the coast of Mexico, it went adrift because of fire in the engine room. Just knocked everything out. So they lost power, which means it was basically just like being on an abandoned boat, but filled with people. A ghost ship. And filled with not just people. Filled with 250 magicians who were on a convention. That sounds like my idea of hell on earth. Okay? In addition to the magicians, which apologies to any magicians listening, ice sculptures melting. You've got magicians, they can't find their rabbits. You've got toilets that don't flush. You've got cabins that are stuffy. You have warm food or warm drink. Yes. So Carnival and their credit did give away free beer and wine and all that, but it was warm. So for three days, all these people were hot beer just sitting adrift. They weren't very happy. The US. Navy flew sorties out to the ship and dropped off supplies. They dropped off canned lump crab meat. They dropped off Pop Tarts. They dropped off a little something called Spam canned meat. And when the ship was finally, I think, towed back to port, sadly, the people dubbed this crazy vacation. What do you think? Do you think they dubbed it the Poptart Kitchen? No. Do you think they dubbed it the lump crab meat casin? No. Of course. No. They dubbed it Spamcation 2010. Yes. That's like Chad's story. Our buddy Chad was on a cruise. Remember when he was younger that the power went down? He never told me this one. Oh, yeah. He said it was like Sodom and Gomorrah for a couple of days. Really? Oh, yeah. He said that people were having a lot of fun and engaging in sodomy just and gamora. Me having a good time is how he characterized it. That's crazy. I wonder if he just didn't realize that it would have been like that either way, with the power on or off. He was just exposed to the power off part. I don't know. He kind of made it seem like that. With the power down, people just it was a little nutty. It was sort of like the end times are here. We're on a cruise ship adrift and let's just have fun with each other. Crazy. Yeah. I've never been on a cruise. You? No. Yeah, I'm not a cruise guy. My dad, he's turned into a cruise guy. He and my stepmom are into cruises, but my dad's way into them. Every time they go, they come back with, like, a stomach bug or the flu or just apparently it's like the epidemic just goes through, like crazy, like wildfire. My friend Andrew in New York, or from La, but from the Bronx andrew, he showed me videotape of his grand. I think it was his grandmother. Maybe it was his aunt, this old Jewish lady in New York talking about a cruise, and she was explaining about the cruise and how much it costs and how much you get, and she was like, it almost cost she said it cost more to stay at home. Like, she thought it was cheaper to go on a cruise then to just live her life at home. Well, she does live in New York. It was very funny, though. Yeah. I didn't tell her. Right. But, Andrew, if you're listening, I still remember that. And if you're listening, Chuck sorry for that one. I am. So that was Spamcation, 2010. And of course, they named it Spamcation. Spam the food. By the way, if you were hoping to hear about Spam, email, sorry, we'll mention that. We'll mention that briefly. But this is about the iconic potted meat, right? Which, by the way, Chuck, next July 5 will be its 75th birthday. July 5, 2012. It was introduced to the public May 11, 2012. It will have been 75 years since it was trademarked and technically born. Yeah. And then in 25 years, there will be a Spam Tennial is what they'll probably call it. Yes. Which will be spam. Tastic So, Chuck, let's talk about spam. It's shrouded in mystery. No one has a clue what's in it or in what degree or what it's made of. So, Chuck, what is spam? Josh spam is a pinkish brick of meat that is canned, and we actually do know it's in it. It is pretty easy. It's 100% pork shoulder and ham. Yeah. And ham is from the butt. Right. It's from the rear hind legs and rear end of the pig is what ham is. It's also got a lot of salt because you need that to help flavor and preserve the meat and get a little bit of sugar for flavor and water. And then a tiny amount is what they say on the Hormel site. They use the word tiny. A tiny amount of sodium nitrite, which keeps the botulism away. It keeps the botulism away, and it also keeps the pinkish hue, because if not, Spam would turn gray, which is not very appetizing. They're doing their best to keep it pink. So I don't know that the pink or the gray with Spam specifically would make a difference, but the grabster for some reason. Who wrote this article? How Spam? All the good ones. He left out potato starch for some reason. Oh, is that in there? Yeah, potato Starch is in there, too. I did not see that. Spam has a Hormel on the website says the shelf life is indefinite. No. Yes. Well, they say it's indefinite. They recommend you eat it is stamped within three years of the stamped because the flavor, quote, gradually declines. Wow. It declines at the bottom of the can. Yeah, but it's still edible. Shake it up. I'm sure it goes right back. Yeah. That's really something. So should we do history first, or should we go into the production? Well, it makes sense to do history first. Let's do history then. Okay. Before it was called Spam, there was a product on the market called Hormel Spiced Ham. Did you know that? I did not know that. And it wasn't selling very well. Well, because Hormel was in the fresh meat biz. Right. And apparently it was hard to make your name in the fresh meat biz because it was just kind of all the same looking. Right. Like, look at this turkey breast. Right. It looks like the turkey breast next to us. I imagine they still have the same problem today. Yeah. But they decided to get into the Can Meet business. Well, that was George Hormel's problem. Jay Hormel was the one who said, well, let's just get into canned meat. And he was the son of George, the founder. And this was in the late 1008 hundreds in Austin, Minnesota. Yes. Which is still the home of Hormel. Yeah. Right. And it's one of two places it's produced. No, there's a few others. They added some. Yeah. There's South Korea, Denmark, and I can't remember where the third one is. Okay. In North America. You're right. Fremont, Nebraska, is the other place. Right. So Jay Hormel is I guess he comes into his father's business and just revamped it and probably kept it going. Today Can Meet. See? Exactly. Yeah. One of the reasons why he got into Can Meet was because they were just not able to make a name for themselves in the fresh meat, but also because he came into the business during the Depression, and there was a lot of thriftiness. So people wanted something that was cheap and delicious that they could feed their family, but meaty. Right. And Jay Hormel gave them spice ham, but it wasn't called Spam at first. Like I said, it was called spice ham. Right, yeah. Well, he had problems at first packaging it because it took a lot of trial and error because canning meat, it was a pretty new fangled thing at the time, and apparently cell walls, the heat would cause we need to point out that Spam is cooked. Yeah. It comes like you can eat it right out of the can. It's cooked. I have already have you I mean, I haven't eaten spam literally since college, but we used to take it on camping trips and fried up. Well, yeah. That's not right out of the can. No, but I could also eat it out of the can. I can eat fried circumstances. I have never eaten it out of the can. Yeah, the taste is the same, but man, fried. Like, I was remembering that taste today. I mean, it's been 20 years, though. Or probably not 15. It's been a lot less than that for me. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Yumi's family is from Okinawa, and Okinawans are crazy for spam. Really? Oh, yeah. Like Hawaiian. Yeah, we'll get to that, too. So the cell walls would break down and release the water from the meat. So what you would have is dry meat floating in water, which is pretty gross. It's separate. Yeah, because the cells would lice that's right. Which is not good. So over time, they figured out the canning process, which meant a lot of salt and the precise temperature that you need to cook it at to preserve it to where it is moist. And it also has to be mixed and canned in a vacuum, which is really important. That's the key. That's the key, yeah. If you mix it and can it in a vacuum, you should be okay. And speaking of key, remember when you needed a key to open it? No, I wasn't alive then. Yeah, you are. It wasn't that long ago I wasn't paying attention to spam. Yeah, there was a key. It came attached to the can, and you would take off the key and insert it into a little thing and roll it back. I guess, like old sardine cans used to do the same thing. Okay. Yeah, I've seen that on cartoons from the 60s, but I didn't know spam had that spam keys before they went, I guess, with a pull tab. Was there like a giveaway, though? Like a spam key? Like you'd send off for it or no, I told him at the store it came attached to the bottom of the can. I got you, man. Those are the good old days. It was self contained and fairly explanatory. All right, so Jay Hormel figures out how to can meet. Yes. But he was a born marketer. The guy sold. He came up with Hormel's Chili concerne. Oh, really? He hired a 20 piece Mexican band to go around the country, like, touting its goodness. And that was Los Lobos, right? Gypsy Kings, I think. Okay. He would come up with great publicity since he was good at marketing, but he was hamstrung by hamstrung by the name Hormel Spiced Meat. It wasn't selling well. He had it figured out, and he later on kind of messed a little bit with the recipe to come up with spam as we know it today. But there's something similar called hormel spiced ham. So he was having trouble coming up with the name. And he had a new year's eve party, right? Yeah. Well, he had a contest before the party. Yeah. And it yielded nothing. It yielded names like brunch and baby grand. Right. We can do better than that. Right. And we should probably give a shout out to NATO Rama, who had a pretty good little blog post about it. Is that what you thought? So Hormel is like, we need to do better than that. I'm going to have a new year's eve party, and I'm going to tell my guests that they can get a free drink for every name they write down on a slip of paper. And there's a quote from him saying that along about the fourth or fifth drink, people started using their imaginations, right? I imagine so. And finally, an actor named what was his name, Chuck? His name was Kenneth. D-A-I-G-N-E-A-U-D. NIA. We'll go with that. Okay. He was a Broadway actor. I believe he came up with the name spam and $100. Yeah, he had, like, five slogan fizzes and came up with spam. Right. 100 cash. Right. And that was it. I guess he had to sign away the rights. Oh, I'm sure. Right there on the spot. Yeah. He's like, I'll sign it. Yeah. Spam. I wonder how he came up with it, besides the fact that he was drunk. It's encrypted in mystery. It's lost to mystery if you go onto the spam official site and they're like, what does spam mean? And there's a lot of conjecture that it means things like something posing as meat, like it's an acronym. Not true. Or that it stands for stuffed pork and meat. Okay, it's another acronym. Apparently there's dirty ones, too. Yeah. But what we need to point out, though, again, that spam is not some weird mystery meat with all sorts of disgusting parts. Unless you think pork shoulder and ham is disgusting, we know what's in it. That's true. So apparently it's lost to time. They think it's just basically taking spice and ham and put together. But again, if you go on the official spam website, they're like, spam needs spam now. Right? That's what we're going with. Sure. 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 that's where the name came from. It was 1937. That hormel trademarked. It, introduced it to the public, and it started to take off pretty well. But it was actually aided by an obscure act by the US. Congress that was passed in 1941 called the lend lease act. Right. Did that have something to do with the exportation? It did. So, in 1941, America was neutral, still in what was becoming world war II. And the congress passed the lend lease act saying that the president had the authority to send weapons, supplies, and food to countries that were fighting the access power, which effectively reversed the neutral stance we had. Right. Yeah. And spam is a good thing to send because you can have it forever. It's in a can. It can get dented up. And soldiers apparently could eat a lot of it. And not just soldiers. People in other countries, in restaurants, they shipped \u00a3100 million of the stuff. Yeah. So hormel was like, hey, we've got a bunch of stuff for you. Give us a contract. And they did, and it became ubiquitous in world war II, especially in the pacific. Right. So two things are going on with the GI. S. Well, two things are going on with world war II. One, the GIS. Are eating this stuff, or what they thought was spam morning, noon, and night and hated it because they got so sick of it. And then, secondly, it was also being shipped to countries that were part of the pacific and European theaters. And then after world war II stopped, these people had developed a taste for spam. Well, even the soldiers that hated it came back, and they were kind of like, oh, boy, now I kind of miss spam. I could really go for some spam. Yeah, exactly. So world war II is like this incredibly strange, perfect marketing platform for spam. And then right after world war two, apparently Jay hormel recognized what was going on, and he let out another advertising blitz back here in the states. And that was a household name from that point on. It was a perfect storm, if you will. All. Now, does that explain why it's popular in Hawaii and Japan? Because of pacific thing. Yeah. Okay. And especially in Okinawa, there have been marines there forever, and apparently anywhere the American military goes and has a very big open presence in the local population. Spam is a big thing, but for some reason, people of Asian descent are crazy for spam. Well, they make it. I know in Hawaii, they have it in sushi rolls and stuff like that. I imagine they do in Japan, too. Yeah, I haven't seen it in Japan. Sushi. It's called Spam Museumbi. It's a slice of Spam on a slab of rice wrapped in nori, which is seaweed. Sure. Nothing else? Not even like avocado or row or anything like that? It's Spam, man. Is it cooked or is it raw? It looked cooked in the picture I saw. Well, I'm sure you can find it anyway. It's all cooked, but it was cooked again. Right. Okay. And in Hawaii, also, Burger King and McDonald's, you can find, like, Spam rice and eggs on their menu. Their breakfast menu. Yes. It's everywhere. It is it is ubiquitous. And they're nearing their 8 billion can of Spam. Right. Pushing it out there. All right. So that's the history. We should also say the Hormel Corporation often has alleged unfair labor practices and stuff like that these days. Oh, really? But Jay Hormel was dubbed by, I think, Fortune magazine the red capitalist because he was really progressive with labor relations. In a good way. Yeah. There was, like a three day strike once, and he had a platform built so he could meet with the labor leaders, and he hammered out things like an annual wage, a 52 weeks notice before termination for workers. Wow. A year like a year from now, you're going to be laid off, profit sharing, all this stuff. That was unheard of. He became like a really and he managed to create really good relations with his employees, which helped get them to really work hard to turn this stuff out. I'd say 52 weeks is almost foolish as an employer. Yeah. Because when it nears, it's like, no, we need you. Don't worry about that. Yeah. All right. So that's the Spam history. Now we should talk a little bit, Josh, about Spam production, because it's pretty neat, though, like we said. Austin, Minnesota, and Fremont, Nebraska, is where it's made here in the States. And it is such a highly automated process that apparently it only takes 13 workers to run the Spam factory. And imagine a lot of those are shaving trimming ham because Ed says pig pieces arrive at the plant across the street. Is it really? Yeah, they grow the pigs. They grow and kill the pigs across the street. The machines remove the pork from the bone, but the ham is trimmed by hand. They grind it up into 8000 pound batches, flash, cool it, blend it, and mix it with the other stuff. And then pipe it I always love it when meat is piped. Pipe it to a conveyor belt where it's pumped in a can and sealed shut right off the bat. Right. And then it's cooked. Right. It is cooked in the can. It's cooked in the can right. In these six story cookers that can hold up to, like, 66,000 cans at a time, which is something because I think all of the capacity for all, I think five Spam factories is something like 44,000 cans an hour. Wow. So they need this huge capacity to cook that many cans at once. Your stomach scrawling Spam right now. I thought about bringing some in because we kind of regretted with the Twinkie cast not eating twinkies live on the air. But yeah, spam. Gary, do you have any Spam? She's fresh out. Okay. Nothing fresh about it. So it is cooked in the can that kills the bacteria and obviously cooks it, wash it and cool it, and then applied the plastic label used to be lithographed on the can itself, which I remember. And it had a different picture. It had a loaf of Spam with cloves in it, and now it's a Spam burger. I prefer the old picture. Yeah. And the lithograph one way, I think 97, and they went with probably the cheaper plastic wrap on the can. I imagine that's why they did it. Lithography is not cheap, and then it is shipped all over the country and then they license it. Like, I guess they probably don't ship it all over. Well, they probably ship it to you. The ones here, the two and the one in Nebraska and the one in Minnesota supply North America, South America and Australia. Okay. Yeah. And they sell on the Hormel website. If you've ever wondered what Spam tastes like, it is a, quote, wonderful combination of a savory, salty, sweet taste that will make your taste buds dance. I know they did a lot of self promotion on the official website, if you ask me. Dancing taste. Oh, yeah, of course. Did you go through all the questions? It was like, how should I eat Spam? Eat delicious Spam any way you deliciously Spam. Me want to spam. They have a museum, of course, the Spam Museum, which is free as it should be. And it sounds awesome. Did you read the Roadside America article on it? Yeah. And I looked at some of the pictures, too. It's cool. It's a cool museum. There was one guy on the Roadside America article named John who seemed to tell it like it is. Like he talked about the hog place across the street. They slaughtered 20,000 had a hog across the street there every day. It's like at the spam that is in the Spam Museum? Yeah, it was one of the guides. Oh, wow. And apparently they employ retired Spam factory workers as guides. And this guy was just like a straight shooter. If you go, you should ask for John. Oh, really? That's what I gathered. I can't wait to hear from people from Minnesota about this that live near there. I wonder what the smell that gives off. So let's get to the health benefits of Spam. It's not healthy. It's not apparently a twelve ounce can, which is the standard size. Yeah, there's two sizes, the twelve and the nine. The seven. But if you're eating spam. You're going for the twelve? Yeah, that's the one you normally see. Sure. The twelve ounce can, that little twelve ounce can has six servings in it. Yeah. That's about a slice, roughly, wouldn't you say? Yeah, I'd say like a sort of thickish slice is a serving. So there's six of them in there. One slice basically has a third of your recommended intake of sodium. Yes. So full can is 198% of your daily sodium intake. Yeah. That's two times what you should be eating. Yes. It has a lot of saturated fat, and a lot of it is saturated, 96 grams in total, in a twelve ounce can, which and you always got to do the Big Mac comparison, a single can of Spam is a little bit less than three Big Macs. Wow. Stuffed in that little can. Wow. They do have reduced sodium and light versions. They do. We need to point that out. Who's eating that? The health conscious spam eater. I mean, surely people are eating it. They're going down the grocery store island going like, I could go for some Spam, but I really should watch myself and I'll get the spam light. All right, I need to point out, in fairness, we're making some jokes here about spam eaters, but there are poor people who rely on things like Spam, and I just want to point that out. I don't want people to write and say, I used to have one to the Golden Pantry in Athens. I would have these daily, cheap hourly workers come in and buy, like, potted meat and spacious. Yeah, the sausage is huge. And they would spend literally, like, the little pack of crackers, and the potted meat was their lunch, and they would spend like a dollar 50 on it because they couldn't afford anything else. So we're not making fun of those people. We're making fun of rich people who eat Spam. I'm not making fun of anybody. Okay. And actually, if you bring that up, because you brought that up spam was born out of the depression. Yeah, well, exactly. And apparently now during the recession, its production is through the roof again. See, there demand is just crazy for it. So we're not mocking, but Spam, and they seem to take it. I mean, it's all advertising for them. They've embraced the culture of Spam and everything that it entails, and it's the cheesiest meat around. It's impossible to not make fun of. You know what I mean? Yeah, sure. It's a pop culture icon, which is why we're doing this podcast. Exactly. We're not doing one on well, I guess we could do one in Venus sausages, also made by Hormel. I ate one not too long ago at the School of Humans. Wow. They served Venus sausages at their little rat party. Nice. And they taste exactly the same as I remember. I've never tasted one, but I can tell just by looking at it exactly what it tastes like it's sort of bolognak in a tube. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. 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All right, so there has been some research that suggests that potted and processed meats might increase the risk of cancer. Yes. The FDA still says no, it's fine. But 2005 was a big year for that. Was that the university of Hawaii study? Yeah. And they found that you're 67% more likely to develop pancreatic cancer if you consume large amounts of processed meats. Right. And the reason why is because that sodium nitrite. That's what they think. Sodium well, this is why they think it it's correlated. Right. Sodium nitride itself is not a carcinogen that preservative that they put in. But if you combined nitrite with amines, and amines are found in meat when they combine and they're metabolized and they combine, they form nitrosamines. Nitrosamines. Yeah. Man, I wish I would have said that right the first time. Those are carcinogens. Most of them are. I can't remember who did it, but somebody sampled 300 nitrosamines, and 90% of them are carcinogenic. So we can make, as far as people think, nitrite into nitrosamines. So if we're eating cured meat, we're converting it into a carcinogen in our body. That's the fear. Cured meat or process cured meat. But anything that has sodium nitrite in it, right? Bacon. Cooking bacon makes it carcinogenic by under this logic. Right. So there isn't, like, a direct causal link, which is why the FDA is not doing anything. Surprise, surprise. But the logic is there. That's where the fear comes from. Okay. That's where the fear sets in. And we mentioned that that was done by the university of Hawaii, and that is because, as we said, hawaii and Hawaiians love their spam. Do you have any stats on that? Yeah. What was it? I think for every Hawaiian, they eat \u00a36 of spam per year. I think so. They definitely eat I'm sorry. \u00a33. So I've seen different numbers here. I saw six cans per person per year. If you spread it out across the population evenly okay. As a whole, the state eats 8 million of the 100 million cans that are made that are consumed in the US. Every year, which seems low. Yeah. I got all sorts of it's all over the place. The numbers are all over the place. But Hawaii leads the nation in Spam consumption. Well, and they said it's far and away, so they didn't tell me who was second place. I imagine Georgia ranks it's probably up there. Top ten scrapple. I'll bet Georgia leads in scrapple consumption. I bet California is pretty low on the list of Spam. I would think so, yeah. But yes, Hawaii is crazy for you. If you can find it at a McDonald's, that means that it's part of your local culture. I remember in 51st dates, it was a big thing. Sort of saw that, but don't remember the Spam references. Yeah. Anytime they were at the restaurant, there was, like, some Spam joke. Okay. I think I might have checked out at the 25th, 1st date. It was a cute movie. That Drew Barrymore. I love her. We have to mention Monty Python's Flying Circus because they a had the Broadway show or have Spam a lot running. I think so. Somewhere. I'm sure it's on the road. Big hit. And in the they're awesome show, the Flying Circus, they had a very famous skit about Spam. Did you watch it? Yes, I watched it again today. I've seen it before. I think my favorite part is the beginning when the couple just comes down on wires into the chairs. Yeah, I like that. Who played the wife? Was it Terry Gilliam? No, I think it oh, shoot, I can't remember his name. Is the other Terry? Terry Jones, maybe. Okay. I'm not sure. He was hilarious in it. Spam. And the joke was that there's Spam on the menu all over the place in this diner in England, and there's also a big group of Vikings that start singing a Spam song right in the diner. Just type in Monty Python Spam and go for the one that has 3 million views. This is vintage. A little back to the history for a second. Hormel was so involved in the war effort that they had a wartime mascot called Slam and Spammy. I did not see that. Which was an armed pig throwing grenades. Really? Yeah. Wow. Ostensibly at Hitler. Oh, of course. In Tojo. Sure, yeah. Hitler. Yeah. You got to throw Spam at Hitler. No throwing grenades. Oh, they weren't made of Spam? No, they were grenades. Okay. He didn't even look like a cute pig. He looked like the kind of pig you'd see, like, painted on the front of an airplane in World War II. Okay. I thought they were thrown, like, Spam grenades. No, you wanted to keep the Spam from the Nazis. That would help them. Yeah, you don't want them to you want to reign death upon them, not Spam. Right, that makes sense. Although if you drop Spam from high enough, it would kill you. Yeah, I guess it wouldn't be very good marketing if they're throwing Spam to try and stop the Internet. What else we got? Well, we should talk about the email version of Spam and where that came from. The story I got is that in the early days of the Internet, remember bulletin boards? If a bulletin board user wanted to scroll you off the screen, they just started typing Spam and copy pasting it until you were removed from the screen. That's what I heard. That's a good one. And they got that from the Monty Python thing, evidently. And then early chat rooms, same thing. It was initially called flooding, and then simply Spamming. And then eventually the email version came around. Nice. And it does not stand for stupid, pointless, annoying message. Yeah, that's stupid. That's just a false idea that makes me want to beat someone up. What else we got? My personal experience with Spam has been pretty pleasant. Let's hear it. Let's see. I've had very good in curry with rice. Nice. I was in Switzerland once. I had Metzgerrosti, which is one of the greatest things I've ever had in my entire life. It's like fried hash brown potatoes, slice of fried Spam, fried eggs, and then this divine gravy. So good. And I ate that as often as I could. Surely I've mentioned it before. Metzgeroshi. You throw some French fries on there and you're at Permanny. Yeah. I've never had permanisse muppet. Treasure island featured a character called Spam. Spam. Is that what that was on? Yes. Okay. And he was a big warthog who also wore a necklace of shrunken pig heads. So that kind of ties back in with our shrunken head thing. So he was nuts. He was nuts. And the Hormel Company sued the Jim Hinton Company for, quote, a noxious appealing wild boar who was intentionally portrayed to be evil in poor sign form named Spam. I guess they call them Spam. And the Henson Company was like, we're just kidding around. Like, can we settle this? Get a sense of humor? And I think it was settled. I don't think either that or they just lost the lawsuit. Yeah. I got a world record for you. Oh, yeah? Let's hear it. Richard Lefaire or Lafarre ate \u00a36 of Spam in twelve minutes. Wow. And I think he holds the record still. Wait, hold on. You keep talking. I'm going to do some math. And if you want to go, there are different Spam festivals. But I think the big daddy is in Waikiki. The Waikiki Spam Jam. They just held their 8th one in April, and I believe they hold it every year in April. And that is where lovers of Spam congregate to trade recipes and spam related products like T shirts and mugs and Christmas ornaments and just all things spam. There's spam sculpting contests, too? Yeah. How fast did that guy eat? \u00a36.12 minutes. He ate of Spam? 812 ounce cannons of spam in twelve minutes, then. So what's the sodium in that? I didn't do that math. Well, that was 200% of your daily intake in a can. He ate 16% of his sodium intake for the day in twelve minutes. And he loved to tell about it. As far as I know, he's alive and well. That's spam. I got nothing else. You know what I'd like to do? Some of Barbie. I bet that would be fascinating. That lawsuit you mentioned made me think of Barbie. Mattel loves to sue anybody and everybody they can do. You just want to push their buttons? No, it's just interesting. Yeah, I sort of like these pop culture ones. We had someone say we should do peanuts. Charles Schultz's peanuts. I looked into that and I may be writing the article. So maybe we'll do that. That would be awesome. Yes. And we're long overdue for the Dr. Seuss podcast, too. Okay, well, there you go. Keep listening, because it will eventually get better. Okay, that's what we just basically promised. If you want to learn more about spam and read about Ed Grabanowski's take on it. He tries it for the first time while he's writing this article. And there's a step by step picture graph of how to make fried spam and cheese sandwich. Just type spam. Actually, we should probably do everybody a favor. Go to your favorite search engine type spam food and then how stuff works, and it will bring up the spam article. Is it the number one? Hit? It's up there. But it's tough to find on our site because so much computer spam articles come up. Do that and then go into the handy search bar and type whatever you want. And I said handy search bar. So that means it's time for listener now. Yes, Josh. I'm going to call this from Kristin, our 16 year old fan from Toronto, which is in Canada. She sent us a really nice email about how she listens to it with her family and how she learns things and all the different things she's learned. And then she got to a PS, which I'll skip to PS. I've always wondered, how do you guys distribute your information so evenly between the two of you? Maybe it's just me, but I remember in elementary school, almost every group presentation ended in either tears or a fight because someone spoke more than their fair share. I know you guys aren't in the fifth grade anymore, but you seem like nice, civil guys, but be honest. Have you ever had any disagreements off the air over someone stealing the thunder? And if you haven't, how do you avoid that? Because your listeners would want to know. Putting this on the spot. Yeah, I think it's just equitable. Some shows might speak a little more, some Josh does, and it does no good. I think you grow up a little bit and you realize it's just silly to think of things like that. Yeah. And I think by doing that, we've just kind of even out. And I think also, if one of us gets the impression that we're talking too much, we usually tease the other one out. Yeah, that's pretty much it. It's going to be a boring answer, wouldn't it? It's just not being in fifth grade anymore. I think I remember I don't think I wanted the spotlight in the fifth grade. I think I was one of those, like I'll write it. You were like the evil genius behind the scenes dance puppet. Yeah. So there's your answer. Fish bulb. If you have a question for us, you want to look behind the scenes, that's fine. Kristen from Toronto. Thank you. Kristen from Toronto. If you have a question for us, you want to peek behind the scenes. We'll answer anything, but we probably won't. But we'll say we will because we like interesting questions. Agreed. You can send them to stuffpodcast@howstuffs.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuff works.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime 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. 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Bizarre Ways to Die | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/bizarre-ways-to-die | When it comes to shucking this mortal coil, no two deaths are exactly alike -- and some are truly bizarre. Tune in to this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com to hear Josh and Chuck discuss some of the strangest deaths imaginable. | When it comes to shucking this mortal coil, no two deaths are exactly alike -- and some are truly bizarre. Tune in to this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com to hear Josh and Chuck discuss some of the strangest deaths imaginable. | Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:17:12 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=18, tm_min=17, tm_sec=12, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=92, tm_isdst=0) | 20752238 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from houseuffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Chuck, do your job. Cheek thing. All right. I'd like to explain it to everyone. We have a little superstition here at stuff you should know. And basically every time Chuck doesn't do that with his cheeks ahead of time, we have a terrible take. And sometimes I have to stop part way through it gets so bad and do it again. And we've noticed that when Chuck does this, we have a good take. So prepare for an excellent podcast, because he just did it twice. So we're good, right, Chuck? I think we're set. Yeah. I feel a little bit better after you told me that this article we're about to talk to talk about ten bizarre ways to die was blowing up on the home page because it means that there's a lot more people than me who have a morbid curiosityfacenation with death. Buddy, this one and the other dead bodies on Mount Everest apparently did phenomenally well on the home page. They exploded on the home page. Yeah. And people want to know about these wacky, bizarre deaths, so we're going to share some of them. Yeah, we agreed we weren't going to do all ten, right? No, of course not. Okay. I don't know if you picked the guy from Canada, the first one, but if you didn't, I have a question for you. Okay. So this guy from Canada in 2008 got stuck in a sewer grade after he went after his wallet, and he was still alive, right, when they pulled him out by tow truck. Yes. But then he died. So my question is, was he crushed to death and they pulled him out? Did the tow truck kill them? Like, what killed this guy? Well, that's a great question, and I don't have the answer. Actually, my editor Amanda, asked me that same question. She said, how do you actually die? And I couldn't find it. I looked, other than the fact that he was stuck in a sewer wedged several feet down, upside down for a period of hours, which can't be good for you. But he was still alive when they pulled him out by tow truck. He died on the way to the hospital or at the hospital. I think he was alive when he came out of the sewer grade. He was. So he was pronounced dead at the hospital. Got you. And this isn't the first person to die from being stuck in a sewer drive. I know, it's really sad. It's nuts. Yeah. And we should say we're not making light of any of these this is very sad tragedies that have happened, but so abnormal sometimes that they well, it's in the title. Bizarre. Bizarre. He went down to get something, retrieved something in his wallet, and after a robbery and got stuck upside down for a period of hours and was, like you said, pulled out by a tow truck and it was too late. It's odd. It is. Well, that's one I don't know if you're planning on talking about that guy or not, but I had that question. I was not, actually. Okay, well, give me one of yours, Josh. I'm going to talk about the woman who died by her sheep's hand, or I guess close. Yeah. And this again, another sad tragedy. In 1999, a woman in England, she was a farmer's wife, and she was going out to feed the sheep, and she had a little ATV that I guess she wrote out to where the sheep were, and the sheep were really hungry, and apparently they came at her with a lot of force and knocked her off of a cliff. But she was parked along the edge of a quarry. Right, yeah. And so they knocked her off, and they say that the sad tragedy is that she may have lived if not for her ATV falling on top of her. So that was knocked off as well. Came down from her hungry sheep. Very hungry sheep. Did you get an idea of how many there were? It just said a flock. It's like two or more. Right, sure. Yeah. So I'm thinking probably a little more than two. Yeah. That is kind of bizarre. Again, I think that definitely falls into the category. Let me ask you, how did you choose these? That's a good question. I thought you might ask that. Well, I mean, you just start looking around on the Internet for strange deaths and bizarre deaths, and pretty soon you've got a big master list of stories. Did you have to pare down? Oh, yeah, sure. Okay, give me one that's on the list. Yeah, I can't think of one right now. You put me on the spot. I love putting you on the spot. I know I can't think of one. Right. All right, well, maybe by the end of the podcast. Sure. Okay. Well, let me give you one of my chuck, which, by the way, this is just an excellent article. It's as good as numbers journalism gets. Right? Yeah. So I guarantee this is one of yours, too, but I'm going to just go ahead and steal it in. I love this one. It's just so nuts. Yeah, it's weird. In North Boston, there was a neighborhood that was largely populated by Italian immigrants, and one of the big features of this neighborhood was, I guess a huge holding tank, I assume a molasses processing plan or something. Yeah, huge holding tank that held 2.5 million gallons of molasses. Apparently that's a couple of gallons too many because the tank ruptured, and from what I gather, exploded with molasses. There was shrapnel that was flying everywhere. So some people died that way. Sure. But I think the most horrific aspect of the death that came out, that day was that 21 people were killed by a 25 foot high wall of molasses. And you know the term slow as molasses? Right. That did not apply in this case because the reports were that it was going about 35 miles an hour. The problem is, you have that much molasses and it's traveling that fast and you get stuck in it. You're going to drown in molasses. Yes. And I can't imagine it takes more than one breath of molasses to drown you. Yeah, I would say so, but yeah, that's a pretty horrible way to go. And the weird thing is that apparently, to this day, I understand the residents of this neighborhood, almost 100 years later, at least 90 years later, still say that on a hot day, they can smell the molasses that took years to clean up this mess. Right. And of course, that's one of those things that might be lower at this point. Sure. But it makes for a good story. It definitely does. But yes, 21 people died drowning in molasses. Right? Yeah. Bizarre. Very bizarre. Onto the Collier brothers. I love these two. This is my other favorite one. These guys were pretty famous, too. If you're from New York City, you've probably heard of the Collier brothers. At some point, Langley and Homer Collier, they moved to New York, to Harlem in their in their twenty s, and they were from an uppercrust family, kind of well to do. And the brothers lived together in Harlem and became hermit's, basically, over the years. Yeah. And not just hermits, but compulsive hoarders. Yes. We should do a podcast on this that's very interesting. I read an analysis of compulsive hoarding using the Wonder machine, and they found that when asked to decide if they should throw away one piece of junk mail or another, the region of the brain that's associated with processing very unpleasant experiences lights up like a Christmas tree. Really? Yeah. Interesting. From what I gather, homer and Langley are definitely compulsive hoarders. Legendary. Right? Legendary. Apparently, they accumulated 180 tons of they call it junk in their apartment. And think about that every time. You can think of that's 60 more tons than what they've got every year on Mount Everest, which is one of the most littered places on earth. Right. And this is an apartment. Yeah. These guys had it in an apartment. So I think to call them compulsive orders is right on the money. So we're talking busted chandeliers, baby carriages, smash, pianos, clocks, furniture, newspapers just stacked to the ceiling. Homer went blind in the 1930s and was bedridden because of Rheumatism by 1000 1940. And his younger brother helped care for him night and day and saved all these newspapers in hopes that one day his brother would regain his site. I know. Which I found beyond sweet. Yeah, it's pretty sweet and strange. The other odd thing is they had their home booby trapped because what they did was they moved to Harlem, and then Harlem, over the years, started becoming a little bit more of a rough neighborhood, and they never moved. They just, like, shut themselves in and close all the doors still. It's a boot. That's true. Yeah. So they set these booby traps, and it turned out to be Langley's undoing. He tripped on one of these booby traps and was buried beneath an avalanche of junk. And Homer was starved to death because his brother wasn't around to take care of him. Did you get the impression that Langley died instantly, like, of a broken neck or something like that? Or did he possibly starve to death as well? That's a good question. I didn't get that, because it didn't say. It just said that he was buried underneath a pile of junk. So he could very well have just been trapped and had to starve to death as well. I mean, can you imagine Homer realizing that his brother just died under a pile of junk and blind and bedridden? You imagine he would have been like, oh, right, I'm toast. Yeah, exactly. So bizarre. Yes, very bizarre. Yeah. And apparently I read this I think it was a New Yorker article about this, and the author said that he grew up in the in New York, and his parents that was something they would say. They say, Clean up your room, and you're going to end up like those call your brothers. Poor guy. I'll bet they were grossly misunderstood, too. Probably, yeah. All right, well, I guess it's my turn. Sure. I call this one Death by Irony, because that's what it feels like to me every time I hear this one. Okay. Pagan twistle. Yeah. So she was a failed actress, somewhat successful back in New York, but she was drawn to Hollywood land, as the sign originally said. Right, right. And in a string of rejections, she acting role rejections. Thank you. Romantic. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Wow. She kept getting turned down for part after part after part, and she decided she was going to take her own life, which I call dedication to your craft. Right. Yeah. So she climbs up to the h. The first, leaves a suicide note at the bottom of it, climbs up to the top of the h, which is like, what, 60ft or something like that? I think it's about that. I smell some listener mail in my future. Right. But she climbed up to the top, jumped off 60ft, or whatever it is, it killed her, and they found her two days later, and her suicide note was very apologetic and short and sweet, and she just couldn't take it anymore. Right. And what kills me is that the day after she died, she killed herself. A letter arrived at her house offering her apart for the role of a suicidal woman. Right. Yeah. That one. That's bizarre. And agonizing. Agonizing. The Hollywood sign was outside my window in my apartment in La. Yeah. That's very cool. Very cool view. And didn't like Sutherland to live in your neighborhood, too. He did, yeah. Mr. Malcolm there. I'm going to go ahead and jump straight to number one. Okay. I like this one. Sure. Death by unexplained phenomenon is what I'm calling it. Okay. Even though I know it's really space aliens in the Ural Mountains of Russia. This is a group of college students, russian college students went hiking from Euro Polytechnic Institute. And this is in the wintertime. And so it was cold. Nine never made out of the woods. And what the investigators found was frightening. It really was horrific, I think is a good word. I don't even know if this one's bizarre. It's horrific. Yeah, just unexplained and horrific. First of all, they found their tent abandoned. It was ripped open from the inside and half buried in snow. And their shoes and their coats and their belongings were still inside the tent. Yeah. So that's where we're starting with investigation. There's snow everywhere. It's like winter, right? Sure. February in Russia. The first two bodies were found at the edge of the forest, barefoot and dressed in their underwear. The next three bodies were found near there in similar state. And then two months later, the last bodies were found buried in the snow, about 250ft away from them. Right, so they're all dead. Right. Four of the students had massive internal injuries, broken ribs, crushed skulls. One of them was missing her tongue, which is just freaky. Yeah. But they had no external wounds and no signs of struggle. No. So they had, like, crushed skulls, but no external wounds. Right. That's insane. Yes, but the weird thing is what they found on their clothing. Right. Well, the final victims were wearing the clothing of the other victims. Right. But wasn't the clothing irradiated? Yeah, they did test on the clothing and found that it had high levels of radiation. The case records were sealed until 1990, and when the case came back up and they learned that there were bright orange spheres spotted in the sky that night by other hikers. So you think aliens, huh? Oh, and these people, their faces were sunburned, too. That's crazy. Well, I mean, I don't know if it was aliens necessarily, but I think it was probably what I think it was some kind of army experimentation. Radiation, maybe. Bombs, something like that. Yeah. That's very odd. But it's still to this day, the Russian government won't own up to anything happening out of the ordinary in that area. Nine of your youth killed at your hand, accidentally or otherwise. It makes for bad PR. And you guys can't see this, but that one was clearly Chuck's favorite, because normally, like in an article, he will highlight a little passage or two as a reminder. He has that entire thing highlighted. You love that one, don't you? I do. It's really strange. Can I do one more? Sure. We haven't hit ten yet, have we? No. Okay, so I call this one Disco Boy. The 16 year old kid in England. Yeah. And if he was 16, he probably only started using deodorant maybe a couple of years before. Right. But he took a real shine to this stuff. Spray deodorant, aerosol deodorant. Right. And apparently this kid would just slather it on all over his body a couple of times a day. And you see in the article, it was so thick sometimes that his family downstairs could taste it in the air. And eventually, at age 16, he dropped out of a heart attack. Right. Yeah. And the reason why they found he had heart failure due to levels ten times the lethal dosage of butane and propane, liquid natural gases that are used as accelerants and aerosols or were. And this kid built it up time over probably two years, man. I mean, think about that. And it just built up in his system and finally just stopped his heart, which is just crazy to me. Apparently, he's in a very confined space, like his bathroom. So not only was he absorbing it through his skin yeah. He was inhaling it as well. Right. So we're not saying it's dangerous to use any kind of aerosol. Well, good luck finding an aerosol deodorant these days. Aren't they illegal? At least one's with propane and butane in them? Sure, if you say so. We'll go to the store and look. Okay. You want to after this? Yeah, I'd bring that up because I know somebody who occasionally will use fabrize in her hair to kind of, like, freshen up. And now I'm kind of like I kid you not. I find that really strange. Okay, good. Well, it's ten bizarre deaths, x number of bizarre deaths. There's still more that you can read about. Yeah. And I strongly recommend anyone go onto the site, read this article, a fine one, written by one Charles W. Bryant. Thank you. And all you have to do is type in ten bizarre ways is dye and the handychurch bar athowtofworks.com yes. And check while we are here, while we have everyone's attention, because we know you guys don't go anywhere. You know, listener mail is coming eventually. You want to hear your names. So first exactly. First, let's talk about our spoken word album. That's right. Josh and I and Jerry got together. Excuse me? Josh and me and Jerry got together, and we recorded our first ever full length it's like an hour plus Super Stuffed Guide to the Economy. And we break it down economics on a global level and tell you what it means to the individual and get into some pretty complex stuff in the way that we like to do. Yeah. I feel like we broke it down into very manageable knowledge. Right. Yeah. Well, that's the stuff you should know. Super stuff. Guide to the Economy. Yes. Which we love. That name it's up on itunes for what? 399. Right now. 399. If you guys want to go get it, that's cool with us. You can actually find it on itunes by typing in super and stuffed. Or super stuffed. Two words, I mean, in the little search bar on itunes. And I think it's the first thing that comes up. May be the only thing. No, it's not. Okay. But it is definitely the first thing that comes up, and you can find it there, like I said, on itunes. Great. And I guess while we're at it, we should go ahead and plug the blog, too, right? Our weblog? Well, we have a blog now, folks, called Stuff You Should Know. Yeah. Oddly enough. And you can access it through the homepage housetofworks.com over on the right side. Chuck and I each post once a day, so it's updated twice. Sometimes it's news items that we find interesting. Sometimes it's something that a fantasy that maybe isn't full enough for a podcast. I do a little recap on Fridays so where we can talk to the fans about what we podcast about that week. And it's fun stuff. It is fun, actually. I've kind of taken to it. Yeah, it's going to yes, I can see that. Yeah. So, Chuck, I guess it's listener mail time, right? Indeed, Josh. This is a really good one. I'm just going to call this exceptional fan mail. We get these from time to time. Remember when you brought up prosopagnosia? Yeah. Facial blindness. Facial blindness, yeah. You want to do a real quick recap of what that is? Basically, there's a malfunction of the brain region that processes visual facial information, and so people with say it one more time, Chuck. Prosopagnosia. Facial blindness. I have a total inability to make a memory of someone's face. So seeing somebody you've known for years for the thousandth time is like seeing them for the first time. You don't recognize them. So we had someone write in who has this, which is very cool. So we like these first hand accounts. So Anna wrote in and said that we could read this to our fans, so I thought it was kind of cool. Thanks, Anna. She said that she cannot visualize the faces of her coworkers, or anybody for that matter. But I do see faces when I look at them. This means that we can memorize features such as hair and skin color, haircut and facial structure. To some extent, feature based recognition like this is useless for recognizing people out of context, but it's usually enough to differentiate between people in context when you expect to see them. So, in other words, she comes up with a system of how to recognize people at work, let's say, right. Or somewhere else you might go to the club. Sure. Secondly, we recognize voices just as well as the next person. I know a lot of people wrote in and asked that question. Excellent. Point. Yeah. So that safe word thing when talking to relatives is absolutely not necessary. You were talking about having a safe word eskimo or pickle. Right. That's funny. So in the workplace, if a colleague greets me, I know who they are from their voice. Thirdly, people's body language is very individual, and although I can't recognize somebody's face, I can recognize how they walk and move, which is very individual. That made sense to me. Yeah, because it's just the face. Exactly. Only the face. Yes, that's what she says. Facial recognition is specialized for faces only in the brain. And fourth, she says that people tend to dress similarly from day to day, and that's also a good guideline. So you develop coping strategies. Most of the time you get by well enough. Although I work at a large company, I very rarely have problems at work and with people I meet regularly and I don't think my colleagues notice that's. Correct. Yes. You come up with a system. It's kind of interesting. Kind of like the guy memento would write down important things. Or tattoos are really important things for somebody. Yeah. Well, thanks, Anna. You sound like a sharp tack. Appreciate you sharing all that with us. And if you want to share some tips for overcoming facial blindness or anything else, you can send us an email to stuff. Podcast@howstepports.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, 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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3fdf9236-5461-11e8-b6d0-d3ee812101e1 | Selects: How Animal Domestication Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-how-animal-domestication-works | It's strange to hear, but the transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture, including the domestication of wild animals, is the single biggest thing to ever happen to humanity. You can thank it for everything from kingdoms to Ebola. Learn all about it in this classic episode. | It's strange to hear, but the transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture, including the domestication of wild animals, is the single biggest thing to ever happen to humanity. You can thank it for everything from kingdoms to Ebola. Learn all about it in this classic episode. | Sat, 14 Aug 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=14, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=226, tm_isdst=0) | 47695921 | audio/mpeg | "You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com.com with no fees or minimums on checking and savings accounts, banking with Capital One is, like, the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Kind of like choosing to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with their top rated app, you can deposit checks and transfer money anytime, anywhere, making Capital One an even easier decision that's banking reimagined what's in your wallet terms apply Capital One in a member FDIC hello, friends. It's me, Josh, and for this week's select, I chose our September 2014 episode how Animal Domestication Works. First, I want to congratulate you on being curious enough that you pressed play and what seems like it might be a very boring topic, but your adventurousness will be rewarded indeed, because this is one of those Stuff you should know episodes that sounds dull but turns out to be super interesting. I hope you enjoy it and spend the rest of your day patting yourself on the back. Go ahead. You deserve it. 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 our buddy Noel, who's producing us. Yeah. And that's stuff you should know. How's it going? Fine. Where are you at? Just a friendly ice breaker. Oh, I see. Yeah. As if. We didn't just record another show. We did. It was on police interrogation. That's right. So, Chuck yes? You've heard of Jared Diamond before, right? No. Yes, it rang familiar. He ran on guns, germs and steel. Okay. Yeah, he wrote Collapse. He's known for those two books. I don't think I know that one. I think it came after guns, germs and steel. But he wrote one of my favorite journal articles of all time. It's called the worst mistake in the history of the human race. About agriculture. About transitioning to agriculture. I was going to guess on what that might be. Oh, sorry. That's right. What do you guess that it's about? No, agriculture? Well, the thing is, it may be the worst mistake in the history of the human rights. I've talked about it a million times. Yes, the article, that is. But he also wrote this really interesting article called Evolution, Consequences and Future of Plant and Animal Domestication, which sounds extremely boring, and it's in Nature, the journal Nature. I bet it's not boring, though. It isn't boring. Yeah, it's really interesting because in it he talks about animal domestication, and he says that it came about as a result of typically in about the same time as agriculture, the Neolithic revolution, where we went from hunter gatherers to agriculturists right. To farmers, and everything changed. Like, we grew shorter in stature. Our brains grew smaller, our jaws grew shorter, we got just weird in a bunch of different ways. Right. And it was as a result of agriculture. And if you look at what happens when we domesticate animals, when we take them from the wild and we plant them next to us on a farm, the same thing happens. So his point is, what he's arguing is that not only did humans domesticate animals, humans in turn have become domesticated themselves through agriculture. Yeah. There's probably nothing that's had a greater impact, no single transition or change or concept that's had a greater impact on Homo sapiens than the Neolithic revolution or the transition to agriculture boom. And a big part of that was the domestication of animals. Yeah, they kind of went hand in hand, hoof in hand. Which to me is hilarious because consider this, I think this is the funniest thing I've ever thought of in my life. Wow. Imagine being an alien come down to Earth, alright? And you're just walking along, taking everything in and you see a human riding horse. And us, it's a human riding a horse. It makes it a complete sense. But if you're an alien, you see an animal riding another animal and that would have to be the funniest thing you've ever seen ever. If you're a marching yeah. An animal riding another animal. Yeah, like those little cowboy monkeys that ride dogs and stuff like that. It's hilarious in that same thing. It's the exact same thing. Or when you watch Planet of the Apes, an ape riding a horse. That sounds funny. That's unsettling. That's terrifying. Yeah. That is the funniest thing you've ever said. Yes, it is. So man, that was a good set up. Thanks. Man, it's been a while since we got an old Josh story. I get really excited about anthropology. Well, we are covering domestication and I guess we should say off the bat that not everyone is on board. PETA had to look this up because I wasn't sure what their actual stance was regarding animal domestication. You had to look that up? No, about pets. Sure. I wondered. Officially they are against Pet keeping. Sure. But they know it's too late. They hate pets, but they know it's too late. They're like we know what they are not for is for setting these animals free. Here's why the original co founder, I think is Ingrid Newkirk is an animal abolitionist. But Peter is like it's way too far gone. We don't want you to set these animals free. So we're going to fight our fight on spaying and neutering and reducing that population as much as possible. Right. But they are still officially against pets. Right, but their position actually does make sense. It's extremely realistic because there is a strict definition of a domesticated animal. Domesticated animal is a species that was formerly wild, that has been taken in by humans and whose characteristics have been so radically altered by humans that they can no longer feed themselves? Typically, yeah. It's when we actually change their genetic makeup. Yes. And part of that change, part of the characteristic change is that the food supply is controlled by humans. So if you put, say, an average dog out, my dog, luckily, would be dead in three days. Yeah. And somebody would say, well, they would forge their garbage. Humanity. If you took a dog out of any kind of human area and put it in the area, it may return to a primal state, in which case that dog is reverted to a feral state. Now, a feral animal is one that was formerly domesticated and then went back to the wild. Yeah. If you take a single wolf and you teach it to jump up and grab beef jerky out of your hands yeah. What you have there is a wolfie. That's a tame wolf. Yeah. Now, a tame wolf could still go fend for itself. It's a tame individual. A domesticated animal is one that's born comfortable associating with humans. Yeah. And there's exceptions, of course. Cats, the domestic house cat being one. You could drop a cat out in the middle of the woods yeah. And they would survive. They would hunt mice and eat mice or whatever, squirrels. And the domestic cat is its own species. But that raises some questions under Jared Diamond's definition, the stricter definition of a domestic animal. If a cat can just go take care of itself, is it technically feral or is it ever really domesticated? Yeah. Or is it just an agreement? Hey, I'll catch the mice in your house, and I like that wet food every day at 05:00 p.m.. So I'll just hang out here. Exactly. And I like to sleep under your chin. Like, the cat has found an agreeable arrangement that it could take or leave at any time. Yeah. Mutually beneficial. And as we'll see, that's a consistent thing in the domestication of animals is that some people believe that it's good for the animal, it's good for the human. And we have learned to scratch each other's backs in many different ways, literally, even in some cases. So a little bit of a good background for this one might be to listen to our show on natural selection. Yeah. Well, it covers natural selection, but there's another kind of selection called artificial selection when it comes to domesticating animals, and that is not the same thing. That is when humans are choosing these desirable traits and making it so through breeding. Like the original horses. The first domesticated horses were they smoked cigars. They did. We broke them of that habit. No, they were small like ponies. There were little ones, little wild horses. In Mongolia. I think they call them the Zowalskis. Is that a family in Pittsburgh? No, it was a Russian army officer that they're named after. But when you start your name with three continents, I never know which one is silent? Okay, so how do you spell it? P RZ oh, I was not going to get that spelled. E WS I'm just going to say Zoeki's horse. But people were at one point like, man, I'd love to ride that thing, but he's too small. So find the biggest one that's a male and find the biggest one that's a female and make them go have sex and maybe they'll have a bigger son, and then make that one mate with someone big. And eventually these things are going to be big enough to where we can ride them, and then by proxy, throw away the ones that don't fit the criteria that we want or use them for something else for food. But that's what we did with dogs, too. You got a bunch of different ones, right? Say, big, small, soft, furry, fast, cuddly. And we said, well, we like this one for this, and we'd like that one for that. And so artificial selection was still going on. We were just spreading it out all over the place with, like, say, a horse or something. We want it bigger and stronger because we wanted to ride them. And we also wanted to apparently drink their milk, which I did not know. But it makes sense that horses produce milk because they are mammals. But apparently our ancestors used to drink horse milk. You never had horse milk? No. I want to know if there's anyone out there listening who's tasted horse milk. Please describe it. Is someone out there is drinking horse milk right now while they're listening to the show? One of our Mongolian listeners, straight from the teat. I think they use the horse for all sorts of stuff, the Mongolians. They're also, like, excellent riders. Yeah. I think that Zoeki's horse is in Mongolia again after being nearly extinct. I might be wrong about that. So in addition to selecting the big horse, we also did some cool stuff with sheep we selected out there. They had longer, coarser hair that we didn't want. That's the Kemp. We wanted the softer stuff that was inside, aka the wool. So we bred sheep that had more wool than Kemp until basically you can't find Kemp and sheep any longer. And they were one of the first domesticated animals, right? The sheep? Yeah, they were. Chickens don't normally produce eggs as frequently as they do once they've been domesticated. And like, a Rhode Island Red will produce five to seven a week. That's a lot of eggs. Yeah, apparently the original chicken, too. I didn't look this up, but I remember a friend of mine that was a vegetarian. I witnessed an argument between the vegetarian and meat eater, which is always fun because I don't get involved in that stuff. And I think when I was like, well, look at the chickens. What else are they going to do? What are they good for? And he was like, Dude, the original chicken wasn't anything like this chicken. Yeah, the original wild chicken was, like, taller and leaner and ran super fast. Road Runner gets solved crimes and did all sorts of chicken things that weren't just being slaughtered for food. And apparently the first chickens were domesticated, they think, for cock fighting. Yeah, for entertainment. Crazy. We have a shameful history, don't we, as people, humans. Yeah. So, diamond, you would think, if we can domesticate animals, why don't we just domesticate them all and use them for purposes? And diamond writes that only about 14 animal species out of 148 cannons have been domesticated. And that's because Westigate, every animal, there are certain things, there are certain criteria that even opens up the possibility. Yeah, there's like, a six point checklist, basically, and it's not progressive. If any one of these characteristics or traits isn't met, it pretty much just throws off the whole deal. So you got to have all six. All right. The first one is the right diet. If you're a picky animal, what's the one that only eats bamboo? The bamboo toad. Those dumb koalas. Koalas? No, they eat eucalyptus. Yeah. Man, I'm glad you remember that. Yeah. You're not going to be able to domesticate a koala, because what you want is something that you can feed in mass quantities on cheap, accessible food. Well, actually, bamboo would be the way to go. It's eucalyptus. Yeah. I don't know how eucalyptus, because if they bamboo, they'd probably be domesticated in that. Well, no, by cheap, accessible food, I think they mean, like, millions of pounds of feed that you can put in a trough. Dude, bamboo is, like, one of the fastest growing plants on Earth. Not realize that. Are we still talking about eucalyptus? But this bamboo thing have you heard about bamboo? I have a company that grows it. Oh. Josh's bamboo floors. The number two thing is a fast growth rate, so they got to be able to grow quick and so you can use them. Yeah. So, like, if we'd figured out how to use gorillas to build skyscrapers, that would be awesome. But it would take forever to build a skyscraper because gorillas only reproduce fairly infrequently. Okay. So we need something that can build a skyscraper fast. And that's why that didn't work right when they tried it. Yeah, but that one gorilla wearing that hard hat got a lot of laughs, friendly disposition. That's pretty clear. If you're a kodiac bear, you're not going to be domesticated. They tried that. They tried grizzlies at one point. That's a failed domestication. Oh, wow. Yeah. Zebras very famously can't be domesticated. Yeah. Because I imagine people would be like, man, I want to ride that thing. It's cool looking. Yeah. And it'll bite you to death. Really? Yeah. Apparently in that Jared Diamond article, he says that zebras account for more injuries to zookeepers than any other animal at the zoo. Man. Yeah. That is one pissed off stripy horse. They're not horses at all, though, are they? They're related for sure. Well, yeah. So the zebras one and then koalas too, apparently, are like ferocious little animals. Well, they're tired of eating bamboo eucalyptus. Right. 1234 easy breeding. That's pretty obvious. You gotta be able to pump out little baby puppies quickly. Yes. Some animals, like, just shut down when you when they're captive. Like, they don't breed. Like, pandas have a lot of trouble breeding in captivity. She does too. Is that why it's always such a big deal when they're born at the zoo or when twins are born at the Atlanta Zoo? Yeah, man. I don't know about zoos. Well, we did a podcast on that. I think that's the conclusion we came to. Huh? I think that was the title of it, man. I don't know about zoo. What's it called? Zoos good or bad for animals? Yes, that was a good episode. It's one of those long lost, overlooked ones that are so good. That's polarizing too, man. I did some Facebook posting about killer whales in captivity, and people really feel passionately about, like, Blackfish about supporting SeaWorld or not supporting SeaWorld, and that blackfish is a bunch of bunk. And apparently Blackfish was highly manipulated. The documentary was. But at the end of all of that, I was like, I don't care. I just don't think they should be kept in captivity. This one particular thing. But that was just me respect of a social hierarchy. That's a big one, because if you can't be the alpha dog and the leader of the pack, then you're going to have a very hard time domesticating that animal. Yes, but with a cat being an exception, an animal that does follow a social hierarchy is basically prearranged to be domesticated. Because you just take that alpha male, you punch them in the face a couple of times in front of everybody, make them cry, and then now you're the alpha male and you say, start laying eggs and they listen to you. And then they're domesticated, at least in that respect after you've punched the chicken. Yeah, but that's a big one with that social hierarchy. It sets them up. They're predisposed to our method of domestication, which is listening to humans. And like sheep, it's mind blowing because sheep, they're herd animal that follows an alpha leader. Right? Yeah. And so we have gotten so we're just show off when it comes to animal domestication. We're so good that we've taken one of our domesticated animals, the dog, and put the dog in charge of the sheep as the alpha male of the sheep. Yeah, that's how sheep are herded. That's just showing off the aliens. That's another good alien laugh. The double domestication thing. Dog leading the sheep. And it's funny too, if you ever had a dog that has the herding instinct, when you see that play out in your own home. We used to see it all the time with lucy, she would totally hurt us. And when we let her out in the backyard, she would walk the perimeter of the fence instead of running through the middle of it. Very interesting stuff, those original tendencies. And then the last one is they won't panic. If you have an animal that freaks out behind the fence like deer, yeah, you're going to have a real hard time there. But like we said, there are exceptions because wolves were fierce and cats don't follow a pack leader. And we're going to get to dogs and cats a little later. 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Come chat with us. That's Neovenrelievespane.com. Your patience will thank you. So if you listen to our show on Caveart, you know that and on Egyptology, you know the animals. What else? Mummification. Yeah, probably so. You know, the animals have been tied to humans for a long time and revered by humans for a long time, as evidenced by the fact that they buried them and they mummified them and they painted them on their walls, painted pictures of us riding them. Yeah. They think that the first animal to be domesticated by far was the dog. Yeah. How awesome is that? Huntergatherer Society and the dog were pals long before agriculture ever came along. But about the time of the agricultural revolution, which is and get this, check this out. Yeah. 10,500 years BP to about 4500 years BP. Now. What's BP before present. Is that the new one? Yeah, that's like the scientific way of saying it. There's no zero year or anything like that. It's just 10,500 years before present. Before present. Before present. Not British. That was New Zealand. Basically. At some point about 10,500 years ago. What they think happened is the Earth's climate change. Maybe we killed off enough of the megafauna through over hunting or through climate change. They just went extinct. And about that time, some plants came around that we noticed we really liked, and maybe accidentally we started growing them. And then we figured out that we could just select these ones and through a process of artificial and natural selection, merged together, we got agriculture, and about that same time, we started to domesticate pigs, sheep and cattle. I think we're the big first three. And they still are the big three. Yeah, like those are the money, domesticated animals. Well, yeah, like you said, it's tied to human natural selection as well, because if you are the tribe that has figured out how to keep cattle, then you're going to do better than your neighboring tribe. That hasn't yet. And so you are going to be more successful as a civilization. Yeah, you are. And you're going to conquer, like we talked about, and I think the royalty one. We talked a lot about tribes conquering other tribes through agriculture, through exporting agriculture. And as a result, Jared Diamond points out, 88% of humans alive today speak one of seven language families, and they come from two places in Eurasia, which were the first places for agriculture to take root. So basically, those tribes were so effective because of agriculture. Today, we still basically the vast majority of speak one of seven language groups. Wow, that's crazy. Years. All these thousands of years later, that's how effective agriculture was asserting authorita we should do one on agriculture. The birth of agriculture. I can't believe we haven't yet. Yeah, let's do it. Agreed. So, back to animals. Here's a little breakdown of where some of your favorite animals came from. So in Southeast Asia is where you first got your goats, pigs, sheep and dogs. Southwest Asia? Yeah, we went over to Central Asia. It's like Mesopotamia. Okay. These are the birth of it all. Yeah. Central Asia, you're going to get your chickens and your two humped backtrie in. Is that it's pronounced? Yeah, it looks like it. Camel. Central Asia. Yeah. And those camels were actually well known for long hair and they can survive in cold climates. Yeah. They're not just desert dwellers. Right? No, but apparently when they were domesticated, it created such a revolution that some societies stopped using the wheel because they're like, we don't need the wheel anymore, we got camels. Like the wheel left altogether, and then came back when someone said, cars are pretty cool, too. Yes, actually, it was much sooner than that. Arabia is where you have the Arabian camel with a single hump. China, they domesticated pigs and the water buffalo and dogs move over to the Ukraine and you've got the wild tarpon horses. And so what most folks think were the original the OG, the original horse. Right. Even though I read about the small ones in Mongolia with new ski. Or the Kollsky. Yeah, the Koalky family. Yeah, I'm going to have to look that up. And then Egypt, you've got your donkeys, and then South America, you've got your llama and your alpaca. Llama as a beast of burden, and the alpaca for their soft wool and the guinea pig for their meat. Oh, really? Yeah. In South America? Yup. The Andes. I don't want to eat a guinea pig. That's what they were bred for originally. Really? Yeah. Wow. And those were some of the earliest ones. And Jared Diamond again, I know I keep siding him, but man, this guy has great ideas. Is he live? Yeah. Okay, so he's a modern man. Yeah. He's got a little beatnick pointy beard and everything. Really? Yeah. He's a good guy. Let's get in touch with him. Okay. Attention, Jared Diamond. Please contact us for reasons we'll figure out later. Yeah. Stuff podcast and how stuff works put in the subject line, I'm Jared Diamond. And now we're going to get 500. It'll be Lou Bega posing as Jared Diamond. Nice one. So diamond pointed out that over the last 1000 years, only one substantial animal has been added to the list of domesticated animals. So basically, we were good at it to start, and we did everything we could. Basically, almost all animals that are going to be domesticated on Earth have been domesticated. Was it the hamster? It was the reindeer. Oh, the hamster was until 1930, though. Yes, I know. And if you read that, that's technically a tamed animal. Oh, it's not domesticated. Not under the strictest definition, where it's like the animals are born and they're genetically modified. They're comfortable around humans, they're born that way. With a tamed animal, you're like inventing the wheel with each individual organism. Got you. With a domesticated animal, you've taken a wild species and you've selected it enough so that when an animal is born, it's cool being around a human. Whereas if you're around like a gerbil or a hamster baby, it's not going to be cool around you. It doesn't have thousands of years of genetic information telling it that from birth it can be comfortable with you because you're going to give it some pellets to eat. Okay. Whereas a dog, a puppy will just automatically snuggle up with you. Right. But think about getting close to a wolf pup. It's going to be problematic. Let's go try right now. Did you ever see that movie never cry Wolf? The Disney movie from the mid 80s? It was so good. His live action. Ethan Hawk. No, it was way before his time. No, I totally know what you mean. I can picture the guy in my head. He goes and lives with the wolf by himself. Man, it's a good movie. Yeah, he was in I can't remember he's in another movie. So when we did Domesticate it, like I said, we took a wild animal. It underwent a process through artificial selection to where it just became something different. And there's certain traits that they're not quite sure how they happen, but they're clearly linked to the genes that lead to domestication, that take an animal and turn it from wild to tame to domesticated, that have outward signals and signs like floppy ears. Yeah. The only other animal in the wild that has floppy ears is the African elephant. Every other animal in the wild has perky ears, but it's almost like it's a signal, like, okay, we're tame now. Our ears don't need to perk up. It totally is smaller brain size. Yes. They don't need to be as smart over the years if you're feeding, as evidenced by my dumb dog Buckley. Like I said, he wouldn't survive two days in the wild. Yes. My neighbor one time left his dog out all night by accident. And I was going out to the car the next morning, and this big Rottweiler comes running over at me. And I was like, at first I was like, oh, man. And then I realized it was Carter. And I went banged on his door, and he finally woke up and he's like, Carter's in here? I was like, I don't think so. And he had come home from a long night, let him out, and forgot to let back in, and little Carter just slept on the front porch. It's like the sweetest thing ever. But Carter survived is my point. But sleeping on the front porch. Sleeping on the front porch and, like, scratching on it, please let me in. Yeah. So, yeah, smaller brains, curly hair, sharp sense of sight and hearing. Well, it's lessened. Yeah, it's lessened because they don't need that stuff either. Right. Because they're being cared for by humans. The humans are saying, you just get dumb. We're in charge now. We'll teach you everything you need to know. We got a lot of this data, this information from a Jared Diamond. No, not even a very famous study that went on for about 40 years by a Russian geneticist named Dmitry Balya. And Bellev said, hey, I'm going to figure out how domestication actually works, and I'm going to take silver foxes and I'm going to compress the domestication process. And basically, over the course of like, 30 or 40 years, even after he died, his colleagues and interns and assistants carried on this experiment. So it's been going on for maybe 50 years. Oh, wow. And they've found that you can get predictable results from domesticating animals, and they've domesticated some silver foxes. Their ears started getting floppy, their skulls started to get smaller. They started to get curly hair. Some of them started to bark, and they were born comfortable around humans. Yeah. And here's the thing. If you've seen, there's a really cute video on the Internet about a little fox getting his belly rubbed. It looks sort of like dogs, but they are DNA evidence. They have pretty much proven that dogs are descended from the Asian gray wolf and have nothing to do with foxes. But that's just proof through this experiment that taming and domesticating this animal can lead to these traits. Yeah, because a lot of people are like, how do you get a Pomeranian from a gray wolf or a pug from a gray wolf or something like that? Have you seen that picture? Of that pug who is clearly messing around with a crawfish and gets his tongue bit and it's like in mid air and they have huge eyes that are bulging out. Anyway, he's trying to have sex with the crawfish. No, he was sniffing it, and the crawfish grabbed onto his tongue and now the crawfish is hanging onto his tongue. And in the mid air is the pugs, like squealing or whatever is hilarious. Anyway, they figured out that because of domestication, these traits change. And like I said before, with different kinds of dogs, you get different kinds of well, different looking dogs that we've selected for over time. Yeah, it didn't take that long, apparently. Apparently with canines, specifically, selective breeding can affect the species really rapidly. And there's been evidence of pekinese dogs as far back as first century Ad. China. So they weren't wolves for long once we decided. And there's different theories on how that very first happened. One of them, which I like is that people found abandoned pups and it's just a natural human instinct to see a little puppy and care for it. So they said, well, let me take this little wolf puppy because it needs a home. We should talk about the science of cute sometimes it's really interesting. Why would you find things cute? An email the other day. We'll have to do that one. So, yeah, that's one of the theories. The other one is that maybe some of the more tame wolves would rummage around our garbage for food. And so if you were a more tame well, if you're more likely to survive and eventually that would evolve into a more dog like species. Yeah, because the human garbage pile was much more reliable source of food than, say, like whatever was growing in the wild. Exactly. That's natural selection basically through artificial means, almost. Yeah. But either way, they think that dogs descended from wolves or diverged from wolves as long as 100,000 years ago, but they didn't really start to undergo the drastic morphological changes until maybe 15,000 years ago. Yeah. And again, all of this predates the advent of agriculture. So that means that huntergatherers and dogs were friends for a while. And they think that the reason that happened was because they figured out that a dog could go flesh out some Corey, a hunter gatherer could spirit and then tear off a piece and give the dog some and eat some himself. And they had a symbiotic hunting relationship that was aces. Yeah, like we said earlier, mutually beneficial. It was great for the dog. They were fast and fierce, and we were smart because we already mentioned dogs innately want to follow a lead dog, an alpha dog. It was kind of like the perfect relationship, and it has been ever since. Yes. And one of the other cool things about the domestication of the dog is in ancient Rome, apparently, women is where they had the first evidence of little lap doggies because they were supposedly cured stomachaches, which of course, they didn't. But I think it just made someone feel better having a little dog curled up on their lap. So how's your tummy feel now? So we selected them for that. So we selected them for that. We selected, oh, I don't know, sheepdogs to herd and terriers to catch rats. And that explains all this variation in dog breeds. Yeah, I saw a cool special on it the other day. I think it was on Animal Planet, but it wasn't one of those just like, look how cute everything is. It was kind of like the science behind the history of these animals. It was really cool. Got you. So let's take a break and we'll come back and we'll talk about cats and other stuff, too, right after this. 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. The Neogen device developed by Rst Syndnexis, is a Wellestablished advanced quantumbased medical device using electric cell signaling technology. Treatment is noninvasive, safe, effective, and used in managing pain associated with neuropathy and other painful conditions. It helps improve circulation, offers better rehabilitation through pain relief, and activates the recovery processes, giving better patient outcomes. Visit Neogenrelievespane.com now for provider benefits. About the Neogen system. Come chat with us. That's Neogenreleavespane.com. Your patience will thank you. Okay, so cats don't follow an alpha male, which leads to a puzzle of how they could possibly have been domesticated. And if you talk to certain people, they may not have ever really been domesticated. Yeah, cats don't look different than their ancestors. Right. Which means that it makes it tough to go back and compare modern cats to the cats in the fossil record and say, oh, they diverged x number of years ago, or whatever. Yeah, that's one of my favorite things about cats is when you look at a cat in the backyard, crouched down to leap on the bird, it looks just like a big lion. About the leap on the big bird. The thing is, they're pretty sure that cats did not diverge from big cats like lions. They think they came instead from a couple of different wild cats, a European wildcat and an African wildcat. And both of those are still around today. And they think that that's what the cats last common ancestors were. Yeah, like, if you look at the African wildcat, it looks like just a bigger version of a tabby. Yes. And they don't know exactly when they were domesticated, but there's evidence that as far back as 9500 years ago. There's at least one grave site where a cat was clearly buried with a human, which indicates some sort of importance. And familialness with a cat. Yeah. They love cats and dogs. Right. And I think cats even had like, a religious significance or maybe both of them did because Anubis that was the dog. Right. I don't remember. I just remember Horace was the hawk. Right. But ancient Egyptians love their dogs and cats. It was Horace, the dog. I think Anubis was the dog. So again, cats probably are not technically domesticated. Well, the reason why we took them in, though, is the same reason that some people still take them in now is because they're good mousers. Right. And that's pretty much the explanation for domestication in a lot of ways. Like the animals were useful for work. That's right. So some of the other animals, very ancient domesticated animals that we domesticated for work and I guess I should say it wasn't just for work. Probably initially we domesticated animals for a food supply, like their milk things like cattle, cows. We domesticated them for milk, of course. Yeah. They're ancient ancestor. It's now extinct, called the arak. That's what led to modern tame cattle, apparently. Right. Oxen. We domesticated them for work. Although there's milk from them. You can pretty much drink milk from anything. Yeah. Mammal, I think you can milk anything. Just a little milking. The ox, I think, was even stronger than the cow. And they would pull initially sledges, like, put a bunch of junk on that thing and pull it over here. And then eventually plows and of course, wheeled wagons. And some say that we wouldn't have even gotten to where we were with the wheel if it hadn't been for things like ox. Yeah. Because we would have had to pull it. Yeah. That's no good. Cheap. We eventually figured out that we could breed them for their wool. Although apparently there was a 5000 year differential between the time we domesticated cheap and the time we started using wool. Yeah. Before the loom or before they started weaving by hand. Goats are great because they'll eat anything. So they're super useful. You can be on infertile rocky land and a goat is pretty happy. They're great. Climbers eat them. Yeah. Got meat, unfortunately. Make cheese out of their milk. Did you know that cashmere comes from goats? I did not know that. Did not know that. I think they're just good for looking at and thinking they're cute. Sure, that's one thing. Pigs, of course, are descended domesticated from the wild boar and pigs were domesticated mainly because they would eat waste and trash. And so they were handy to have around because they would eat our trash and then we would eat them. Right. You know, it's interesting. North America has a pretty fascinating history as far as domesticated animals go with pigs in particular. The wild hogs in North America were not around there are a couple of piglike animals, but there's no true wild pigs in North America. Or they weren't until the 16th century when DeSoto brought a bunch of domesticated pigs who wandered off, some of which wandered off and became the wild hogs of the Americas. Well, that's the same thing happened to the horse. Exactly. They originally came over on the Bering land bridge and then went extinct. And then the Spanish brought them over and they said, hey, I don't know why there aren't horses here already, because this is pretty great. Yeah, the horses said that and some of them went feral. And now you have the horses on Cumberland Island. Yeah. They're still wild, aren't they? Yeah, that's pretty amazing. Unless they're faking it. No, Cumberland Island is here in Georgia, for those of you that don't know. We're not talking about some like, South American country. No Cumberland Island? Yeah, right here in the south. And what's cool is for me, this is the fact of the podcast after the horse, the next step forward in speed transportation was 5000 years later with the steam train. Yeah, horses were as fast as we could go and tie up twelve of them to that stage coach and we'll be twelve horses strong. But yeah, for 5000 years, it's just amazing. And then finally they invented the steam engine and then the horses were like, all right, fine, we'll go over here. But apparently at first they were used for their meat and their milk. Yes, horse milk again. And then they were used as a mode of transportation. Donkeys, also good for transport, like you said. Egypt. Yeah, they came out of Egypt. Camels, good for transporting. You got a couple of different kinds, the backtrin and the Arabian camels. And just using animals for transport and for work kind of allowed for not only the agricultural revolution to take hold, but for it to spread as well through trade routes and stuff that allowed humans to just move longer distances faster. That was another big way that domestication changed humanity. It helped us spread like a plague over the face of the earth so we could ruin everything. Yeah, I guess we can talk about some other smaller livestock like chickens and roosters. Like you said earlier. This was, I think, maybe the second factor. The show is possibly domesticated for entertainment as cock fighters, which is sad. Turkeys. I didn't know this. They were one of the few indigenous North American domesticated animals. Yeah, mesoamericans domesticated them. Who knew? I didn't know that either. Although if that floats your boat, you should read 1493 because stuff like that comes up. I just need to read both those at some point. I can't believe you haven't. I know. Here's another one. Bees. We domesticated bees, I'm sure through a very long and painful process. This is discussed in 1493 as well. So we domesticated bees and we use bees to help us with another domesticated organism. The almond tree. Oh, yeah. So that's another one. That's like sheep dogs herding sheep. Oh, yeah. But this is bees pollinating almonds. Yeah. Well, bees, we did a great episode on that. That's how we sweetened everything for many years and still do. Using honey, I did last night. It's still delicious. In a cocktail? No, on a biscuit. Oh, nice. A little honey on a biscuit. Did you make the biscuit yourself? Yummy, did. Nice. From scratch? No, from the can. Yeah. Okay. Those are good, though. Oh, yeah. You know what's real good, I've noticed is the frozen ones in the bag instead of the can. They rise a lot more like a traditional Southern biscuit to me. We wanted just like a nasty, buttery like layer biscuit. The flaky layers. Yeah. Man, those are good. And it's always fun to open the package too. And it's delicious with honey. But thanks to a man named Ll. Langstroth, he is the guy who really made beekeeping. There are a lot of people working with frames already, but he's the one he's the first guy that made removable and movable frames. Which apparently bees will have a tendency to tie their honeycombs into the wall of the box, let's say. And with those removable and movable frames, I couldn't do that anymore. And apparently that made it really easy to manage them. Yeah. So thanks to him, in 1852, smart guy, we could domesticate those bees for their delicious honey. And so here's where it comes kind of falls apart for me. I could see saying bees are domesticated. Sure. They don't sting you. They're used to being around people. Yeah. Silkworms? No. Rabbits? No. I would say that you can tame a rabbit, but for the most part, they're not domesticated. Okay. And then the same with hamsters, which I didn't realize that they were this recent. Yeah. From 1930. And another fun fact is, supposedly the entire population of domesticated or I'm sorry, tamed hamsters derives from that one hamster family because they make so many little hamsters so quickly. So you take issue with silkworms rabbits and hamsters? I do. As tamed, but not domesticated. Yes. Like the elephant. Just because Hannibal rides an elephant doesn't mean it's domesticated. It meant he had a tamed elephant to ride. And, Chuck, just before we wrap up, I mentioned that humans, in turn have been domesticated by agriculture. And we have. Yeah. We've undergone a lot of the same changes that domesticated animals undergo when we domesticate them. Our reproductive period has increased because we don't have to carry a kid like 10 km every day because we're not huntergatherers. So we can have more kids. Yeah. Just get on the horse and ride all over town. Exactly. And one of the other ways that we've changed in addition to some of us becoming lactose tolerant into adulthood is we become ravaged by and also immune to a lot of diseases, a lot of epidemic diseases which couldn't have ever existed prior to the advent of agriculture for two reasons. One, it needs a dense human population that agriculture supports for it to be spread around and contracted and to really gain steam. And then secondly, it also requires a lot of repeated close proximity to animals. And it turns out that all of our epidemic diseases come from the agricultural revolution and are hanging out with livestock a lot. Yeah. Like, for example, influenza came from pigs and ducks. Measles and tuberculosis came from cattle. Possibly smallpox came from cattle, if not camels. And then get this. The very fact that almost all of these worst epidemic diseases have their origins in eurasia means that that's because our domestication took place in Eurasia, which means that the people of Eurasia were able to develop resistance and immunity over the generations to these diseases. So they don't get these diseases as much. No. And when we came over, that's what wiped out the North American New World populations, because they didn't have any resistance to these diseases. So you can really make a case that agriculture changed everything more than anything else ever has. Wow. So that's that. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Man you need to read 1490 114 93. I'll do that tonight. Okay. If you want to know more about animal domestication, you can type those two seemingly boring but rather fascinating words into the search bar house to the Worlds.com, and that will bring up this article and then suggested search bar sign for listener mail. I'm going to call this Nielsen family. We heard from quite a few, got quite a few people that showed pictures of their little, like, two and $3 packets. It's kind of neat. I don't think it's even $5 anymore. I think a couple of people just got $2. Apparently, they give you two to sweeten the pot, and then once you do it, you get more. That's what I think. That's what somebody, I think, said, well, this is from a real deal Nielsen family. They got paid. And they're from Atlanta, from Grant Park. Apparently. Our address was picked at random by their computer program, and they sent out a representative with a gift set of ugly tumblers to convince us to participate. We agreed because they pay you about $200 every six months if you let them track your TV and computer usage. Rob, who was the representative, came by, installed the TV box and computer program, and we check in on us in person every six months and asked a set of questions about our life and purchasing habits. They always asked about table wine, which I thought was interesting. I know every time we turned on our TV, they would have loved me, because I would just be drunk on table wine the whole time. Every time we turn on the TV or open up our laptop, we had to press a button about who was watching and using the computer wasn't that hard, but it became annoying after a couple of years. So we were happy when our contract ended. Apparently they were really excited to have us as a part of their program because we were what they call a Grand Slam family. Which means we were young, under 30, with over the air TV, no cable antenna, and we owned a Mac. So that's a grand slam. Apparently. Yes. I guess so. It seems like we're pretty rare find in the world in their world. So rare that when our two year participation ran out, they offered us a year long extension. We also got a bonus payment for being a minority household, which is hilarious because both of us are white as can be. But my husband is half Cuban, so that is from Laura and Chris right here in Atlanta. Nice. Laura and Chris Nielsen? Yeah, they're the Nielsen family. No cable, under 30 Mac users. The Grand Slam. Grand Slam. If you are a Grand Slam family of some weird sort, we want to hear from you. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyoushhnnow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housetofworks.com and check out our home on the web. Stuffyoushorenow.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. 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 Neogenreliefspane.com now for provider benefits. About the Neogen System come chat with us. That's Neogenrelievespane.com. Your patience will thank you. You know you're the best pet mom when you growl back during play time, give epic belly rubs and feed them Halo holistic made with responsibly sourced ingredients, plus probiotics for digestive health. Find us at chewy amazonandhalopets.com. Com." | |
42474cf8-53a3-11e8-bdec-17f3dd076c07 | How the US Interstate System Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-us-interstate-system-works | Wait! This is actually a good episode! It turns out that America’s 48,000 miles of superhighways – possibly the largest civil works project in the history of humanity – may have also ruined what made America a cool place. | Wait! This is actually a good episode! It turns out that America’s 48,000 miles of superhighways – possibly the largest civil works project in the history of humanity – may have also ruined what made America a cool place. | Thu, 19 Sep 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=262, tm_isdst=0) | 58284076 | 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. Hello. Stuff you should know. Listeners, if you want to come see us live, you've only got a couple of more cities this year that still have tickets, and that is Orlando and New Orleans. Yeah, we'll be in Orlando on October 9 at the Plaza live. And we'll be in New Orleans at the Civic Theater the following night, October 10. And, friends, like Chuck said, you better go get your tickets. Go to sysklive.com for info and ticket links and everything you need to come see us. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there. And the three of us are going riding on the freeway of love in a pink Cadillac. There's no looking back. Jack. Who is that? Aretha? Yeah. Good song for later, stuff. For sure. That and then knew you were waiting with George Mike living. Come on. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't hold up to me against the stuff from the but you're like it's. No. Zeppelin. No, I'm just talking about Aretha's earlier work. I know. Yeah, I know what you mean. I would have liked to see her sing with Zeppelin. That would have been neat. Yeah. I wonder if it songs she would have sung. I don't know. How about a whole lot of love? Whole Lot of Love? We'll go with that one. Yeah. All right, we need to get to reanimating Aretha and John Bonham. All right, Chuck, enough of this. It's high time that we got to talking about the United States Highway interstate system. Yeah. I love this stuff. I do, too. I was like, what is it about this that I do love? Because I've been meaning to do this one for a really long time. And I guess it's the fact that it's a huge, massive public works. Yeah, that's where it gets me. Civil engineering. We kind of have a thing for civil engineering, don't we? I think so, man. Like subways and bridges and all that stuff seems to delight both of us. But then also, the other thing I like about it that really kind of came to the floor through this research is the enormous impact both like good and bad, that this huge, massive, sweeping public work project had on America and still has today, like, just completely restructured America inside and out. Yeah. And this also makes me want to do a commission a piece on the suburbs. Yes, dude, I think that's a great idea. That's a big one, to unpack and commission a piece. I'm glad you said that because this is based on an article written by the great Ed Grabinowski the Grabster. That's right. So we should probably say what we're talking about. If you've never been to the United States, or if you've never been out of your house and you live in the United States, the America the America has a really extensive system of roadways, like really fast, really well designed interstates. That's what they're called their highways, their expressways, speedways, whatever you want to call them. But they connect every major city in the United States to every other major city in the United States. You can get anywhere from anywhere. And there's something like 48,000 plus miles of interstate, just interstate. Not highways, not byways, not roads. I think that comes to something like 150,000 miles, but there's like 48,000 miles of just this incredibly well engineered, well constructed, super fast road artery system, cardiovascular system for cars in the United States. Yeah, it's kind of what it looks like sometimes on a map, for sure. It's like a central nervous system for the US. So shall we go back in time a bit, though? I think we should, but we had to lay down what we were talking about first in complete contraryness to the standard SYSK fast. That's right. Okay, so let's go back in time, Chuck. So we're going back to the beginning of the 20th century here, and at the time, roads in the United States, and we're talking about roads outside of the major, major urban centers. They had a little bit better roads, but the rural roads were not good by any standard. They were dirt roads. So when it rained and we're not even talking gravel roads, we mean literally dirt roads. Yeah, which seems like a catch all term, but a gravel road is much better than a dirt road. For sure, because I've lived on both. Oh, fancy man. You lived on a gravel road? Yeah, growing up, I had a gravel road until I was like ten or eleven. They paved it. When did you live on a dirt road? Before they put gravel down. Okay, so you lived on the same road, but it was a dirt road once a minute. So I think when they put the gravel down, it's called an improved road. Yeah, it went from dirt to gravel, improved to paved. I said this on one episode, but I remember very distinguishing they paved it. After my whole life going up that gravel road, it felt like we were driving on pudding. Oh, yeah. It was so smooth and weird and we felt so modern. So you grew up on a road back in chewing tobacco and working in the mines. Is that where you grew up? No, it was the 70s, but it was just a dead end road. It wasn't a big neighborhood, which I talked about before. I'll bet that was a pretty big difference in feeling. When you had it paved, it was really weird. But rural roads at the early 20th century were dirt, and when it rained, it was terrible mud. And then when that dried up, there were terrible ruts. And it was not the biggest deal at the time because cars were still pretty new and we're very much for the rich. But the horse and buggy and the horse drawn carriage did not enjoy these roads either. Sure. No. And then another mode of transportation, the bicycle, actually created something called the better roads movement. Good roads. Good roads movement. I like mine better. Yeah, you got good, but wouldn't you rather have better? Sure, that's probably in the meeting. Let's think old timey, folks. So the good roads movement was created by bicycle enthusiasts who said, like, these dirt track, muddy roads aren't going to work for bikes. And when people started using automobiles, especially, like you said, wealthy people, at first they were like, these bike people are onto something. I'm a car guy. But the same applies. So let's kind of adopt this good road movement and we're going to start agitating for better roads. And those better roads are, like you said, just laying down a layer of gravel was a vast improvement over what they had before. Yeah. And there was also legislation in 1893 for what's called rural free delivery RFD mail, because at the time, if you lived in the country, you went and picked up your mail, they didn't bring it to you, it seems appropriate. And so in 1893, they finally passed legislation that said we need to get mail two people. And that was a big part of improving the roads as well. They're never going to find out about Circuit City's newest sale if we don't get them their mail out in the rural sticks. That's right. So there are people agitating for road improvement, but at the time, it was kind of taken on by the wealthy people who own cars. Industrialists, philanthropists, benefactors. This is all within the first 20 years of the 20th century, I think, where clubs were formed, where they said, we're going to take over responsibility for improving roads and just basically getting things up to snuff so that we can drive our cars on these things. And I think they did it fairly locally at first. But by 1913, the Lincoln highway was built, and that was the first transcontinental highway that was basically built four cars. Yeah. I went from Times Square in New York to Lincoln Park in San Francisco. And it didn't just carve it out of barren earth. It used a lot of the roads that were already there, improved on those connected stuff together. There was a dude named Carl g. Fisher. Yeah. Did you look at this guy? Yeah, he was an entrepreneur from Indiana, real estate mogul and really big timeauto racing enthusiast who had a way of marketing and drumming up support for stuff like this. Yeah, he was big time into racing cars, but he had such severe astigmatism. He had like coke bottle glasses, but he still raced cars. And he actually set the record, the land speed automobile record. He made it around he made it around a track. 2 miles on a track in two minutes. Broke the record. Wow. That's not a joke. That's adorable. It is. It's pretty cute, isn't it? Yeah. He had to calm down. He took five days for his nerves to stabilize after that, top speed. But he was the champion of this highway, the lincoln highway. It became famous for kind of like route 666. We did an episode on that. Lincoln highway was notable for its famous roadside giants and attractions and things just like route 66 was. Yeah, but still there was this idea that private groups of auto enthusiasts were kind of the ones who are responsible for taking care of roads or designating highways, that kind of thing, in this group called the american association of state highway officials. Now it's the american association of state highway and transportation officials. They sound like this very legal, important group, and they are. But they're not an actual government group. They're a non government organization that basically started, I think, 1914, saying, we're in charge of saying what the best practices are for roads, what roads should be made into highways. And they managed to basically insinuate themselves in between the government and the highway system and said, hey, these roads should be highways. Why don't you go fund and improve these roads right here? And the government said, sure, we'll do that. And that's kind of how we started to get our first highway system. Yeah, so they were 1914. Then two years later the federal aid road act came along to provide funding. And I guess future libertarians started to weep because the public couldn't take care of their own roads anymore. Or maybe they were sad because it came clear that the public taking care of its own roads was not a workable solution for the future. Right. So they had to rely on the federal government to come in and they did. And this group, as you said, now the aasto, not only did they designate highways and connect cities, but they said, you should get funds. This road should be improved. We need to get a numbering system. We need to get signage. That makes sense. And we'll get to the numbering system. But the basics of it are that highways are numbered in reverse order from interstates. Right. Because what you don't want is like those numbers to be too close to one another, right, which actually led to one of the quirks of the US interstate system is that there's actually no I 50 in the United States because there's a US highway 50 and they would be in the exact same spot, basically. Right. And US highway 50 I looked into, it's called the loneliest road in America because it goes through some of the most desolate stretches in the entire country. It doesn't look like a fun trip to me. Where does it go through? The fly over states, basically. The drive through states, kind of. Yeah, but it's like it goes I can't remember exactly where it goes through, but from what I was reading, it's like there's huge long stretches between gas stations and towns and stuff like that, far more than the average, even back road highway. Interesting. Yeah. I'm wondering I'm just trying to think if I've been on it, I have to look at the map. I looked I wondered if you and I have been on it between Scottsdale and Las Vegas, because I was like, man, we were definitely on some desolate stretches. No, that was, I think, like 93 or something like that. Or maybe 60. It wasn't 50, though. Yeah. When I did my big out west trips, I was definitely on some roads where I thought, if I have car trouble, the buzzards will be circling. Doomed. Yeah. So the highway system is going, not the interstate system yet. Yeah. That's a big thing to remember. We're talking about two different things here. Yeah. Big diff because these roads were still, most of them, two lane roads, and they still had some dangerous curves and they had stoplights and they went through little towns and big towns and they were just connected together, at least. That's right. So around this time, though, is this highway system is coming along and improving. They were just constantly adding to it and designating new roads that were traditional horse and buggy paths to be improved into US highways. The automobile is becoming more and more important. It's going from a luxury of the very rich to something that just about every American was starting to depend on, especially people who didn't live in the center of a city. Right. So as the car gets more important, the highways start to get more and more important. And people started to say, look, I think we might be able to do better than what we have now. And that actually was the fire that ignited the interstate system as we understand it today. That sounds like a great time to stop. As I was saying it, Chuck, I was like, god, this is such a great segue into a message. Yeah. We'll take a little break and come back and talk about FDR right after this. Well, now, when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck stuff you should know. All right. All right. So highways are being built. They're being connected. But in 1937, Franklin delano Roosevelt said, here's a plan to the bureau of public roads. It's 1937. There's six super highways. And everyone went, what? And he was like, these are going to connect our nation. And they had all these reports done, and that sort of formed the basis of what would become our highway system. But we couldn't afford to do this at the time. World war II came along, and everything just sort of was put on hold. Right. Understandably so. But then afterward, America was like, man, we've got a lot of money. And from what I've read, there was a concern that this post war boom that had been generated by world war two because one of the big knock on effects of world war II, it pulled us right out of the great depression and put us into a pretty great boom period. I think they were scared to death that we were going to go back to a recession or lose this boom. And so some people say that one of the main reasons. One of the great unstated reasons for why the federal government was suddenly so happy over the idea of spending billions and billions and billions of dollars to create this interstate system was to put significant numbers of people to work and just flood the economy throughout the entire country with government money to just keep that post war boom going. And it worked like an absolute charm. It still works. That's still a stimulus package. That's reliable is a lot of times now. It's improving stuff, obviously, but that's what a lot of presidents turn to. Like, let's get people working on these roads that are falling apart. Yeah, look at these slackers. Somebody give them some asphalt. So Eisenhower is obviously most associated with the interstate system because it was when he was in office, and he pushed for the federal aid highway act of 1956, which really kind of made everything legit for many reasons. This was like a very necessary thing, not least of which was for the military we talked about since world war one. We needed bigger roads. Like, we didn't have railroad capacity to take all the armaments and all the things we needed and supplies, and then we didn't have the highways that could do it either. Right. So in 1921, this guy named Thomas McDonald, he's the head of the bureau of public roads. He and his staff really drew up this map, this proposed system of 78,000 miles, handed it over to general John pershing, who presented it to congress and said, we need these for this is critical for the military. It became known as the pershing map, even though he just handed it over to congress. Sure. It should be the Thomas McDonald map, sure. But nobody knew who he was. And they would have been like, get out of here, McDonald. You know, buddy, probably general pershing. They were like, yes, sir. And click their heels together and started building things. That's right. But that was back in the think that the Pershing map was handed over, right? Yeah, 22. But it was apparently such a good map. The Pershingmcdonald map, that's what we're going to read Chris in it. Okay. Yeah. And it was pretty I mean, they drew it up in a way that made sense, but it wasn't like, here's your exact blueprint. It's just like, no, we've connected all the places we think we should connect, but it was basically the general blueprint that was used for the interstate system. It was pretty well done map. Yes. It wasn't research, but they weren't 30 years later, they didn't go, this McDonald guy was way off. They're basically like, this works really well. That's right. And Eisenhower himself had traveled to Lincoln Highway during World War I in a military convoy and he was like, this kind of stinks. Yeah. And all the military brass in Europe saw the auto bond and they saw the highways in Italy and they're like, we need some of this stuff. Plus also not just the military, but related to the military. This is done during the cold War that the legislation was signed into law to create the interstate. And this is a pretty uneasy time. So there was a real concern that with the existing original US. Highway system, if atomic bombs started getting dropped out of the United States, we'd have a really hard time moving people from place to place, from bombed cities to unaffected cities. And this interstate was a big solution to that too. Yeah. And not to oversell the military importance, but it was literally called at first the national system of interstate and defense highways. Right, defense highways, yeah. Interesting. At least it's not the offense highways, you know what I mean? Sure. Like they're real aggressive. They poke you in the chest while they're talking to you. Defensive driving. There was another reason. There's a whole list of reasons. A lot of people say, oh, it's all military. That was a large part of it. But that certainly was not the only reason that the interstates were built in the United States. Another one was that people were starting to move into the cities more and more. They had been for decades already people were moving, leaving their farms for factories. But this is putting an enormous strain on the cities themselves, this huge influx of people that the infrastructure couldn't really support. So they said, well, wait a minute, if we build these interstates, we'll be able to more easily connect these rural areas with the cities. And then I've got this genius idea that people can continue to live in the rural areas, but go to and from work each day in the city. What do you think about that? And everyone said, that's probably the most flawless idea anyone's ever had in the history of the world. Right. And then queue upcoming podcasts on the suburbs, right, exactly. And exurbs. Nice. I think we just did a choose your own adventure wedge in there. Truck. That's pretty sweet. Another couple of reasons. Leisure travel, people getting in their car with the family and going on a vacation, driving cross country to see these roadside attractions and stay in hotels and swim and swimming pools. It's all very new stuff in America. Sure. Safety, interstates, no matter which way you slice it, are a lot safer even though you're going faster. A lot safer than these highways that they had up there. Yeah. Which is really funny to think of. I think of highways like crash on a highway. It's just like limbs everywhere and just blood all over the place. But the thing is, yes, you can get into big, serious trouble going very fast on a highway or on an interstate. But on a highway you don't have things like this designated set distance between the incoming and oncoming traffic. You don't have like gentle slopes to the shoulders so that if you do fall off the side of the road yeah. You're not necessarily going to bear overall. You might just keep driving straight there's all these designs that are created to make highways safe. Interstate safer than highways. And part of it is like you can't get in a head on collision with another car. It's basically impossible on United States interstate. Well, yeah, unless somebody gets on going the wrong way, which happens. It does happen very infrequently, but under normal conditions. Right. You're not going to veer out of your lane, you'll veer into the median and go, what the heck happened? I'm driving on grass. Right, exactly. There's two other things that make interstates distinct from highways that improve their safety tremendously. One is that there's controlled entrance and exits, right? Yeah. So that means that when you get onto a highway or an interstate and I'm going to do that all episode, apparently you're traveling in the same direction as traffic, ideally at speed. Right. I remember very distinctly in Driver's Head the first time I emerged onto the highway and how nerve wracking that is. And the dude telling me to punch it and I'm like, but the speed limit. And he was correct. You're going to die. He was correct in saying like, no, man, it doesn't matter. You got to go as fast as they're going or it's dangerous. That's right. But that's a huge difference than, say, like a highway where somebody turns right into traffic and all the people behind them have to slow while they speed up to the flow of traffic. So that's a huge thing. And then also the reason why people don't turn right onto the highway is because any crisscross with the interstate, I should say, did it again. Any crisscross with it goes over like it's a bridge. You have an overpass. That's how you get across the highway. There's no stoplights, there's no somebody just driving perpendicular with the flow of traffic. You go over that within interstate. I love that. At the beginning of this, he said, this is a very important distinction you should have said, which I will fail to make over and over, which I will blur in your mind forever. And then one of the other big things, and Ed said, they don't have stop lights. There are traffic lights now in a lot of cities to more safely get you onto the highway, but they still give you enough ramp time to get up to speed. Right. That's for to ease congestion. Yeah. So there's not 100 cars trying to pile on at once. It's one car every, whatever, three or 4 seconds. I think we talked about that in our traffic episode and I'm pretty sure that really helps ease congestion. Traffic bubble shown, too. You coined that. I did, didn't I? Didn't I break bubble? One of the bubbles. I think it was the break bubble. I think so. I certainly talked about a lot. I remember that. And then one of the other big reasons to kind of jump back here why we needed these highways. I'm sorry, jump back, here we go again. Interstates. Right. With simple economics, if you could get these urban centers connected to rural towns and these efficient roads where you could ship goods faster and further than you ever have and extend the range of the workforce more than you ever have, it just cannot be overstated what that did for the American economy. Yeah, because, I mean, connecting those rural areas and eventually suburban areas, it's like you have a way bigger workforce pool if you're a company located downtown than you did with these highways, because the commute would have just been unsustainable unbearable. I mean, it's already bad enough on the interstate, but with just original US. Highways, you couldn't do it. Yeah. Here's to me, one of the more interesting parts of this is that originally the US. Interstate system and Eisenhower wanted them to all be toll roads because he's like, what's better than having something that people just it pays for itself. But they did all these studies and it turns out, and I think this is still pretty much true, toll roads aren't a super great idea. And there have to be very specific conditions wherein a toll road will actually pay for itself or even bring in a profit. Right. It has to be in a very heavily trafficked area and then there has to be basically no other alternative but that road to get from point A to point B. Otherwise people are just going to say, I'm going to save my nickel, or whatever it was back then. That's why number 400, georgia 400, sure. It was really successful as a toll road because it was so successful that it paid for the road, it paid for itself within 20 years and they ripped the toll boots out because Republicans were in charge of the time. They said, no more tolls. Do you remember? Yeah, I think they were up longer than they said they were going to be up there. And people started complaining like, hey, I thought the plan was, these are going down. Yeah. And Sonny Purdue, I think, was the guy was like, all right, we're getting rid of them. Or maybe it was deal. I can't remember. But the reason 400 was so successful is Tolrose because there really weren't very many other ways to get from the Bucket area of Atlanta up to the northern northeastern suburbs, except for $400. Yeah, I don't have to pay $2 to go see my brother now. And I had to do that for many years, except for the $2 he charges me when I show up at his front door to play as Adam's family pinball. He's like, Give me $2. It has to be a $2 bill, too. Scott will not accept anything else. Yeah, Scott. So the toll roads don't pay for themselves. And one reason why check they don't typically pay for themselves is because, especially if you're talking about interstates, there's really long stretches of interstate that are not heavily trafficked, and you would have to pay for that with the toll. Well, if somebody's coming through once a day and paying one dollars, that's not going to pay for the upkeep so much. So that actually, there was a study that was done, I think, ahead of time when they were planning the interstates, and they found that a lot of these even, like, fairly successful toll roads or toll interstates, probably would just barely pay for the salaries of the toll booth workers. So that's a wash of all washes. So they said, okay, no toll roads. How about instead we'll start taxing gasoline? Yeah, not just gasoline, but let's propose a bill that taxes the rubber industry because of tires, the trucking industry. And they all said, no, I don't want to be taxed. Forget this. I don't like it. So they said, all right, we're not going to do this. Yeah, they managed to beat the bill to create the interstate system. Yeah, they beat it down, congress goes into recession. And then the trucking industry went, what did we just do? Because this actually would have been a really great thing for trucking, and so maybe we do want that after all. And they came back with a different bill that was pretty much the same, and that one passed. Yeah. And you can understand why they were a little short sighted. They said, well, we don't want to pay extra for tires and for gasoline. We use that stuff. But then somebody crunched the numbers and said, well, everybody showed up. But the idea that it would be done through tax dollars rather than toll roads, that was a big result of a PR push that was taken up by the AAA, General Motors, other. Car companies. They formed something called the National Highway Users Conference. And from this they basically managed to create this change of mentality in America's mind from oh yeah, roads are created and supported by rich people and auto enthusiasts. It is a national duty to build and maintain roads and it is the federal government's responsibility to create interstates. And that was the result of a PR push. And part of that PR push is how we got freeways that was meant to really kind of point out how bad an idea toll roads were. The idea is you don't want toll roads, you want free roads, which came to be called freeways. And freeways are basically supported by gas tax. That's right. Yeah. That's great. I thought so too. That's a good little dinner party if you want to be super obnoxious. Yeah. Oh, you drove over on the freeway, did you? You know where they got that? Right. So the in shot of all this, or the upshot, I guess there is no InShot, is that these taxes would be placed into the Highway Trust Fund. And it's a pretty good deal for states. It's sort of like Social Security. The government is going to tax levy these taxes to pay for more highways, but provide 90% of that funding to states to do it themselves. So the states are getting lots of jobs created, these big huge public works projects. They only have to pay 10% of that and they get a highway on top of that. Yeah. So like mayors and governors loved this idea because it made them look like they were just so like all this job creation and economic growth was happening under them and it just got dropped in their laps by Ike and the Feds and they're only on the hook for 10% of it. Right. And the idea was every American city with at least 50,000 people, we're going to connect them all within 13 years. Which did not happen. No, it didn't. As a matter of fact, officially the first original plan was completed in 1992. It was a little more than 13 years from 1956. Yes. And that points out it's technically finished, but it's never finished. It's always being worked on and tweaked and changed here and there. Yes. So Chuck, before they got started, they had to actually do some research first, which is pretty cool. They didn't just say, sure, we've been building highways, we know how to build interstates. They really did a lot of examination on how to best build these because the interstate is much different from the highway. Like the highway just kind of went around the terrain and the landscape. It was bent to the will of the landscape, subservient to it. Interstates are not like that. They are 100% American muscle carving through Mother Earth wherever that interstate wants to go, fast as you please. And they use something called cut and fill, which is exactly what it sounds like they just cut out the track for the interstate and then they filled it with the stuff that makes up the interstate roads. But to figure out what to use for the interstate roads, they actually did a tremendous amount of research first. Yeah, this is really cool. They built these test tracks near Chicago, Illinois and assigned a US. Army company to live there for two years and load up trucks and drive them around 19 hours every day for two years. It sounds so awful to see you can't just willy nilly build a road that's supposed to last forever with upkeep, obviously, but you got to really test the stuff out over time and wait and duration to make sure that it holds up. So they had to do all this to determine how thick it needed to be and what the layers need to be and what the final top layer is going to be. And not only that, they had to decide, like, hey, what about signage? It's got to be all the same. They ended up settling on green with reverse messaging. So green background, white lettering, which apparently is they detest. It's 40% more visible if you have a reverse message than the other way around, especially at night. Rather than, say, black letters on a white field. Yeah, exactly. Okay, which speed limit signs are like that, but they have to distinguish, like, the exit signs and the highway signs because the actual highway badge, interstate badge, is blue and red, white and blue. I guess if you count the white I just got that. Yeah, there's white on there, right? In the outlined and white. Yeah, for sure. And they tested colors. They decided green generally means go, so we're going to stick with green. Okay. But white and blue for the shields for interstates, but green shields for business loops and spurs. Oh, yeah, it does look a little weird, but the font that they use is actually on the green signs in particular. It's called Highway Gothic. Yeah, which is great, which is not very gothic. I feel like we've talked about that before. I'll bet it was in the traffic episode, now that I think about it. Yeah. So they get all this stuff done. They figured out the poor army company that had to live on these tracks in Chicago for two years are all discharged and the building begins, but it doesn't really go according to plan. Like we said that it was supposed to take 13 years to complete the first 40,000 miles of interstate, and they completed it in 1992, but they ran into issues pretty much from the get go. Quick question. When you say they were discharged, you mean they just stopped that project? I'm assuming here that they were discharged because they were forced to do that for two years, that they said, you're fine, you don't have to do anything else because you're out of the army. Right. If you want to be. And here's some extra money. This yellow book comes into play here, and this is when the federal officials finally, officially submitted, is the proposed map. And this one, much like the Pershing map, wasn't super detailed, just had rough lines and spurs and beltways, and they said, all right, states, since you're getting a really sweet deal here, you need to figure out how best to do this within your state. Right. So before we go on, actually talk about what happened when they started building it, you want to take a last break? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. Well, now, when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's tough. You should know. All right. Okay, Chuck. So when you're building an interstate and you're building it through pasture land or fields or even desert, whatever sparsely inhabited regions, you don't run into too much problem. You can do it fairly cheaply. You can do it pretty quickly. There's just not a lot of stuff you have to get done aside from building the road. But when you start to approach cities, everything changes. It gets way more expensive. It takes way longer. And the effects that it has on that area on the city can be really bad. And when they started to approach these cities and started creating the interstate system around the cities, some towns, especially the welltodo, wealthier people in the towns, say, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait. This map shows this highway going through my neighborhood. That's not happening. That's not going to happen. Yeah. And there were what were called highway revolts, where local groups, sometimes in collaboration with local politicians who felt the same way or probably lived in the same areas, kind of rose up against the feds or even the state government and said, we need to replan where this highway is going. And some were successful. There was one in northwest DC. That never got built. And there was one probably the most famous of all, was the one in Manhattan that was led by Jane Jacobs, who wrote The Life and Death of Great American Cities, who took on Robert Moses, the guy who revamped Central Park into what it is now today. And one because they were going to build the interstate right through Soho, the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Chinatown and Little Italy. They were just going to tear it up and go right through there. And Jane Jacobs managed to stave it off. Yeah. When the rich people said, not in my neighborhood, what do you think happened? They went to the people that couldn't fight back as much. They ran them through poor neighborhoods, use eminent domain to kick people out. And there was some grassroots resistance. And like you said, sometimes it worked, but most times it did not. Yeah. And so this is in cities where there was resistance. There were plenty of cities who are like, this is going to breathe new life into our city. So that's fine, tear down whatever you want. Let's get this super highway of the future going through Topeka. Sure. I'm pretty sure 40 goes through Topeka. Or Manhattan. Kansas. Okay, sure. Manhattan, kansas City. We didn't get it in New York. It's ironic that we said that because the first project that was started on the interstate system began in Kansas and Missouri. Is that right? Yeah, I 70. Kansas and Missouri, as usual, leading the country forward in progressive new ways. That's right. And then in 1992, the reason why they consider the interstate system having been completed is because that section, I think it's I 70, not 40, was completed in Kansas. It connected onto itself and they said, we're done. Yeah, it's I 70. So I think we should talk a little bit about just some of the nuts and bolts of what an interstate is and what they needed to be when they were first designing these. We talked about getting away from. They need to go fast and they need to be safe. Those are like the two big requirements. So all these big curvy roads and absence of sight lines and blind bins and things that you had in the highway system was no good. Super steep grades. So they wanted to streamline all that, make it more gentle, good site lines, nice and straight. You got to have at least two traffic lanes in each direction for that's divided interstate. Now we have, what are we max out in Atlanta? Like six or eight lanes across. It's going to be eleven. The plan is for eleven on each side. Eventually the 22 lanes of traffic, it's just going to be a monstrosity. Oh boy. The lanes and shoulders have minimum width. 12ft for lanes, 10ft for shoulders, and 4ft for that very scary inside shoulder, which you'd never want to be pulled over on. Right. And then as far as speed limit goes, it sort of varied over the years. I remember after 1974, I was only three in 1974, but that is when the 55 mph speed limit was mandated in most states. If you wanted to receive federal funding for highway projects, get in line with that. Because we had the gas crisis, oil crisis. So if you wanted your dough, drop it to 55. And it was 55 for a while. Sammy Hagar wrote a song about it. Oh, yeah, he couldn't drive it. No. Despite the oil crisis, he just could not drive it. But I remember when they started relaxing that and when 60 and 70 started popping up, it was just like it was a really big deal. Hey, I don't know if I ever told you this or not, but Sammy Hagar's son is a fan of stuff you should know. Shut up. He is. He rode in maybe to the end of the world to one of them. It basically said hey, I heard you guys shout out my dad or make a joke about Sammy hangar or whatever. I just want you to know I'm a big fan. And he sent a picture of him and his dad hanging out on stage down in Cabo San Lucas. Of course. Where else? Yeah. So shout out to Sammy Hagar's, boy, and I bet you we made an I can't drive 55 joke. We certainly did. Well, Emily is very famous for liking Van Hagar more than David Lee Roth. Van Halen? Sure. I don't know why you have to choose. They're so different. I like them both. I went and saw Van Hagar live on the Ou Eight one Two tour in high school. So great. And it was great. And I loved that 51 50 album, too, man. I could air drum, air guitar, and air base that entire album. Did you air keyboards? Not very well. I have fat fingers. Well, that's sort of the most boring air instrument. Yeah. Air Base is. No, it's not. But it's easy. It's the best one to start out on. All right, well, shout out to the Red Rocker and his son, then. So red Rocker. I haven't heard that one. Yeah, Montrose. That was his big band. Is that right? Yes. Before he went solo, he was in Montrose. Okay. I didn't know that. I only picked him up around the I can't drive 55 error. I hope his son is listening, because he's probably quite delighted with he's like, my name isn't Sammy Hagar's son, by the way, guys, sammy Hagar's son. Hagar. We should look up his name because that would be very nice. Okay. Are you doing it? Yes. All right, I'll just continue on. Are we editing this little combo out right here? Yeah, we should have it in there. And I'll talk about Montana, because Montana, as everyone knows, you don't mess with Montana. They like to make up their own rules. They were very famous. What's his name? Oh, man. He's got two sons aaron and Andrew. It's one of the two. Maybe both of them are fans. I bet you they are. Okay, so Montana is very famous for saying, we just are going to drive however fast we want to drive. We may not even have a speed limit for a while. It became known as the Basic Law, and the speed limit in the daytime was whatever is reasonable and proper as determined by us. You hear me? No one's going to tell us, like, Sammy Hagar to drive 55. Don't tread on me. I think that's Vermont. Okay. Is it? No, that's the tea party. Aaron Hagar. I just found it. The event. Forward that to me, will you? Yeah, sure. So Montana eventually, I think right now they do have a daytime speed limit, finally, but I'm not sure what it is. It's probably like 95. Yeah, it probably is pretty high up there, actually. But the idea of just not having a posted a numerical speed limit, which apparently they did for a little while. That's just astounding yes, but the idea of driving 60 through rural Montana is ridiculous. Well, yeah, you need to be going 80. Right, exactly. I'm guessing that the cops probably look the other way. Yeah, cops in Montana, they get smaller fish to fry. So, I mean, because you can go so fast, that's the danger of the highways. But again, because it's closed access or controlled access, where there are very few places you can get on and off and those places are designated and designed for you to get on and off of the highway that the rest of the highway is just for go going. It is typically safer. I don't think we said compared to highways in interstate, per million car miles driven. Is it a million? I'm sorry, you're right. I believe per 100 million I'm tap dancing here because I cannot find it. Per 100 million car miles driven, I know that the interstate death toll rate is only .8. Right, I know that's. Part two, the highways are going with stats wise. I got it right here, friend. 1.46 deaths for all other US roads that's per 100 million vehicle miles driven on interstates, it's zero. Eight deaths per 100 million vehicle miles driven. That's a substantial, almost half the rate of fatality as every other US. Road. And it's because of the way it's designed. Even though you can go really, really fast, the thing is designed like bumper ball to where you can't really get a gutter ball very easily. So here's the thing. We talked about all these like you got to have a meeting this big and all these regulations that define what an interstate is. That's not the case everywhere you go. There are plenty of examples of turnpikes and three ways that were sort of grandfathered in here and there toll roads that were grandfathered in states that don't have the medians that they need or do have some steep grades and curves just because of the terrain and stuff or speed limit differences and they relax some of that here and there. So that stuff was more of a general requirement, not like the hard and fast rule and the fist will come down and you will not be in interstate unless you have a median, that kind of thing. Right, yeah, the stuff that got grandfathered and it's still around, but when they rebuild these roads or update them or improve them, which is constantly going on, they're going to get rid of that light and put in an overpass instead. That's right. So when you have like a public works project this big and supposedly this is the biggest in the history of humankind, does that sound right? I mean, some have said that, okay, we're going to go with that because we live in the USA. But when you have a project that big, it's going to have some weird quirks and foibles and that kind of stuff. All the Dave Barry adjectives. Yeah. And one of the things is that because of the way that some roads come up against one another, you have something called concurrency, where sometimes two different interstates will share the same road bed for a stretch. Yeah. And so you can literally be driving on two different interstates by name. Right. And then one particular stretch of Virginia, ten mile stretch around where Virginia and Tennessee come together, there's a concurrent stretch that's technically a wrong way concurrent stretch. Did you know about this one? No. Yeah, so there's a stretch in Virginia, interstate 81 and Interstate 77, and they're concurrent. So when you're driving on this ten mile stretch, you're on both of these interstate. But the weird thing is 81 and 77, because they're odd numbered highways or interstate, they run north to south. But this ten mile stretch runs east to west. Pretty weird, right? Yeah. It gets even weirder, Chuck, for this wrong way, concurrent stretch of highway, this ten mile stretch, you're actually going on I 81 north, but I 77 south when the actual direction of travel you're on is going east to west. Yeah. When you think about perimeters, too, there are times in Atlanta around the 285 where is it marked north or is it marked west? Or is it marked south or west or north and east? It's very confusing. Depends on where you are in that circle. Right. And we should say that with the interstate numbering system, we got to talk about that. It's not meant to be a navigational guide. It's meant to keep from duplicating the same interstate route in different parts of the country and for the same interstate or for the same number of interstates to come up against one another. They're meant to keep everything quite separate. Yes. From the beginning, they're like, get a map. People don't rely on these signs to get you places. No. So if you are looking at a map of the United States going from the west to the east, odd number highways that run from north to south, the low numbers start in the west. So I five is the first one. And that's over in California. That's right. Great highway goes up to 95, which is on the Eastern seaboard. Yeah. Great expressway. And then in between you have all the other five, the odd numbered ones, they run from north to south. Now east to west, you have even numbered ones, and they start at the lowest in the southwest. Well, starting with ten, even, I'm a big fan of I 20. I 20 is good. I've driven that thing from here to California quite a few times. Okay. So I can see why you'd be a fan of I 20 then. That's a nice drive right there. They get you there. That's their motto. But if you go up 1020, 30, 40, 60, there is no. 50. And apparently it says the department of transportation used to get letters from people saying, like, you guys screwed up. There's no interstate 50. Oh, people. Which is hilarious. Too much time on their hands. Here's an interesting thing. Alaskan, puerto Rico, they don't have to meet these federal interstate standards. And technically they're not federal interstates. They're interstates in name only. And then in Hawaii, you have three interstates all on oahu, and they are designated with an h instead of an i. Instead of interstate. It's whatever. H? I don't even know. I've never been there. What are the numbers? I think there's an h five, maybe. But the thing about it even weirder than the fact that it's an h instead of an i. There's no dash. It looks really, like western European, like the m five or whatever. Yes, I see palm trees, but I feel like I'm in Budapest. Right, exactly. It's weird. Yeah. So we talked about at the very beginning, I said that one of the things that fascinates me are the massive sweeping effects that interstates have had on the United States. And a lot of people have studied the effects and there have been some good and some bad. And I came across the forum. I can't remember on what site, but the question was, is there a net gain or a net loss for America with the interstate systems? And it seemed pretty evenly divided. You can make a case both ways that in these ways it helped. In these ways it was really terrible. And it's kind of a subjective judgment, whether when you add all those up, it was actually a gain for America or a loss. Well, we already talked about safety. Definitely safer. If you listen to our route 66 episode, you'll hear lots of stories about, quote unquote dead towns, these small towns and junctions where people traveled on these pretty popular highways and restaurants and local mom and pops, they went away in large part because of these expressways built right beside them sometimes. And that real estate where you get off on these exits is super expensive. Right. So it's not like you're going to see very few mom paw restaurants at these exits. You're going to see the major chains, the major gas stations, and major restaurants and shopping centers. All right. There kind of congregated on the highways. Right. So that produced homogeneity across America. The interstate. There we go. So that created this sense of homogeneity where it was like the same national brands. The only ones who are big enough to buy up this real estate were the ones that you find at any given exit, the same handful of them across the United States. So it lost its local flavor for sure. That's a big effect. That's a huge loss for America. Yeah. Rail use definitely declined. Trucking definitely improved or benefited, at least. What else? Ed says crime, which is something I never really thought about, but there have definitely been a lot of interstate killers who could pick someone up at a truck stop and kill them and get on that highway and get out of there quick. Like, there was the I Five Strangler, the I 70 killer, a series of murders along I 40. I think that was like where they were. Like people were driving around shooting other people at high speeds on the highway. Do you remember that in the 80s or 90s? Yeah. Can't have that without the interstate. No. So that's an effect. But another way that it affected crime, too, is found really pronounced in La. Became the bank robbery capital of the world, from what I understand, at least, the United States. And the reason why is because it's massive system of interstate throughout the entire city allowed for really easy escape routes for bank robbers. I can see that there's a really great article by I think his name is Jeff Manoff. Anyway, he has the building blog and it's really interesting. I'll see if I can find out all tweeted out. It's a really great article. I should have looked it up. Yeah. So in the end, like you said, I guess it's sort of split on how people view this. It's hard to measure some of these effects and put like a number on things like the death of the mom and pop store. Some of those are a little more esoteric and emotional, but it is interesting to think about. Yeah, I like them too, but at the same time it stinks that they're super congested. Sometimes the city is better than suburbia, but the interstates funneled people out into suburbia. Urban sprawl. Yeah, it's fascinating to think like, it's got the good and the bad. Just the sweeping effects are just so ingrained that you're just they're tough to see sometimes. Yeah. I got one more thing, actually. Okay. The whole notion of the, specially in California, of putting the word the in front of the highways, the 134, the 200 and 101. Okay. Whereas here on the east coast, we say I 20, I 85. Right. It is not just an La. Thing. Apparently it's a lot of the western states, especially on the west coast, because my friend and fellow podcaster Adam Pranica was in Atlanta recently and he said, do I take the 20? And I just thought it sounded so funny. Did you say did you hit your head? He's a Seattle guy, so they definitely say it there. And I was just kind of curious where that came from. And that's just a holdover. Like you mentioned, California had some of the first freeways, not interstates, but just larger highways, and they were named it was before they were numbered. So this was in the 1940s. They had the Santa Monica Freeway, the Kawanga Pass Freeway. It was designated by where it went. And it would make sense to put a D in front of those, and that just sort of held over. Once they started numbering them, they couldn't shake it. But even still, we still didn't use the back then, because if you think about it, there was a famous highway from Indiana down to Miami called Dixie Highway. And here you call it Dixie Highway or old Dixie Highway. Not the old Dixie Highway or the Dixie Highway. We just don't like the here. Maybe so. It's a West Coast thing. It was too hot and everybody had too much hook worms to say the it was unnecessary. So if this kind of thing floats your boat, go check out. I read many good articles, but one was by Linda Poon on City Lab. Look that up. Another was by a guy named Joseph Strahmberg. Vox. And then that Jeff Mana. He doesn't have the building blog. He has Cabinet is the name of his site. And that article about La. Being the bank robbery capital is called Forensic Topology. And our own grabster. Of course. Hats off to grabster. And since we said grabster, that means everybody is time for listener mail. All right, I'm going to call this follow up on the punk episode. Hey, guys, just finished listening to your punk podcast. Being a hardcore kid since I was in elementary school and stuff, you should know fans in high school, I was stoked to see these two very different things that I listened to come together. First of all, I'm sorry you guys ever felt intimidated by punks. The time when punk quote, died in quote is really when the scene got, in general, way more enjoyable to be a part of. The old heads got jobs and families and stopped coming out to shows that weren't the bands they listened to coming up. So the kids took over and created a more positive and inviting environment. In my lifetime, I've seen this go even further. In the last ten years or so, hardcore fans have gone from, at times hyper masculine you know what? Measuring contests to a safe place for queer kids and people of color to talk about their struggles. Wow. The scene is very much alive. From my birthplace in the upper Midwest to where I currently live in Appalachia, I am in the early stages of running DIY shows out of my basement. So if you ever want to go to a hardcore show, just let me know and make the drive up to Knoxville. Okay, that sounds fair. I promise I won't let anyone beat you up for calling the Sex Pistols punk. Wink. Thanks for all the great listing you guys have provided me over the years. And please keep delving into different genres, even if you feel out of your depths. That is from Evan, and he also sent a very nice PS just about how we've been there for him. And we want to say thanks for that too, Evan. That's really cool, man. Thanks a lot, evan and. Also, hats off for having hardcore shows in your basement. That's awesome. That is very awesome. Well, if you want to be like Evan and be super cool and hardcore and also super inclusive and nice, we want to hear from you. You can go on to Stuff You Should Know.com and check us out on social media. I pulled that one out. Or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. 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How HIV/AIDS Works, Part I | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-hiv-aids-works-part-i | AIDS is one of the most well-known and most misunderstood diseases humans are susceptible to. In part one of this two-part series, Josh and Chuck explain how the disease is contracted and how it works. | AIDS is one of the most well-known and most misunderstood diseases humans are susceptible to. In part one of this two-part series, Josh and Chuck explain how the disease is contracted and how it works. | Tue, 01 Dec 2015 16:24:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=16, tm_min=24, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=335, tm_isdst=0) | 50201879 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. And this is stuff you should know. The podcast. That's right. Two part podcasts. Yeah. Today release day, not the day we're recording. We're not that good. But today is December 1. It is World AIDS Day. And we were going to record this a while ago, and then I noticed it was World AIDS Day coming up. I was like, well, why don't we wait and record it later and release it then? And then there was so much stuff that it became clear it was a two parter, and I still don't think we're going to even well, we'll scratch the surface. That's selling it short. But you can have an entire podcast series about HIV and AIDS, for sure. There's so much information. There really is. It's like daunting. It is. But luckily, because it's such a huge, massive topic, an important topic, there's a lot of information out there, so usually we do pretty well with those. They'll be daunted is what I'm trying to say. Well, I'm just nervous. I don't want to mess this one up. We will mess something up here. There, I guarantee it. Yeah. How about this, then? We pledge we often read corrections, but we super pledge to correct anything on this because we're bound to mess something up. It's just a lot of stuff. You want to start from the beginning? Don't be nervous. That's fine. Everybody tells Chuck. It'll be fine. It'll be fine, Chuck. It's the collective sound of our audience, like high Pitched Audience Voice so, Chuck, when you think of HIV AIDS, you typically tend to go back to the late seventies, early 80s, when the real panic first started research. And that's about the time it arrived in the United States. Yes. But later research found that HIV, the first case of it came in, actually, and that they think that it goes back even earlier than that. But this is the first documented case. They had blood work of this guy who died mysteriously in Kinshasa and Congo, right? Yes. And he had the first document in case of HIV. That's right, HIV One. There are two HIV. HIV one and HIV two. The one that has been responsible for the global pandemic is HIV One. Right. And there's been a lot of debate over the years about where it actually came from. Most people agreed that it was primates in Africa. Right. That it started as SIV. Yes. Simian immunodeficiency virus. Right. HIV, we should say, is human immunodeficiency virus. Yes. And AIDS is acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. Yes. They're not separate things. No. It's actually been very much confused in the media. We're going to set the record straight. Yeah. And at the end boy, how about this for a tease? At the end of the second episode, there's a big musical number. No. Three days from now, there is an argument that we should not even call it AIDS any longer. Yeah. So how's that first set up? People are going to be waiting or they could just Google it. It was fast forward. Well, but they can't fast forward in time, my friend. No, but by the time they come out, they'll have been done and they can fast forward. Yes, that's true. So what scientists, I believe this is the most current agreed upon theory, is that a type of chimpanzee in West Africa is the source of HIV, one which was transmitted to humans. I don't know for sure how? Because probably undercooked pushed meat exactly. Wanting to eat a chimpanzee and there's blood and all of a sudden it spreads to humans and chimpanzees fight back. That's what I've heard. Yeah. But yeah, if you ingest blood that was infected with S IV and then the SIV virus evolved into HIV in humans, that's the likeliest version of what happened somewhere in West Africa. Probably the Saw one article that said that they think that it could have originally started in primates, even in the 1920s, which is just crazy to think about like the Roaring 20s. Somewhere in the depths of Africa, SIV was brewing. Right. Because it seems like such a modern thing for sure. And then in the late seventy S and early eighty S is when these normally healthy people in Los Angeles and New York started getting sick. Didn't make any sense. And in 1982 they first started using the term AIDS. Right before that they had a really clumsy name for it. Oh, for HIV. Yeah. Are you ready? Yeah. So just the abbreviation is clumsy HTLV threelab. That's just the abbreviation. The full name of what was originally the term for is it AIDS or HIV? No, for HIV. Human T cell Lymphotropicvirus. Type three Lymphodinopathy associated virus. Yeah. And I think they all looked around the room, whoever proposed that, and said, guys, if we want to ever get this in the news, let's just sweeten that and shorten it to HIV. You the person who proposed it. You have to go buy everyone quiznos for lunch. And actually we should say Chuck, this definitely just kind of we're giving the fairest overview of this, but there's a really interesting movie based on what I understand is an equally interesting book called and the Band Played On. Yeah, my brother worked on that movie. That was a great movie. I watched it again in the last few months and it's just as good as ever. Yeah. That's where he got to work with Allen. All done and like some real legends. Yeah, there's a lot of people in it. Phil Collins does great job. Oh, seeing it. Yeah. He plays a bathhouse owner who's reluctant to close down. Interesting. But it basically chronicles the early investigation into what the heck was going on, what was suddenly killing gay men in San Francisco and Los Angeles in New york and it seemed like it was just targeting gay men. So much so that early on, like the non clinical term for this was gay cancer is what people call it. Yeah. And all of a sudden doctors were reporting that otherwise healthy men were suddenly getting really rare cancers, rare types of pneumonia, stuff that people who have like zero immune systems die from. All of a sudden they were just turning up with this stuff and it was very curious and very scary, especially in the gay community. Sure. And then it wasn't until what was it? Where they identified the virus and there were competing teams, this French team who most likely did discover the HIV virus on their own, and Alan Alda, the American team who may or may not have ripped off their findings and unfairly taking credit for it. And I've never seen that movie. Fascinating. It's fascinating. It's moving. It's got it all. Yeah, it's really good. It's like epidemiological detective stories threaded throughout a lot of cultural history. It's really worth watching. Well, in episode two, we're also going to get to that book in the so called Patient Zero, which will be coming up on Thursday. Another tease. Yeah. Alright, so, and we should point out to the reason these men were dying of cancers and pneumonia and things like that, is because most people know this by now. A lot of this we think, is just common knowledge. But you never know. You're in 2015. Sure. You don't die of AIDS. You die of complications from AIDS, infections, other sicknesses and diseases because you can't mount any kind of immune response. Right, okay. I think that was a good move, XL. Well, smooth move, XL. You never know. Like some of the stuff I'm like do really in 2015 have to say this stuff. But you do. Well, the weird thing is you do, especially in 2015, is compared to say like 1990, because there's become this idea that AIDS is being largely conquered and doesn't have to be worried about it as much and not true. I think the education on HIV and AIDS is not nearly as widespread as it once was. When we were teenagers, everybody knew everything about AIDS, basically at least had a working knowledge of what AIDS was, how you got it, how widespread it was. And it seems like today that kind of public information isn't nearly as widespread. Yeah, I think that's one of the issues now is that a large segment of the public is like they have the AIDS cocktail, look at Magic Johnson, it's all great. Sure. And it is great. We're going to talk about why he's still with us, but it's still a very big problem. Here's a stat for you. These are the most recent stats I could find. 78 million HIV infected people worldwide to date. 39 million people dead compared to World War II, which killed 40 million people. That helps put it into perspective a little bit. Right. And sub Saharan South Africa, which is where AIDS and HIV are most threatening. This is a scary stat, dude. One in 20 people have HIV. What? In SubSaharan South Africa, and they account for 71% of all cases worldwide of HIV. Man, a lie. I know. It's a very dire situation over there, to say the least. Well, that's especially chilling, because if you look at the statistics in the United States, it's slowing, and if you look at the statistics, it seems like it's being figured out. Well, yeah, it depends on what demographic, though. It's rising in some demos, right? Yeah, for sure. If you take the United States as a whole, the picture seems okay. But yeah, if you start to break it down into specific subgroups, then some are definitely doing better than others, as far as new infections, death from infections, that kind of stuff goes. Absolutely. So HIV is a scary disease, and it was super scary before we knew much about it because it's still technically incurable. Although we're going to get to that. There are some rare cases where it's what do they call it? Functionally cured. Yes. It does seem like there's at least one person who is widely considered to be fully cured, and he is a proof of concept that you can cure AIDS. And that's coming in part two. What are we going to do in part one? We're just talking, basically. This is all one big set up for part two, apparently. No, it's not. So one reason AIDS is so deadly is it's sort of a conundrum, because AIDS, you can't catch it through the air. It's not airborne. You can't catch it from a kitchen counter. You can only catch it through very specific ways. Intimate contact. Intimate contact, you would think, hey, it's not going to be that widespread because intimate contact is something you can avoid, and so it should be a pretty slow spreading disease. Right. And not all intimate contact includes, like, whips and chains and stuff like that. Intimate contact is basically any situation where intimate contact is basically any situation where blood is transferred or semen is transferred. Right. So it doesn't necessarily just mean intercourse of any sort. It can also mean sharing needles. Yeah, absolutely. And it definitely does mean sharing needles, too. That's a very high risk subgroup, for sure. But the reason and here's the key that AIDS has spread and HIV so widely and quickly is because you can have HIV for more than ten years without knowing it. Right. And if you are a promiscuous individual I did a little math. Let's say you're considered highly promiscuous. What do you rate that as? 100 partners a year. Okay. Which apparently also so I want to say this, too. AIDS being associated with gay people, gay men especially, it hit at precisely the worst possible time in the history of homosexuality in the world because it came right after Stonewall, when men were just starting to be like, it's all about gay pride. Right? And we are loving life and having more sex than we've ever had ever, as a community. And having 100 or a couple of hundred sexual partners in the late 70s among gay men was pretty standard. Yeah, definitely. I don't think it made you an outlier. No. So please continue. A caveat. All this with I'm assuming well, let me just get into it. Okay. Let's say 100 partners in a year. Let's say 25% of those partners are promiscuous. It's my brain, mathematically, already, and they have 100 partners, so that's 2500 people. Okay. And this is not 2500 people who are infected. This is assuming, let's say, that there's a smaller percentage that don't use condoms. And even if you don't use a condom, it's not like every time you have sex you're going to transmit AIDS. But this is a possibility, is what I'm saying. Let's say 25% of that group, 2500, are promiscuous. You end up from that one single person, 62,500 people who could possibly potentially be exposed if nobody wore condoms wow. At all. Wow. And of course that number goes way down because people are smarter now and use condoms, but in the late seventy s, that number could be accurate. Oh, yeah. Easily. So what are you going to wear a condom back then for nobody's getting pregnant? Yeah, there was no reason to. Right. So you can see how it can spread so quickly. And that is also the reason why it stays latent, or the fact that it stays latent for so long. That's the single reason why you need to get tested regularly. Gay, straight, black, brown, candy striped, it doesn't matter. Get tested because you may have it and not know it. And HIV AIDS is an outlier as far as diseases go in that there's no vaccine against it, there is no way to easily treat it, it spreads quickly. And because it has what's called late onset symptoms, like you said, people go ten years after being infected before they realize they're sick, especially if they're not getting tested in the meantime. And so it just keeps spreading and spreading and spreading among people who think they're healthy, but who actually have the virus. Yeah. And if you're promiscuous, it's not like you can name the partners you've had over the last decade sure. To tell them. Maybe you want to get tested. Right. And then even more than that. Again. So with the gay community, it's such an at risk subgroup. We'll explain why in a second. But one of the reasons why it spreads quickly in the gay community is because it's a relatively small community. So that means that the pool you have to draw from for sexual partners, statistically speaking, you're at higher risk. Yeah. Because it's smaller. Because it is a smaller community. But even beyond that, biologically speaking, they're at higher risk. As well gay men are. Yes. Well, we should go ahead and talk about that. Let's do it. The main reason is it's easier to get HIV from anal sex, and that is men and women. Yeah, because there's a few reasons for that. One, the lining of the rectum is very fragile. It tears very easily in intercourse. Lots of blood vessels. Lots of blood vessels. The cells that line the rectum are more susceptible to HIV than cells of the vagina. Right. And then semen and rectal mucosa, which is the lining of the rectum, carry more HIV than vaginal fluid. Right. So, boom, right there. You're, I think 18%. Yes. 18 times more risky with anal intercourse than just regular vaginal intercourse. Right, I understand that. Right, you are. Yes. And gay men and straight women are at equal risk of AIDS through unprotected sex analy. Yes. Because it doesn't matter that you're a man or not. No, a man rectum is the same as a woman. Right? Exactly. As far as I know. I'm pretty sure you're right about that. Yeah. I mean, it says in here the risk. Yeah, that's exactly right. Another reason is role versatility is what they call it. Whether or not you're a top or a bottom, you can get it either way by giving anal sex or receiving anal sex. So you're kind of in a loose lose situation. Precisely. I never knew that until I studied this. But switching back and forth, why do gay men get HIV more than straight people if it's passed through intercourse? And now it all makes sense. Yeah. All right. Going back to why AIDS are so scary and HIV, I feel like we're interchanging those and we shouldn't be. No. Let's lay this out right here, right now. Are you ready? Yeah. Because I didn't realize this fully until we started researching this episode. So, HIV, it's called a progressive disease. Yes. In that it goes through stages. So technically, an HIV infection has stage zero to stage three. And all of this is based on the number of T hamper cells you have in a milliliter of blood. Normal, healthy person has about a million T helper cells called CD plus four cells in 1 their blood. As the HIV infection progresses, it diminishes the number of these helper cells, and as it goes down, you go to certain stages. So, like, stage three HIV is, I think, 500,000 blood or less. And then once you reach 200,000 CD plus four cells in your blood, you have AIDS. Yes. So AIDS is not a separate disease. Right. It's not a new condition that arises out of HIV. It's just part of a classification system. Yeah, it's basically end stage HIV. It's stage four HIV. And it's really bizarre that they have a whole different name for it, if you think about it. But AIDS is just basically the end category of HIV. And it used to be that was a death sentence. Once you had AIDS, you were basically dead. And in the especially before, I think, 1995, when the AIDS cocktail, which we'll talk about came out, you basically were diagnosed and you were dead in twelve to 18 months. That was that. Now it can keep going. I mean, people just live for decades now with AIDS, but once you have AIDS, once you have that designation, you have that for the rest of your life unless you're cured, which has only happened a handful of times. Yeah. And there's a guy named Todd Haywood that wrote this great article saying it's time to retire the medical category of AIDS. And he makes a lot of good reasons why we should just call it HIV disease. Like, you would say heart disease. Right. So we're not going to say HIV disease in this show. We're not that big of friends. Well, I just want to go with traditional terms because some people learn, but I think there is a good case to be made for that, is what I'm saying. Yeah. I mean, this is also another mark in that guy's in favor of that argument is the age was named in, like and we've learned so much about this disease since then. And one of the things we've learned is this is a progressive disease that goes through stages. Age is just the end stage of it, but I have a different name for it. Yeah. And it's not the same in any two people. And HIV disease is just more all encompassing, I think. Yeah. So we're not going to use it. That's going to be tough. What? To not say HIV disease. Oh, AIDS. I thought you were saying yeah. And the final reason boy, this took like 20 minutes to get back to this. Wait, what are we talking about? The final reason the HIV is super scary is because of its very unique way it manifests itself, which is it invades and destroys the immune system. The very system that is supposed to protect you from disease is ruined. Yeah. HIV is a virus, so it behaves like a virus, but other viruses attack, say, like your fat cell, that you could care less about, so who cares? AIDS or HIV attacks your immune system directly. The cells a specific type of cell of your immune system, and that's what eventually leads to your death. Or used to definitely lead to your death back in the day. Yeah. All right, I think we should take a break and we will talk a little bit about how it is and is not transmitted right after this. All right, Josh, it's george Orwell is in charge. I'm in elementary school. Okay. And AIDS is a scary thing, and you can get it from toilet seats and mosquitoes and kissing and shaking hands, shaking hands, looking too near to somebody. It was very scary as far as times go to be a kid. None of that stuff is true. Think about it, man. We were raised during that horrible little Venn diagram where the Cold War and the Aid scare overlapped. Yeah. We just basically didn't want to leave our houses. We missed out on the days where free sex and drugs didn't hurt anybody. Right. And just sprinkle in a little stranger danger in there, too. Why not? Yeah. A little Satanic panic. Sure. In the 80s. What a crazy time. Now that we've got a little distance from it, we're crazy. Parachute pants culture Club is actually great. Yeah. That's the only good thing about the ways that you can get HIV. Sexual contact, sharing needles, intravenous needles, breastfeeding mother to baby, infected mother to fetus during pregnancy, at birth. Right. And blood transfusions, which used to happen a lot and doesn't happen that much anymore. No, it's another thing for me and The Band Played On was this big to do about whether or not blood Donation center, say, like, the Red Cross should have to test blood for this new disease. They're like, do you know how much is it going to cost? It's going to completely dent the blood supply. People are going to die because we have to do this. But then as it became very obvious that this stuff spread really easily through blood transfusions, they definitely started to check it. They came up with, I think, a fairly cheap test for it in 1985. Oh, really? Yeah. The FDA approved something in 1985 to test it. But I mean, without these tests, Chuck, you have a 9250 chance out of 10,000 of acquiring HIV from a blood transfusion. That's HIV? Really? Yeah, man. Yeah. Those are pretty high chances. Yeah, totally. Because think about it. For unprotected anal sex, if you are receiving, you have a 138 out of 10,000 chance. Okay. This is 9250 out of 10,000 chance from a blood transfusion. I tried to find those stats. Actually, I couldn't find that one. Oh, I got some more for you, buddy, if you want them. Well, I was trying to find when I was doing my stupid mathematical equation earlier, I was trying to find out the possibility or percentage rate of having unprotected anal sex. Like, what are your chances of getting HIV? If you're giving, you have an eleven out of 10,000 chance. So 1.1 out of every thousand encounters. Okay. So even if my yes, that 62,000 number goes way down, thankfully. But I think it's still I should say this is based on the distribution of HIV infected people across the United States as of, like, I think, 2010. Okay. It's all statistics, man. It depends on where you are, who you're hanging out with. I mean, if you're like sharing needles with Attics in the street, your risk is probably going to be a little higher than the national average across the United States, you know what I mean? Absolutely. So it definitely is contextual. It's almost to the point where it's like these stats are meaningless, really. Yeah, true. But they do put a I think stats help people put like a face to things. For sure. The blood transfusion one is a tad I open. Yeah, for real. And then finally we need to mention and the only reason we mention this is because technically it is possible there has been one case of HIV infection through open mouth kissing. Yes. But I hesitate to even say that because people like Josh and Chuck said you get to kissing. So there has to be bloody gums of an HIV infected person present. I think both people have to have bleeding gums and one of the people has to have HIV and they just make out and the HIV is transferred that way. That clearly doesn't happen much. Apparently it happened at least once, which is pretty crazy. But yes, it's extraordinarily unlikely that you're going to contract HIV through open mouth kissing. It does not transmit. Well, here's the good news. This sounds like it's all bad news. The good news is it is not airborne, does not transfer through the surface contact. It's very fragile outside the body. Super fragile, which is awesome. Like, once saliva or blood dries up, there's practically zero chance of transmission. Right. And yeah, it doesn't live very long outside the body, which it sounds bad, but it could be a lot worse. Oh, yes, super hard. Transmitted through breathing. Yeah, through the air would be bad. It is not transmitted through saliva, tears or sweat. Saliva and tears have trace amounts of HIV. They have not detected HIV and sweat at all. Right. Which is good news for me because I'm a sweaty guy. Yeah, it's good news for us. I guess you're right. Insects. I guess we need to talk about the whole mosquito thing because I think I talked about this in the virus episode. Was it virus? There was something maybe I remember it might have been just the mosquitoes one. Oh, yeah, maybe so. I remember thinking when I was a kid and this is before I'd read anything about it, I came up with it on my own. It's like, wow, mosquitoes. Those are like little needles. I bet they could transmit AIDS or HIV. And it's not true. So here's why. There's very good scientific reasons why you can't catch HIV from a mosquito. When a mosquito injects its probosis into your skin gross. It uses its own saliva to lubricate this whole thing. Right? Gross. And when it draws blood out, it can conceivably draw the HIV virus out of an HIV infected person through their blood, right? In theory, yeah. But there's a couple of things that happened after that. One, the mosquito goes and digests its blood meal. Two, so it doesn't just immediately go to another person and pick up some more blood, usually. Two, the virus does not replicate within the mosquito. And three, the virus isn't present in the mosquito saliva correct. Even if it went and drank the blood of an HIV infected person, got HIV in it and then went and injected you and got some of your blood and then went back and digested blood meal, you still would not catch HIV from that. There would be no transfer of HIV from that person's blood into your body. Yeah. And they've even investigated in like parts of Africa where AIDS and HIV are rampant and where mosquitoes are rampant and transmit all kinds of diseases and they've still said, no, not happening. Yeah, thank God. And then of course, toilet seats, swimming in a pool with someone eating at the same restaurant, sharing a fork, even social kissing. Closed mouth kissing. Did you know there was a name for that? Closed mouth kissing? Yeah, I call it no fun social kissing. What? Like the French do. Yeah, like French. Yeah, or I call that wedding ceremony kissing. You don't often see people when they say you may kiss the bride just like, go full time. Oh, it's gross. I think I saw one guy do that once at a wedding. I was like, oh man, oh man, come on, do like a nice respectful kiss on the lips. You and I went to a friend's wedding recently and they had a nice kiss. Tony and Wendy. Congratulations, by the way, guy. What was nice about it? It was not social kissing, but it was not like you gross. It was a good wedding kiss. A good romantic but tasteful kiss. Perfectly put. Well, that's nice. I hate that I miss that. Maybe I can get my hands on video of it or something. Show me later. Yeah. Virus talk with Josh and Chuck, by the way, october 20 14th. Yeah, but I really think it was the mosquitoes episode that you talked about it in. No, I mean, we're about to talk about viruses because HIV is a virus. Agreed. And as you learned in Virus Talk, viruses require a host cell because viruses are basically they're not their own thing, they just are carrying information basically to invade another cell and poop it out in there. Right, exactly. They are the definition of, I guess what Dawkins would have called the selfish gene. The whole purpose, if there is such a thing as a purpose of the universe, the whole purpose of a virus is to create more viruses. Yes, that's it. And when you think about the effect that a virus like HIV has on human beings and has had on the entire population of humanity over the last few decades, to think that these viruses aren't even thinking that they're not all of that is just a byproduct of its singular purpose. Yeah. Of replicating itself. It's kind of astounding. It's just so creepy. Yeah, it is. Because it's just like the virus couldn't care less. Because the virus couldn't care. Yes. Literally. It doesn't have feelings. It's bizarre to think of it like that. Yeah, it truly is. So viruses, including HIV, they don't have cell walls or nucleus. It's just those genetic instructions. And it's got a little protective shell, a virus, HIV particle called a virion. I think both of those are acceptable. All right. It is spherical and 110 thousand of a millimeter in diameter. And it has little buds sticking out of the top of it where it's basically it docks with the host cell. Like you said. It's just some instructions to replicate itself. It's RNA strands wrapped in like a little protective shell made of proteins and lipids, I think. And it enters the body and it goes straight for your lymph nodes, I believe. Yeah, because that's where the T helper cells like to hang out. Right. And of course, because it wants to wreak havoc on your body, it goes straight there. And let's talk a little bit real quick about T helper cells. So basically you have T cells and they're like Jaws from James Bond. Okay. Lurch from the Adams family, you rang? And Jason Voorhees all rolled into one. Wow. As far as like white blood cells in your immune system, they are mindless bloodthirsty killers. Hey, Lurch wasn't a bad guy. No, but he's scary intimidating. Okay. And you do a pretty good Lurch, by the way. That wasn't very good. I thought it was a great lurch. I appreciate it. So it's just vocal fry. These things are just kind of hanging out. These T cells are just hanging out, waiting to be told what to do. Okay, so there's one more character that they're like master Blaster. Oh, yeah. But they need the Master guy, the little shrimp. And the little shrimp comes in the form of the CD four plus T cells. The T helper cells. They go to the T cells and say, hey, get ready, get all revved up and go get those guys. Right. So HIV goes right to the CD four plus T cells, the T helper cells, and that's its preferred cell to attack. Those are the ones that it hijacks. And it goes up and it docks with the CD four plus T cells and it basically takes over, it hijacks it and turns those cells into HIV VIRIN factories. That is correct, sir. And more specifically, there are seven it's a seven part process and how HIV invades the Tcells and replicates. Yeah, because I don't know if we said that the replication is a really big part of HIV and why it's so devastating. Yeah, we did. Did we mention that? We'll talk about a little more. Okay, let's just get to the nitty gritty though. Yeah, and we should point out too, we're going to talk about the drug cocktail later. And then each stage there's a corresponding drug in the drug cocktail that helps disrupt this process. It's like a very smart multipronged approach. It really is. Because the HIV virus is like what the heck? Yeah, exactly. Going on here, I can't get anything done and it just leaves. All right, so part one binding is when HIV actually attaches to the immune cell, the T helper cell, and they actually fuse together. Yeah, there's special proteins. There's proteins on the helper cell that allow these things to dock with it. That's right. It's like a receptor site, almost like a couple of rednecks and boats when they tie their boats together out on the lake in 4 July. I was thinking more like a space capsule in the ISS, but I guess it's a lower tech version of it. Right. Next, tying their boats together. One man's space castle is another man's party boat. Yeah, some redneck boater who was listening to this and didn't realize he'd be implicated, he's like, hey, I'm not gay. He just said that to his iPhone. Number two reverse transcription. Reverse transcript days. It's a viral enzyme. It copies. We said that HIV was RNA initially, correct? I don't know if we said that. It's a retrovirus. The genetic instructions that are inside the virus is RNA, not DNA. Right. But it goes through the reverse transcription process where the viruses RNA becomes DNA. Right. And when it docks with the helper cell, it does this little bit of work on its own. It says it's got this little enzyme, it runs its RNA through it and there's a DNA strand that it just built. Right? Correct. Number three, integration. Now you have your DNA and it is carried into the cells nucleus by something called viral integrates, binds with that cells DNA. And now you are no longer a retrovirus, you're a pro virus. Right. But then strangely, the cells DNA, the helper sells DNA, takes this new instruction, these new blueprints and spits out RNA again, mRNA. Correct? Right. It's called messenger RNA and it is instructions on how to build new HIV variants. Yes. It all sounds very sinister. It does. Because if you think about it on a cellular level, it is like I'm trying to kill this thing. Right. But it's very insidious in that it translates its own little instruction manual into the language of the cell, inserts it into the cells like main section, the brain of it, and makes the brain spit out new instructions that are taken to the rest of the cell. It almost like it gets the stamp of approval from the cell to go for the other parts of the cell to start building these new parts for the virus. Yeah, we're totally humanizing by making it sound like it's nefarious. But it does seem that way. Yeah, it's very interesting. So that last step was called transcription. Then you have translation, you've got that mRNA. At this point it's carried back out of the cell. This is like a work order. Yeah, exactly. Carried back out of the cell and then basically follows a natural progression where these long chains of proteins and enzymes are strung together by their own cells, own functions and own components. Yeah, it just starts doing its normal thing. Right. But it's not doing its normal stuff any longer. What it's doing is using its energy and time to build new HIV virus. Rather than go prime T cells. Exactly. Part six assembly the RNA and viral enzymes, they get together at the edge of the cell and another enzyme called protease basically cuts. I don't really understand this part. So imagine what's more recently, making one cell at a time, having somebody just spit out a whole bunch of the same parts and then assembling them later. One of the steps of assembly is cutting them into individual bits from these long chains of polypeptides. And then finally budding is when it actually splits off, it pinches out from the cell membrane, becomes its own thing. And one of the key components there is it doesn't have to destroy the whole cell in the process. No, it doesn't. There's a lot of viruses out there that just keep building and building and building until they literally rupture the cell and that's how they spread through the body. These like, say, hey, thanks for a little bit of that lipid action, I'm now a new HIV virus, but you can keep going on and build some more viruses. I don't have to destroy you to spread. It's really a nasty, nasty disease. It really is how it works. So eventually the helper sell does figure out that there's something terribly wrong and it felt the destruction. But this makes the whole thing even worse. So the CD Four plus T helper cell is not out there doing what it's supposed to be doing, priming T cells to attack the HIV. Yeah. Instead it's spending its time making more HIV and then when it finally is like, this is messed up, something's really wrong, I need to self destruct. It actually signals other CD Four plus T Helper cells to come surround it and then it basically blows up, taking them with it. Yeah. It's like a mass suicide. Yeah. It's like a massacre down there on the cellular level. Yeah. So this is one of the things that makes HIV so insidious. All right, I think we need to take another break because people's minds are exploding at this point and hopefully expanding. So we'll be right back after this. Chuck, one of the things we also have to mention about HIV and one of the other aspects that makes it so difficult to cure or to even treat, in addition to these cells, like being hijacked, some of these viruses that are being produced are just going off and accumulating in other cells, but they're not hijacking it. Right, right. So as far as the cell is concerned, there's nothing weird going on. There's nothing worth blowing yourself up over. It's just there's just some extra little virus hanging out on my surface, but who cares? It's fine. And they start to spread over that decade from infection to the onset of symptoms. Right. They start to spread and accumulate throughout the body in the groin area and your bone marrow and your lymph nodes, like, all over your body. Are these the reservoirs? Yes. They form HIV reservoirs. Right. And since these things can just hide out and they're not active, and then they can become active whenever, it makes HIV a chronic lifelong disease, and it makes it really, really difficult to eradicate because the body mounts its own defense against the HIV infection initially. It's those reservoirs that become more and more widespread and increase in number to where they finally get to a point where your viral load is what it's called. There's just so many HIV virus infecting so much of your body that when they do start to finally become active, it just totally overloads your CD Four account and your number just goes down and all of a sudden you have stage three or four HIV, which again is AIDS. Yeah, thanks for pointing that out. I think that one of the also more dangerous parts is the reservoirs are invisible. Is that that right. Like Immunologically speaking. Yeah, and it's just like there's a virus on the protein outside and that's it. And we're going to talk about the AIDS cocktail and stuff, but even though it is effective, I think they said it's so slow moving that it would require 60 to 80 years of the cocktail therapy to completely eradicate the virus. In other words, you can't completely eradicate the virus. I mean, you technically could. It depends. To be very old when you were very young, if you acquired it at age ten and you lived to age 90, then technically you could probably completely eradicate HIV. That's not the way that this goes, though. Yeah, well, no, but there have been plenty of kids who get it through other ways. Sure, yeah. You can be infected as a fetus and again through breastfeeding, I think are two of the ways you said, right? Yeah. I think Ryan White got it through blood transfusion, didn't he? Oh, yeah. Well, we'll talk about that too, man. There's so much future goodness coming. All right, well, we're going to close this episode out with some stats. And this is for the United States. We've already given some worldwide stats, but jeez, we're going to start there's. So many estimated incidence of HIV has remained stable in recent years. About 50,000 new HIV infections per year in the United States. But like we said, some groups are worse off than others if you go by groups, and this is where categorizing sexuality gets so tricky, because you can say homosexual men, bisexual men, or this term that was invented in the mid nineties, MSM, men who have sex with men, which is meant to be a neutral term. That's not casting any judgment or anything. Right. It also takes into account dudes are into like, download stuff. We don't self identify as gay. Right. I'm not gay. I just have sex with men. Exactly. Every Wednesday in the park. Yes. Those people will be counted in this. Correct. And we might as well say the very people who created that term in the science community, some of them are now lobbying to have that term removed or used more sparingly, I think is another interpretation. Yeah. And the thought is that it makes a lot of sense. And there's also women sleeping with women. WSW, it says, and I'm going to read this directly so I don't goof it up, said MSM and WSW often imply a lack of lesbian or gay identity and an absence of community networks and relationships in which same gender pairings mean more than merely sexual behavior. Plus, it makes sense. They are also saying that it's overly broad, too, that you're really not taking into account specifically who you're talking about. If you're lumping in Wednesday download guys with men who have been openly homosexual since age 16, who are now 60, those are two totally different communities in most ways. Absolutely. And to lump them in together, especially if it's an epidemiological paper, for example, that's doing a disservice to the person you're writing the paper for. Absolutely. So they propose to just be more specific. You don't have to do away with MSM, but say, Wednesday download MSM. Right. When you're talking about a specific population and in your study site, the type of subgroups that you studied that participated in the study, like, you had 20 Wednesday download MSN, you had 30 old gay guys. Right. Surely there's other abbreviations that can come out of this, but they're saying, just be more scientific about this, shall we? Yeah. And I think it started out with a well meaning, well intended thing, but this whole thing has evolved. Everyone's learning how to best deal with terminologies and ten years, there'll be more specific terminology, for sure. What are you about to say? You had a good job. You're like, give everybody a break. We're all learning as we go. Yeah, we are. We're in this together. But risk group wise. And of course, it says MSM here right after we said all that. They represent about 4% of the male population is all in the United States. In 2010, they accounted for 78% of new HIV infections and 54% of all people living with HIV in the United States. We got to the reasons why that is happening earlier, right? And then the let me see here. Injection drug users represent 8% of new infections in 2010. Women accounted for 20% of estimated new infections in 2010. And what's scary there is there's been a rise in HIV infection and women 21% increase from 2008 to 2010. That's going in the wrong direction. I didn't see it in my research anywhere, but I didn't specifically look for it. So take it with a grain of salt. But I remember hearing not too many years ago that HIV was on the rise among the elderly population. Oh, really? Thanks to Viagra, that there's a far greater increase in sexual activity than retirement communities or nursing homes even. Sure. Because of Viagra, but they're just not taking precautions because they're like, I'm 80. Yeah, it's fine. But apparently HIV totally makes sense on the rise among that population. We need to do one on Viagra. I actually looked at the article the other day to suggest it, and it was hard. Oh, was it? Yes, it was dense and difficult. Oh, I see. I took that off. Yeah. Got you, bad guy. African Americans and minorities in general. African Americans represent 12% of the population, but accounted for 44% of new infections in 2010. And I wish we had more recent stats, but we don't. Apparently that's the most recently available, which is surprising. And the same with Hispanic Latino, a disproportionate affected by HIV compared to their population. So then I was like, well, why is this happening? As far as African Americans are concerned, there's a lot of debate on what's going on there, but they have found more infections, a shorter survival period, an increased number of deaths, and the most leading theories are poverty. They may be more likely to be uninsured and go to the doctor to begin with. Right. Injection drug use, the increases the spread of HIV, and I guess what they're saying is there's less safe injection drug use in the African American community or less responsible, like getting new or something like that, like a heroin epidemic going on right now. I don't think just with the black community. As a matter of fact, I think it's even more popular among white kids than black kids right now. But I wonder how much of an effect that's having on the spread of HIV among everybody. Yeah, good point. And then the last couple of lack of information. You may be HIV positive and you don't even know it. And I know we talked before about the Tuskegee syphilis experiments and how that has led to a general distrust in some corners of the African American community against medicine and doctors overall. Right. And then finally a stigma. There's a stigma in the black community that still is a gay white disease. And that's why when Eze got AIDS, it was such a big deal. Yeah, it was the illuminati who injected them with it. Was that one of the theories? You're kidding. No. Wow. Yeah. I mean, that's why he was a really big deal, because he put a face to a certain segment of the black population where they're like, wait a minute. If I can get it, anybody can get it. Yeah, it's true. So those are the reasons they think it's spreading more in the minority communities. And are we done with part one? I think so. Do you remember when they would do like, a very serious two part different strokes at the end. Normally they would clap at the end, but at the end of part one, it would just go quiet. Yeah. I got no listener mail for this. I think we should do that. How do we set this up? I think we just stopped talking. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com." | ||
a63d3de8-5462-11e8-b449-672cbc19a4e7 | How Attorney-Client Privilege Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-attorney-client-privilege-works | One of the oldest protected forms of speech comes from when a lawyer speaks with their client. Over centuries, this legal privilege has been protected and defined and still stands stronger than ever. | One of the oldest protected forms of speech comes from when a lawyer speaks with their client. Over centuries, this legal privilege has been protected and defined and still stands stronger than ever. | Thu, 19 Jul 2018 13:30:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=13, tm_min=30, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=200, tm_isdst=0) | 35252854 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from howstuffworkscom? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this is stuff you should know. Flying solo. I was going to not say anything and just see if anyone out there would think I just wasn't here at all. It's just me. Everybody be like, God, no. Who cares? I don't know about that, man. Do you remember how berserk everyone went with that one jokey 3D printer? I know. April fools after fools. Poor Ben. No, people were very respectful to Ben. They were like, Ben, I really like you, but this is a travesty. All right, so this is a pretty relevant topic. Oh, wait, hold on. Will you indulge me real quick? Sure. Speaking of Ben, I want to give a shout out real quick. Ben and I worked on how Stuff works. First ever fiction podcast called The Control Group. And it's out. The first five episodes are out, and maybe by the time this comes out, we'll be releasing the last five once a week. And it's pretty good. It's set in the 60s. It takes place in a mental asylum, and there's a doctor who is running the show who is under the encouragement of a very shady organization, a secretive, shady organization starting to really go off the rails and lose his ethics and morality. You could say that. It's pretty engrossing. Yeah, for sure. It's an engrossing radio drama, basically. Yeah. If you like our MKUltra podcast episodes, then this is kind of right up your alley, for sure. And it's really well done. The acting is top notch. Music is really great. The sound effects are great. Really sucks you in. So go check it out on itunes, the Control Group. And if you like it, leave a nice review, maybe, if you want. Yeah, whatever. Even if you just go and enjoy it. That's all I'm asking you to do. Agreed. Okay. Thanks for indulging me, Charles. Of course. So we're moving on to attorney client privilege, which is something that I knew just about everything about it turns out. Oh, yeah. Because there's not that much to it. I mean, there's some nuance here or there, but basically everybody knows what it is. Yeah, but here's the thing. There is nuance because our legal system here in the United States and in Canada are very much based on precedent and legal precedent. And attorney client privilege is not something that was laid out in the Constitution. So it's something we've had to formulate over the years through precedent on prior cases to kind of figure out all the nuances that you were talking about. That's right. Since it comes from English common law, that means it's a very old custom. But since, like you're saying, it's not enshrined in the Constitution, you can't point to it and be like, here are the rules of attorney client privilege. You have to work it out through court cases over the years. Yeah. Should we talk about that very first one or the very first one that mattered? Yeah, for sure. And do you remember the story from the revenge episode we did? Was that what this was? Okay. Yeah. It did smack up something that I had heard before. Per. Fascinating. So tell it to him. All right. So this is 1743, and prior to this there had been references to attorney client privilege. But I saw here that only 14 reported decisions on this predate the 1743 case. So it wasn't something trotted out there a lot, but Annesley v. Anglesia. I would say anglesy. Anglesey? Really? Yeah, I guess you could pronounce it Anglesia. It's Anasley Jennifer Aniston versus Julio Aglesias. Well, regardless, let's just say Ava is a very pivotal trial because this is a story of inheritance. When there was a man named Arthur who died and his brother Richard said, you know what? I'm due to inherit this estate because my brother didn't have any kids. But it was very inconvenient when someone named James showed up and said, no, I am his long lost son in rightful heir. He said, wow. And that's where the story kicks off. Right. So James, it turns out, was very much telling the truth. He says not only is this guy a jerk, he knows full well that I'm the rightful heir because he got rid of me when I was a mere twelve year old pup growing up in England. All of a sudden I found myself kidnapped. Suddenly this is like Robert Lewis Stevenson book. Right? Sure. So he's kidnapped and sent off to Delaware to live as an adventured servant for 13 years. Yeah. Which might as well have been Siberia at the time. Exactly. I mean, still kind of and he's working it off. He just basically said, this is my fate. So he worked for 13 years as an indentured servant and worked it off and made his way down to Jamaica at age 25 and then made his way back to England to claim his inheritance. So he shows up and his uncle Richard, who was the Earl of Anglesia or Angle C, one of the two, and he said, this guy is a fraud. I'm the rightful heir. So first of all, Richard thinks he got rid of this kid forever. Now all of a sudden the kid shows up and he does another even dastardly thing and frames him for murder, I guess. Yeah. There was this accident that happened and Earl got his attorney, one John Gifford, to kind of go for a murder prosecution, even though he knew that the death was an accident. So like you said, he sort of framed it up in such a way that he could really get rid of this kid. Now a young adult, and even said in pretrial hearings of his nephew he would give \u00a310,000 to have him hanged. Yeah. And how this all relates back to attorney client privileges is that, like we said, Gifford was his attorney and was sort of in on this thing. And when it all came out, the attorney was the one, the only person, really, that could give testimony that this happened. And the original Uncle Dick said, no, this is attorney client privilege. This is protected, and it would violate that. It went all the way to court, and they said, no, that's not the case, I'm sorry to tell you. Yeah, because Anasley argued that, or his lawyer argued that these other things, the kidnapping that the lawyer helped arrange, the statement about how we would have them hanged for \u00a310,000, that had nothing to do with the inheritance. And what we were talking about here was the inheritance, and thus that shouldn't be protected communication between the client and his attorney. And the court said, you know what? I don't even care what you just said. This story is so bonkers and that guy is so patently evil, I'm going to rule in favor of you. And the first ruling, the first major clear, concise ruling on attorney client privilege was registered in 1743. Right. So the whole idea behind attorney client privilege is to give you the assurance as a client that you can speak to your attorney in private. And that's very key, as we'll find out later, in private, without fear that they will then use that information against you somehow, or that information can be extracted from them under threat of, say, jail time or something. Yeah, exactly. And it's defined pretty well on this other article you sent it's, where legal advice of any kind is sought from a professional legal advisor in his or her capacity. As such, the communications relating to that purpose, made in confidence by the client, are, at his or her instance, permanently protected from disclosure by the client or by the legal adviser, except the protection be waived. Yeah, and that's a pretty big mouthful. But what it's basically saying is that if you commit a crime or commit a tort, which is basically a civil act against somebody, that they can sue you for, if you commit either one of those, and you say, oh, God, I need a lawyer, and you go to a lawyer and say, I want you to be my lawyer. And the lawyer says, okay, go ahead, and you start talking. You tell them everything. You admit to guilt. You admit to everything. It doesn't matter what you've admitted to that speech, that communication, that conversation is to stay between you and your lawyer forever, even after your death. They've ruled, as we'll see, and that you, the client, are the only person who can waive that right, that privilege of that communication, so that your lawyer has to take it to their grave even after you're dead, as long as you never waive that. Right? Yeah. And that's what you just said would satisfy one of the four basic elements necessary here, which is one, it was a communication. Two, it was made between the privileged persons that is, you and the attorney. It was made in confidence. And this one's really important. It's for the purpose of seeking or obtaining legal assistance. So it doesn't count if you go to your pal who's a lawyer and ask them for legal advice if you're not retaining them for their services. That's a big one. That's a really big one. Even if you do go to Apple and retain them as a lawyer officially, or even if your lawyer is not your pal and you retain them as a lawyer, if you say, I committed this crime, I need your help to cover it up, that's not protected either. Correct. You also can't go to your lawyer and say, hey, I've been thinking that we could come up with a pretty great real estate scam. With your lawyering skills and my scamming skills, let's come up with something that would not be protected either, because it's a crime. You're planning a crime. Either planning a crime or covering up a crime. You just lost your privilege, your attorney client privilege. All right. Should we take a break? I think so. That's a good little overview, and we'll come back and talk about all the ins and outs right after this. All right, Chuck. So we're back. We're talking about some ins and outs yeah. And exceptions. And you mentioned one that would probably fall under the crime fraud exception. And again, in our own article, the thing they referenced here is, like, hey, let's set up a phony company as a front. Can you help me do that as an attorney? Then there is obviously no protection there of attorney client privilege. Right. Or, I want you to go make this bribe to an elected official or whatever. It doesn't matter what it is. If it's on the law books as a crime, you just lost your privilege. Yeah. And another way it can get gray, too, is if lawyers do a lot of things for people. It's not always providing legal counsel. So this is where it can get a little hanky on both sides. You can have a communicative act, but as they say in our article, business is business, and the law is the law. Right. It's only pertaining to legal matters, not if your attorney is doing some sort of business deal for you. Right. And that really comes in play more for corporate law. Sure. Which is they're really big into attorney client privilege because they're frequently letting their client or their attorney in on tax evasion, maybe knowingly selling tainted products or even, like, on the more innocent end of the spectrum, like trade secrets. Sure. Intellectual property secrets. A business attorney will have a lot of knowledge about their company or their clients business that you just don't want them going and spilling the beans, even in open court. Right. But that's where you want it. You want that very much if you're a company with your corporate lawyer. But in the same time, as far as the courts has said over the years, that's very murky because what constitutes legal advice? What constitutes business advice? Sometimes it's clear what is our legal implication for this tax evasion that we just found out our accounting department did that would be protected, I don't know, help us figure out some ways to evade our taxes or even beyond that, even legal ways. Help us figure out some legal ways to evade our taxes that might not cut us because that's more business than law. You could make an argument. Yes. And like I said earlier, it can get super gray as far as whether or not you have obtained the services of an attorney, because this can come about in a lot of ways. Like if you are trying to prove this in court, you can bring an engagement letter, some sort of contract that you've signed that outlines fees or just the relationship. It can be an oral agreement. As long as both sides are acknowledging that it could be that they have appeared for you in court. Like you don't go to court that first day, like your attorney goes on your behalf and file something for you in court, some sort of document, then that is an official expressed acknowledgment. So there are all kinds of ways that you can have an attorney officially represent you. But it has to go beyond just sitting in a room and saying like, I could use a little advice. You have to agree that you're engaging one another. Right. So our non legal legal advice to you that is not legal advice in any way, shape or form is if you ever hire a lawyer, it doesn't matter what kind of lawyer it is, before you tell them anything, say, I would like to take you on as my lawyer. Will you take me on as your client? And if they say yes, everything after that is now privileged as long as you're not planning a crime, right? Yes. And you'll know, that happens because they start a little timer on their desk, little dollar bill clinks. But even without an express, say, like an engagement letter or even them expressly saying yes, I'm your lawyer, I think courts have kind of found over the years that there are certain things that a person could reasonably expect that the lawyer has agreed to represent them. Right? Sure. If you go to a lawyer that you've used before but you aren't currently engaged with and they start doling out legal advice because you told them your problem, a court would probably find that you had an attorney client relationship and therefore there was attorney client privilege. If they quote you fees and then follow up with some advice, same thing. It's more just like the client can't unilaterally say, oh, we had an attorney client relationship. So this is protected. There has to be some sort of sign or signal from the lawyer as well, that there's a relationship there. Yeah. And speaking of signs or signals, apparently it doesn't even have to be like a verbal communication. You could look at your attorney and say, like, well, you could ask them a question and they could just sort of give you a wink and tap their nose. And that could be used in court. They don't have to expressly say something out loud, even. No, that can't be used in court. That's protected. Yeah, that's what I mean, that would come up, but it doesn't have to yes. I think I just confused everybody, but yeah, you don't even have to be talking. Like, if they say, did you kill that person? And you nod, that's protected communication. Or I think they've even found that, like a silence, like a complete silence is protected communication, too, because you're not denying it. Things left unsaid. Pretty much it. Because if somebody is like, did you kill that person? And you didn't, you're going to say, hell no, I didn't kill that person. Get me out of this. If you're just completely silent, I think a reasonable person might take that as an ambition of guilt, but it's still a protected communication between you and your lawyer. Should we talk about people versus Meredith? I think so. People be Meredith. Sure. So this is in California. A man named Michael Meredith convinced his friend Frank Scott to commit a crime, which was, let's jump this guy, Mr. David Wade. They ended up shooting and killing him. I don't know if that was the original intent, but that's what happened. They ran for it, they got arrested, found and arrested, and then they were in jail. So Scott's appointed counsel was one Mr James Shank. And he went by to talk, and they were kind of chitchatting around, and Scott said something about a wallet. He was like, yeah, we got the wallet from the victim. We split the money up and put it in a trash can. The lawyer then sends an investigator and actually found that wallet and took it and gave it to the cops. So obviously this is a key piece of evidence that ended up well, I mean, it ended up backfiring because his client rightfully went to prison. Right. But Shank was subpoenaed and said, you're going to be found in contempt of court unless you admit, like, how this thing went down and how you got this wallet. And the whole key here is if he had never went and got the wallet, then it still would have been attorney client privilege. Yeah. Because all he did was receive information in confidence from his client. It was when he basically broke through into the real world and manipulated evidence that just changed everything and apparently broke the veil or the privilege of that communication. Well, yeah, which is rightfully so, because the courts I believe this one went all the way to the California Supreme Court. They ruled rightfully, that you can't do this, because all this is going to do, if we allowed it, it would incentivize defense attorneys to go out and try and find evidence and collect it. And you don't want attorneys doing that. Yeah, because once they collected it, it would enter the veil of privacy and would be protected, and you could never discover it. Similarly, though I agree with you, I think that that's just logical and sensible. Like, you can't allow attorneys to go do that kind of thing. Similarly, just because you communicated a fact doesn't mean that the fact itself is protected from discovery, just that your communication of that fact to your lawyer was protected. So if there are other ways to find out that you did something and this seems just boneheadedly obvious, but apparently it was worth spelling out at least one of these articles. If you said, yes, I killed that person, your lawyer can't tell anybody you said that to them. But if you said that to your wife, your coworker can go testify against you. Right. So it's not like the fact that you have admitted that you killed that person is protected. It's that the communication between you and your lawyer about that fact is what's protected. Right. So if it's otherwise discoverable, then it's fair game. Yeah. It's not like you can enshrine a fact with your lawyer, and then it belongs to them and them only, and the rest of the world can never learn of it, legally speaking. Yeah, that's a good point. That doesn't make any sense, but I guess it was worth working out. You want to take a break? I think we shall. All right, we'll go back and talk about this extending beyond the grave. All right, Chuck, so you have a relationship with your attorney. Your attorney is, like, ten years old at the time. You hire him, and you're 70, so you pass on before your lawyer. Well, it turns out that something comes up later on and somebody wants info from your lawyer, private info that you gave them. Your lawyer says, no way, Jose. This is covered by attorney client privilege. That is true. Yeah, because that happened very famously with Vincent Foster, who, as most people know, was a big. He worked for the Clintons in Arkansas. He was an attorney. He was one of their close attorneys. Personal attorneys, I think. Yeah. So he ended up killing himself. And if you have on your tinfoil hat or if you go to these conspiracy websites, then you firmly believe that Bill and Hillary Clinton murdered this man with their bare hands. With their bare hands. If you're a reasonable human, you know that he fell into clinical depression. And every single investigator and investigative unit and there were quite a few, including one Kenneth Star, went out and said, yes, he definitely committed suicide. All the evidence is there. I feel like that's a spectrum. You could be somewhere on that spectrum between those two beliefs. What, between thinking he killed himself and was murdered? Yeah. So he was obviously involved in the infamous Whitewater real estate deal, and when Kenneth Star was investigating this stuff, he tried to get his hands on notes created by Foster's lawyer, and the lawyer said, no attorney client privilege, even though this man is dead. And it went all the way to the Supreme Court, and they ruled six to three that it must be honored even after the grave. Yeah. I was really surprised that that was as recent as it was. I thought that would have been a really old case that came up long ago. But, yeah, that was from the agree. So that one was established in well, the don't see when the actual case or when the Supreme Court ruled on it, but that was one thing that was tested in court. There was another one that had to do with employees giving testimony for their company for a long time. It was if you were a director level or an executive level person in a company and you were talking to corporate counsel, whatever communication was being made was protected. But then cases started to come up, like, what if somebody from accounting was talking to corporate counsel about that case? Is that protected? And for a long time, there was this test called the control group test appropriately, which is basically just are you one of the people who is in a position to take the advice of legal counsel and either run with it or decide not to do with it? Are you, like, pretty high up in the company? And if you weren't, then that speech wasn't protected. But then over time, they decided that no. One of the reasons why we have this privilege is that we want lawyers to be fully briefed on the facts of the case so that they can figure out the best offense or the best legal route to resolving this thing. And if they're not fully informed, then we're kind of hamstringing our attorneys. So we want them to know everything, and they won't know everything unless people feel comfortable telling them everything, hence the attorney client privilege. Well, they said that extends to employees as well, because employees sometimes have information that members of that control group won't have. And as long as they're talking about something that directly reflects their job and the case at hand to that counsel, that would be considered protected by the attorney client privilege. That was the Upjohn ruling, I believe. Yeah. And just this year, it's been making a lot of headlines because of the Mueller investigation, when Trump's personal attorney or one of his personal attorneys, one Michael Cohen, had his office rated in April of this year, in 2018. And the FBI sees all sorts of documents looking for evidence of bank fraud. It came back that it was part of the Mueller investigation. And Trump starts tweeting about how attorney client privilege is dead, and the attorney that was quoted in this article said, no, it's not dead at all. This is very typical. What's going on is there is a judge that has, in the Cohen case, has appointed what they call a Taint team, one of the more unfortunately named teams. And what they do this is a third party, what they call an arms length group of qualified people. So they're not involved with anyone in this investigation. And they go through all the evidence gathered and say, what's pertinent to the case, what's not pertinent. And here's the pertinent stuff. It's not like we're just trying to release everything ever said between these two men. Right. And they take all the stuff they saw that didn't relate to the case to their grave. So it is a form, an extension of attorney client privilege. Yeah. And especially in the Cohen case, this attorney goes on to say, because Cohen was performing little to no actual legal work for Trump, not much of what was seized in the raid would be protected anyway. Got you. So that's what this attorney says. That's his expert opinion. So can't you see, like, one member of the Taint team at the bar being like, this is not what it means? Derek, quit saying that. It's really important and vital. Oh, that's good stuff. So we should talk about another famous recent case of attorney client privilege or attorney client privilege being violated, actually, with the Jody Aries case. Yeah, I don't know a whole lot about this one. Except that she murdered someone, right? Yes, in cold blood. From what I read most recently, one of the alternate jurors believes that she killed her ex boyfriend because he was breaking up with her and she wanted to be the last person he had sex with or the only person he had sex with. Or the last one of the two went off the rails, stabbed him, like, 28 to 29 times, cut his throat, shot him in the head, and just left him for dead and ran off to California and was caught within, like, a week or so of his body being discovered. So she mounted a defense that he was a pedophile, that he abused her, and that he was in the act of physically abusing her when she fought back and snapped and killed him. Apparently, that was all just completely made up, that he wasn't a pedophile, he wasn't an abuser, and he was just trying to break up with her. That's the way it stands now. And she was convicted of, I think, premeditated murder, initially sentenced to death, the mistrial was declared, and she ended up with life without the possibility of parole. So that's where it stands now. Yeah. She publicly criticized her public defender, a guy named kirknermy. And over the years, Kirk kind of put up with it and then was diagnosed with cancer and said, to hell with it. I'm writing a tell all book. Is that why? That's what he said. He said that he had a bit of an epiphany, a reversal of his life in that cancer diagnosis, and said, I might be dead. I can't let her be the only person telling the side of the story. Yes, because he's saying like a canary in this book. Oh, yeah, man. He revealed stuff that didn't come out at trial. He gave his own personal assessment of her guilt, that she was definitely guilty, talked about how her mother lying on the stand for her was laughable, just all sorts of stuff. Just ripped apart their attorney client privilege. And so as a result, she's suing him big time. So that's still in the middle of I mean, this hasn't been decided, right? Not as far as I know. I think the article I read was from 2018, so I don't think it's been decided yet. And he's defending himself, saying no when she gave public interviews and talked about our private attorney client conversation. Right. She revoked privilege. She raised her privilege in doing so, and so I'm free to tell anybody anything about it. So the California bar, the Arizona bar. I think disbarred him. He agreed to disbarment without admitting misconduct, and now he's like a life coach or a professional coach for lawyers. Interesting. Yeah, it is very interesting. The whole thing is super interesting. Her case is just gut wrenching. And this new piece of it, he basically hates her. Hates her. He says that he was forced into the smear campaign as a defense, that he didn't want to have anything to do. He just hates her guts. And even her defense team said that he's developed some bizarre hatred of her, and he said in this quote, in this Reuters article, that he was standing up to years of abuse from her. So it's like a deep seated hatred one way or another. They ruined each other's lives. I think she blames him for botching her defense. Right. He blames her, apparently, for a whole slate of stuff. So this will probably be another precedent setter, huh? I would guess so, but it's a civil case, so yeah, I could still set precedent. But, yeah, the fact that he was disbarred, that doesn't bode well for him. But I have the feeling he's like, I'm dying of cancer. So what else? Right? Yeah, screw it. So that's attorney client privilege. I don't think we missed anything, did we? I don't think so. They're probably a little nitpicky things here, and there are definitely some gray areas, but it's been shaped and reformed over the years. I imagine it'll continue to be somewhat hey, one more thing I want to say is this is kind of apropos, but not really. I read an article probably about. Six months ago, maybe a little longer. It was by a lawyer. You know how lawyers will write, like, blog posts or articles or stuff like their clients, just on general stuff? This one lawyer wrote one about how if you ever talk to the FBI without a lawyer, you are an idiot. Sure. And he put it like that. But no, he makes this really great case for why most people, especially innocent people, would think, I don't need a lawyer. And he said, Everyone needs a lawyer when they're talking to the FBI. And he laid out this really exquisite case, multiple point case. Why? To where? By the end of it, you're like, oh, yeah, you need a lawyer if you're talking to the FBI. It's pretty amazing stuff. He's like, you're not qualified to talk to the FBI. A lawyer can make you qualified. You can't go in there and expect to be qualified. It was really fascinating. I don't remember who wrote it, but I think if you search something like, if you don't have a lawyer and speak to the FBI, you're an idiot. Something along those lines. It's fascinating. Just call 1800 Fed protect. Josh will patch you through for the people. You got anything else? No? Okay. Well, if you want to know more about attorney client privilege, you can type that word in the search bar, how stuff works. And since I said privilege, it's time for listener mail. I do have one more thing to say without getting too much on a soapbox. I hope people take the time to understand something like attorney client privilege, because when the president is tweeting out things and all exclamation points like attorney client privilege is dead. I think a lot of people believe that to be true when they don't even really understand the true legal sense of what this means. Yes, I totally agree with you, man. It's just like it's misinformation that people think, like, a tweet means. Well, that's a fact. It's not. It's a tweet. Yeah, I know. Something typed out on a phone like, do better. People fat fingers sometimes, too. All right, so moving on. I'm going to call this mercury, Bobcat. Yeah. Hey, guys. I've been listening for about a year, and I just listened to the Ford Pinto death trap episode. To put this timeline into context, I was born in 1993. This is what makes this story perfect, if you ask me. When I was a kid, my family had a powder blue Mercury Bobcat sister car to the Pinto. Like you said. My dad sold the car and bought it back eight years later, just before my 16th birthday. And I drove this car for two years in high school. Eventually, selling it to buy a vehicle compatible with highway travel as a Bobcat could not top 90 km/hour, which is, what, 20 miles an hour? I don't even know something like that. Well, I knew the Pinto was generally regarded as unsafe. I somehow did not know the extent of the carnage until listening to the episode that you guys did. And after listening, I can't believe my parents ever allowed me to get behind the wheel of this car. Although mine was a 78, so maybe that time they had faith and the upgraded Flaming death bolts. It's been about seven years. And this dude, he was born in 93. He was driving this old car around well after its prime. Yeah, he would have been driving it in the 2000s. That's great. Yes. I was like, me, I had a 68 Beetle when I was in the everyone just thought I was weird with the ankle burner. Yes. It's been about seven years since I let the car go. I'm now 24. My friends and I missed the car so much, I frequently search the Canadian version of Craigslist called Kijiji, hoping to buy it back. It's made up. I love this guy. He just said some code words that we just said on air. The bobcat never went up in flames, but it did burn. We did burn it up in it a few times. I hear you, man. I think I know what you mean. This is Owen from Nova Scotia, and I think that's pretty great, and I hope you get to buy that car back, dude. Yeah. Good luck in your quest, Owen. Anybody out there in Syskland. If you know where Owen's Bobcat is, help them out, let us know, and we'll connect you. Same with my 68 Beetle. Oh, that'd be something. I'd like to buy that thing back. Well, if you guys know the Vin number, just shout it out. You and Owen. Okay, agreed. If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck, you can hang out with us at our home on the Web stuffysheno.com. And there you will find links to all of our many myriad social media sites. And in the meantime, while you're doing that, if you want to dash off an email, you can send that thing to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepws.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder in Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcast. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. 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ccb41fca-3c23-11e8-a992-f7c817b258ea | How Paramedics Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-paramedics-work | Paramedics are not EMTs. Or fire fighters. Or cops. But they do ride around in ambulances (and drive) to help to save lives. It's a stressful job and we're here to shine a light on this noble profession. | Paramedics are not EMTs. Or fire fighters. Or cops. But they do ride around in ambulances (and drive) to help to save lives. It's a stressful job and we're here to shine a light on this noble profession. | Thu, 12 Apr 2018 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=102, tm_isdst=0) | 45918738 | 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. Wow. 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 housetofworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry jerome Rowland. And this is stuff you should know. The Emergency. Rear. Rear. We should have a new podcast called Sirens Around the World. Yeah. Most Annoying Show Ever. It would be pretty annoying, but there'd be some subset of people who really despise themselves that it would be popular among. So we would love it. We don't hate ourselves, do we? Tell me. I need to know. No, it depends on the day. I didn't want to hate myself. Sometimes I want to punch myself. Does that count? No, I know exactly what you mean, man. Sometimes I'm just like, I am so sick of myself. Is that what you're talking about? That was a good song. Remember that song? No. Sick of Myself? No. That was Matthew Sweet. Yeah. Wow. That's weird that this is going on right now, because Matthew Sweet just popped up, like, randomly in the last couple of days in an article I was reading. I was like, I forgot about him. Haven't heard about him in 20 years. And then, bam. Botter mine. Hoff, here he is again. Well, he's still around. He's an Atlanta guy, you know? I didn't know that. Yeah. Well, that's cool. Yeah, I think that's the way it goes. Just because you had one hit in the world, came and listened to you and then moved on doesn't mean, like, you're like, okay, well, I guess I'll go bury myself alive now in my own backyard. Usually the artist keeps going. Yeah. He had two hits, though. I know. Girlfriend and then the other one you were talking about. Yeah. Girlfriend. That's a great song. Yeah, it's a good song. Okay, so obviously what we're talking about today are paramedics. Paramedicine, really, is what we're talking about. Yes. Which is actually a pretty interesting topic because you kind of look into it. You're like, oh, these people save lives. That's great. Here's some of the life saving techniques that they do. Fantastic. But there's like, actually so much more, too. It's got a really interesting history. It's one of those things where it's way worse off than it should be, as far as funding and logistics and stuff like that goes. I just find it interesting. It's interesting to kind of poke into a topic and then find that US is even more interesting than I thought, and have it poked back. Yeah. With forceps. So I guess we should say right off the bat that the word paramedic para means alongside. Alongside medicine, I guess, which I'm not quite sure what that means. So what I think it means is as follows. Charles okay. These people, paramedics, they are not doctors, correct. But they work with and alongside. And really, honestly, as an extension of a doctor, an MD, I buy that. So that's what I think it means, because it's not like what they're doing is a different type of wacky medicine. Like, they're actually doing the same type of medicine that an Er doctor, an Er nurse would be doing in an Er. They're just doing it out in the field. Could you imagine how disconcerting it would be to be, like, on the ground and have a paramedic come up and blow green dust in your face? You're like, what are the chicken bones for, man? Oh, man. Blow green dust in your face? I don't know. It would depend on what the effect of the green dust was. That's true. I think that's what paramedic means. Right, okay. We can go further back, actually, and describe what ambulance means. We know that one for certain. Yes. That came around in the 15th century, Spain, during the Inquisition. They clearly had a lot of need for medical work, and they actually had field hospitals that were called ambulance. Right. It was just basically like a mass unit out in the field. And then eventually the French, shortly after, I think, under Napoleon, they innovated on the ambulance and said, well, that's great. That's neat that we have these things out in the field, but there are some guys way over there who are injured and they probably wouldn't die if we could get them to these ambulances, these field hospitals. Right, correct. So they came up with, basically, mobile ambulances, which is this idea of a flying or a moving ambulance, which is like a little medical facility that they would put the people into and move them away from battle to go patch them up rather than waiting for the battle to end. Well, yes. And before that, even during the Crusades, and they also had a great need for medical care. There were the Knights Hospital or I think Hospitalier. Oh, whoa. I might be putting an extra syllable in there. Well, that's all right. I'm known to do that. That's your past time. Nights hospital. That's what I'm going to say. Of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. And they were the first kind of the first people to practice emergency medicine on the battlefield. And they even invented the what we now call the stretcher, although it's still called a litter in some circles. Yeah, it's a pretty intuitive thing, but it works. Someone had to think of it a couple of sticks with some canvas stretch between them. Throw a person on there, you can pick them up, two people can pick them up and get them off of the battlefield lickety split. Hooray. The idea of emergency medicine grew basically exclusively out of warfare over the centuries. Well, yeah, but what's remarkable to me is that from that time, I have the right idea. Let's get these people out of here quickly. It took about 130 years, all the way until the mid to late 1960s, until they said, hey, wait a minute. If we actually put trained medical people in these things and weren't simply driving people to a hospital, we might have even more luck. Yeah, that was the late 60s. Isn't that amazing? It is. And at the time, a lot of medicine was practiced through house calls, right. Including emergencies. Like, if there was an emergency and you could get a hold of a doctor, the doctor was expected to go out to that emergency and do what they could. But more often than not, either the cops or local morticians were tasked with basically what's called like a scoop and run or scoop and carry, where you just basically get the person out of that car wreck from the bottom of that ladder, or whatever just happened to them, throw them in the back of a car, a cop car or a hearse. I would look it up. The Ecto one. The Ghostbusters ambulance is a modified Cadillac hearse. Oh, yeah. Sinking feeling it really was for a mortician to show up in a hearse and be like, I'm going to take you to the hospital. Depending on what happens, you may be back in the same car. Yes. And talk about a conflict of interest, you know what I mean? Oh, that's a good point. Hopefully not, but yeah, on paper. Right. Or they just casually put their hand on the person's nose and mouth in the back seat. Dry. The thing is, though, is whether the mortician or the cops were getting you to the hospital, even when you got to the hospital, it's not like there was such a thing as an Er room. Ers didn't come about, really, until, like, the mid 70s, where you could find them in fair abundance around the United States. Like, ers just didn't exist. It was, Here you go, Doc, I know you just delivered a baby and you treated somebody else for angina, but now you've got to put this person's head back together. Oh, yeah. And it was all just medicine at the time. So, yeah, the idea of getting somebody to a hospital and having a medical person, a professional in the car that's transporting them. It came out of Ireland, I think, right? Yeah. Big shout out 1967 to Dr J Frank Pantridge of Belfast. He had a study he published a study that said, hey, you know what? We have more success saving people's lives when our mobile units have a physician or a nurse inside. Right. And everyone went, huh, never really thought about that. But there it is. There's a study. Yeah. Pretty cool. So he definitely set the stage for this. And then the year before, there was a report, I think it was a year earlier. Right. The one from Congress in America a couple of years, 65, I think it was like the National Academy of Sciences or somebody basically got together with another group and said, let's study accidents. And what they came up with was this idea that there was, like, this overlooked disaster that happened. Like, accidents were huge. Major leading cause of injury and death in the United States. And this inquiry determined that we weren't doing much about it. And specifically, a lot of people died who otherwise wouldn't have if there had been something like an emergency medical service to attend to them at the accident scene and on the way to the hospital and then having the hospital actually know what they were doing. As far as emergency medicine goes. Yeah. It's just staggering to me. It seems so intuitive, and I can't believe it took that long for this to happen. And in fact, the Emergency Medical Systems Act was signed in, which basically said, we need a standardized system here nationwide. That was after that paper came out in 1966. Yeah. Many years later. I mean, that's the speed of government, I guess. Sure. And then in 1977, the publication of the very first National Standard curriculum for EMTs and paramedics. 77. Yeah. And then, so alongside this, there were people, like, around the country, at universities around the country and around the world who were kind of all recognizing all of this at the same time, that there's a lot more that could be done for people who were injured in accidents. And so you had the people at the University of Pittsburgh taking up the cause. The Panthers. Yes. Is it the Panthers? Yeah. They started creating some of the first curriculum for paramedics, some of the earliest tests for paramedics. The University of Cincinnati came up with the first curriculum for training physicians in er, medicine. I think the University of California was an early entrant into the world of teaching paramedicine. And then I think they were the first one to be accredited in 1980. Like, they had their operation going for years, but they were the first one to say, hey, somebody take a look at this and make sure we're kosher. And then we can say, we're an accredited training facility for paramedics. Amazing. It is pretty amazing. And then the problem is this. So the federal government got into the act in 1973 with the Emergency Medical Services Act, but by 1981, there was an omnibus budget that said, we're out, we're done. We're not funding emergency services anymore. And then from that point forward, the emergency service system in the United States, whatever had been developed to that point, broke into patchworks of state, local, county programs, sometimes multiple ones within a single county. I think there's a county in Michigan that has like, 18 different emergency services and that is kind of created this where we are now, which is people doing the absolute best they can, what amounts to a broken system in a lot of ways. Should we take a break? Sure. All right. When we come back, we will put the broken system behind us momentarily and talk about EMTs and paramedics. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for indemand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience, network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K. Twelvecom podcast. That's K Twelve. Compodcast, and start taking charge of your future today. Hey, everybody. If you want a great quality website, you want to do it yourself with no must and no fuss. Then there's nowhere else to look in Squarespace. That's right. Squarespace has every single thing that you need to put together an awesome website. Everything from growing and engaging your audience with email campaigns, collecting donations for your cause through Apple, Pay, Stripe, Venmo, PayPal. Plus, you can also make your website optimized for mobile, which is great for your user on the go. That's right. And if you're into selling stuff, 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. All right? So if you want to ride in an ambulance or drive an ambulance and get on the scene and help someone out who's in need, there are a couple of ways you can do it. You can be an EMT emergency medical technician and this is the person who has undergone about between about 120 and 150 hours of course work. They are well trained in all kinds of life saving procedures. If you need CPR, if you need oxygen administered, if you were having some bad allergic reaction, that your life is in jeopardy. But there are limits to what they are allowed to do. So one thing they cannot do, even in the case of giving shots, is they can't break the skin. Right. Which is super interesting. I never knew that. No, I didn't know that either. But you can consider an EMT like an entry level paramedicine professional. Right. That's where you would start. And in fact, I think you have to start as an EMT to go on to the next level, which would be paramedic. Right, for sure, yeah. So if you're a paramedic, you have about ten times the amount, of course work and schooling under your belt by the time you're a paramedic. And I think you do have to have about six months, at least, of prior, immediately prior EMT experience to start becoming a paramedic as well, which I'm sure is the way most people go as you start out as an EMT and then you move on to the next level, which is paramedic. Yeah, which like you said, ten times. So that's about anywhere from 1200 to 1800 hours, depending on your state or your municipality, to get certified. And this is where the real action can happen. You can give an IV if someone's having a heart attack. You can deal with that. You can operate defibrillator fibrillator. It's fun to say once you master it. They should have just called it the Clear machine. Yeah. But it's a lot of work and a lot of hours. And one of the people that they interviewed in this article said that it's really grueling, and when you're in paramedic training in school and doing your coursework basically for a year or two, you can just say goodbye to your friends and family. Yeah, I saw that, too. Yeah, that's tough stuff. So the paramedic is actually they operate under the license, not just like under the direction, but under the license of a physician in their locale. Right? Yeah. There's a couple of ways that you can do it, and as you'll start to see I saw a quote that said if you've seen one emergency medical system, you've seen one emergency medical system. They're all just so different and the whole thing is so patchwork. But there is a national standard which I think is the national emergency medical technician registry exam. That's like the national exam. And then you may have to pass like a state and or local exam, too, depending on where you live. But there is like a national accreditation and national coursework, but then how the system functions and runs is what's the patchwork part of it. Yeah. And it'll cost you. I mean, it depends on where it is, of course, and what program. But the example they used in our article is the UCLA Center for Pre Hospital Care, and they quoted about ten grand for just the tuition. And then of course, like any college or course work, you're going to have to pay for books and equipment and uniforms and stuff like that. Got you. That's exactly where they get you a plaid skirt. And then after that, though, the good news is that you have a really good chance of getting work. I get the impression that if you have gone through all of your paramedic training, you're not sitting around like there's usually a job waiting for you somewhere. Yeah, I saw that as well. And actually, it doesn't necessarily pay super well. No. So if you ever see a paramedic be extra nice to them, for sure, because not only are they running around saving people's lives, they're not getting rich off of it at all. They're doing it because it's something they care about. Yeah, but despite the mediocre pay, I thought it's going to be one of the most in demand jobs over the next ten to 15 years. I really wish I could remember the statistic exactly, but I think they're expecting another like 53,000 EMT jobs or paramedic jobs to be added to the American economy over the next decade, maybe. So it's definitely a growing career, for sure. Growing profession. Yes. And you mentioned the pay. If you go to the US. Bureau of Labor Statistics to kind of find a mean salary or something, they do it. They should separate it out, but they lump in EMTs and paramedics when, of course, EMTs don't make the kind of money their paramedic would. But they had a mean annual wage of about $31,000 a few years ago, and if you're in the top 10%, it's about $54,000. And apparently the state of Washington is on the higher side. You can get as high as 71 in the state of Washington. Right, but I mean, that's a good living and a decent living, but it's not like you said, they don't go into this because, like, oh, man, that 31 grand a year. It's sort of like being a school teacher. I feel like it's a calling in a lot of cases. For sure, for sure. As I was saying about the license that they operate under. Right. So if you're a certified paramedic, depending on the state you're in, you may be operating under the license of the state medical director. That's where you have your license. Or you could also be operating under the license of a local physician, like that physicians license covers you, covers the physician's assistant, basically everything working for everyone working for him or her. So you might be operating under that physician's license or I didn't know this man during an ambulance ride. So remember how just adding like a trained medical professional to the ride from an accident scene to the hospital improves outcomes. And we've done that since 1066 at least. They figured out that if you can communicate with an Er physician en route, you could also improve outcomes even more so during this transportation from an accident to the hospital. The paramedic is probably in touch with an Er doctor interesting. Who is instructing and advising and consulting with the paramedic to figure out the best course of action, the best course of treatment, and then how to carry that out. And from what I understand at that time, the paramedic is operating under that physician's license in that state. Would that make you feel better or worse? What? That the paramedic was getting instruction from a physician? Yeah. Like, if you hear this going on, I don't know, part of me is, like, better because it's a doctor telling you that. But the other part of me is like, don't you know? Right. And you would hate to hear, like, the doctor say, we'll get something, something, and for the paramedic to say the what? Right. I don't know what that is. I've never seen this before, ever. Have you ever had to take an ambulance ride for yourself? No, thank goodness. I didn't think I had either. But then I did. Remember when I was 13 or 14, my brother was 16 or 17, we were in a car wreck. There were eight people in a Jeep and my brother's Jeep, that was once my dad's Jeep and that was definitely not safe to do to begin with. But we were going to a movie after church on a Sunday night. A bunch of kids and youth group raised in hell piled in my brother's Jeep. Wasted. No, just kidding. Completely sober. Wasted on the Lord. We were. And it was raining really hard. And you know, at Ponce de Leon Avenue here in Atlanta, everyone that doesn't live in Atlanta probably laughs that we pronounce it that way instead of Paul's daddy all but on pots. Where if you're leaving from Atlanta, it's that big curve where you go over that large stone archway kind of headed toward into Decatur. We were coming down that way, nowhere near North Lake Mall where we were supposed to be headed. We were lost, and my brother, we hydroplaned hit a curb and turned the Jeep over on its side and I ripped through the canvas ceiling or whatever it's made. Oh, man, you got thrown? Oh, yeah. We were scattered all over the street. You are lucky. I know. It's the only time I think that I've been knocked unconscious. And I just remember waking up what would have been probably seconds later in the pouring rain and looking around and seeing my friends scattered within, like, 20ft of each other in various places. Man, that is scary stuff. It was scary. So in the end, the good news is no one had like I think the worst injury was like, a broken collarbone. I broke my finger. There were little cuts and scrapes, but nobody was hurt bad. My brother doesn't listen to this one. In the ambulance on the way, my brother was just sort of catatonic, and they said they were trying to get information, and they asked what his name was, and he said, Ahole, man. Yeah. I think he was just sort of out of it and felt terrible for Scott, and he didn't curse at all at the time. It still doesn't even curse much, but it's weird. That is what stands out in my mind. I wonder if he remembers that, actually. Well, that's a big one. Especially reading curse. So funny. Man, you are a great storyteller. Was that a good story? Yeah, I was seriously where you kept, like, going off on tangents. I'm like, no, we got to get back to the story. What happened to the jeep? I know. You looked a little nervous. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Should we take a break? Oh, yeah, and also, I forgot to mention the one guy that was tragically killed. Right? You're like but did I mention I also broke my finger? Nobody was hurt. Everybody's too bad. Everybody's good? Everybody's good. I think my brother broke his foot. Yeah, it was just stuff like that. Heck of a story, Chuck. Heck of a story. Thank you. Yes. Let's take a break and regroup, shall we? Yeah, let's do. Okay. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college 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. Hey, everybody. If you want a great quality website, you want to do it yourself with no must and no fuss. Then there's nowhere else to look than Squarespace. That's right. Squarespace has every single thing that you need to put together an awesome website. Everything from growing and engaging your audience with email campaigns, collecting donations for your cause through Apple, Pay, Stripe, Venmo PayPal. Plus, you can also make your website optimized for mobile, which is great for your user on the go. That's right. And if you're into selling stuff, square space is everything to sell anything. They have all the tools you need to get your business off the ground. They have ecommerce templates, inventory management, really simple checkout process and secure payment. So whatever you want to sell, you can sell it on Squarespace. Yeah, don't just take our word for it. Head to squarespace. Comssk and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code S YSK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain that's Squarespace.com. SYSK squarespace. Okay, we're back. I'm not reeling quite as much as I was, but that was a good story. Again, I feel like we should mention, even though it's kind of silly, that emergency TV show oh, yeah, for sure. From the 70s, because it seems like it definitely actually played a part in Ramping Up Ambulance Services. Yeah. So this is, I think, 1971 or 72 when it premiered. And remember, the Emergency Medical Services Act wasn't passed until 1973. That white paper had come out in 1966. So this idea of this new type of medicine, this new type of healthcare worker, was really on America's mind. But one of the ways it got there was from that TV show Emergency, in part because it was shot, like, documentary style, people played themselves on it. Like there were real dispatchers on the show, acting as dispatchers. It just captured America's imagination. Yeah, I remember watching it. I don't think I ever saw an episode of it. Yeah, it was an emergency with an exclamation point. It ran till 77, and it was mainly two firefighter characters, but the story centered on and one of them was a young Kevin Tiger tigg. Did you ever see Roadhouse? Yeah, he was the owner. He's a character actor. He's been in oh, yeah. He owned the double deuce. Yeah, he's great. I can't remember what else has seen him. I've seen him young before. I wonder if it was Emergency. Now that you mention it, maybe. Maybe. I have reruns. For sure it did. I'm a Jack Web fan, and I think he produced or created it. You're a big Jack Webb guy, are you not? I don't know. He's the dude from Dragnet. Sergeant Friday. Yeah, I guess. I need to think about that. Yeah, he's awesome. I'll let you know, man, if you go back and watch, like, old episodes of Dragnet. Oh, my God. Yeah. That was a good show. Yes, it was. And I think emergency, maybe Adam twelve is like the direct spin off of Dragnet. Maybe. That's what I'm thinking of. But I swear I know exactly what you're talking about. With fatigue fella from Roadhouse and then wasn't Dragnet colonel Potter? Yes. Harry Morgan. Right. Emily and I had a long conversation about Mash the other day and how that was. I was a mash nut. And how that show was one of the few to survive major cast changes. Like, three of them. Yeah, they certainly didn't big stars, like co stars. I think one of the few people who made it through is Allen Alda. Right. He. Was there the whole time. Yeah. And like, Hot Lips, I think, was the same, and a few others. But they had, like, radar and clinger. Yes. They coexisted, I think. But eventually Radar left and Clinger took his job. Potter took over for what's his face. The original guy, I don't remember. But he wore the fishing hat. Yeah, he was man, the saddest ending ever for that one when he left. Yes, I remember. He got his papers to go home and everyone's all excited, and then he was killed in a helicopter crash or a plane crash. I don't remember that on its way out. Wow. And then, of course, Frank Burns left and was replaced by Winchester, and then Trapper left and was replaced by Honey cut. Right. But it was still great. Well, it wasn't as great at the very end. I don't know, man. Goodbye, Farewell and Amen was one of the all time best last episodes. True, for sure. But you're saying they pulled it together in the last episode. I think I remember the last couple of seasons, it was a little bit like maybe it had run its course. I was a very discerning twelve year old bureau. Yeah, I guess so. They've really gone to the Hooch gin joke too many times, this episode. It is funny, though, that little twelve year old me thought, like, the funniest thing in the world was drunk war surgeons. Right? Drunk philandering war surgeons. All right. We really got off track there. Yeah. Maybe we should take a third break. No, I don't think so. I don't think we should either. So we're talking about paramedics today, believe it or not, and one of the things we talked about was the idea that paramedics well, let's talk a little bit more about their job. Right, okay. One of the things that paramedics are sometimes criticized for is that they don't run to the scene of an emergency. I've never thought about that once. You haven't? I really hadn't either. But then I started thinking about it. I'm like, yeah, I could totally see that. Apparently for some people who are at an emergency scene and see the paramedics kind of walk up, they appear a little too casual and they want to know, what are you doing? Why aren't you rushing to the scene? And paramedics, I think we saw a question answered on Cora or something like that. And a paramedic explains, there's actually a number of really good reasons why paramedics why you don't see them running to the scene. First of all, they're going to park as close as they can. Sure. So that running is only going to shave a couple of seconds off. But really, the number one reason, or one of the top reasons, is that they are supposed to be they're supposed to bring with them to this scene of catastrophic panic, basically calm and professionalism and being in control. Yeah, I get that. I think it would be a little disconcerting if I was injured and I saw a paramedic burst into the room like breathing heavy. Oh my God, what's going on? What's going on? Is everybody okay? Yeah. Plus they might get hurt running that's another one. And they're usually not usually, but I would say probably a lot of times it's not like they're walking through a perfectly laid pathway. Like they could be running upstairs or through a house of hoarders or through the woods. You don't know what's going on. You got to be careful on your way there. Yeah. And you have to be going slow enough that you can assess what the risks you're walking into or as you're walking into them running into it and being like, oh, the guy who shot you still here waiting for me now that I've run into the scene. I know that, but it's terrible. It's also kind of hard to run from place to place depending on the equipment that they're carrying with them. The stretchers get heavy, the EKG machines get heavy, the defibrillators get heavy, all that stuff gets heavy. So there's a number of reasons why you won't see a paramedic rushing to the scene. You will see him rushing to the scene in the ambulance though. And from what I understand, driving in the ambulance or riding in the ambulance is the most dangerous part of the entire job. Yeah. And here's another tip, aside from being nice to your EMT or paramedic, is don't call them ambulance drivers. Yeah. Because that's part of their job. And it's a weird thing too, that it's not like they hire a driver who's super skilled at that and then they have other people in there that do the work. They do double duty. They have to learn to drive like that while they're EMTs or paramedics. Yeah. And so if you've ever seen an ambulance going through an intersection, they're going to slow and maybe even stop and then proceed. They still get broadsided very frequently by people going through the intersection because they have a green light and they're not paying attention. They'll hit an ambulance like TBone and ambulance and the driver is probably okay, or I should say the paramedic driving is probably okay, but the paramedics in the back, they probably aren't lash down in any way, shape or form because they're working on the patient and so they're getting thrown around and can get injured and killed themselves that way. So that's the most dangerous aspect of the job from what I've seen. Yeah. Another interesting thing that I saw from that list you sent was that if you're in a big city, a lot of times they even have divided up between EMT and paramedic for different cases. So if there's a scene of trauma going on, like a car accident, then you're more likely to get an EMT. Whereas if you're at home and you're like, my husband is having a heart attack or my child's having a seizure, then you're more likely to get a paramedic, which is interesting. Yeah. And in cities as well, if you're a paramedic, you probably once you get into your ambulance, you're basically stationed at the ambulance for the rest of your twelve hour shift. You don't go back to the firehouse or to the ambulance clubhouse or anything like that. You're on a designated street corner, parked, waiting for your next call. Yeah. Probably killing time somehow. But there's not very much downtime in the city, especially the opposite is true for more rural EMTs and paramedics and that there's a lot of downtime. So much so that this guy, who is actually one of the consultants on that show Emergency, years back, he became a Minister of Health, I think, in Nova Scotia, and he created this program for rural EMS workers to use their downtime in much the same way that like a country doctor would have made house calls. Yeah. So wasn't the idea that they would go to places and sort of help train regular citizens on how to avoid getting hurt and stuff to begin with? Right, yeah. Like doling out preventative medicine, like making sure that people are taking their medicines. Correct. Like teaching CPR classes, teaching leading exercise classes for seniors at a senior center. Like doing all the stuff to reduce the number of calls that they have to go on anyway. So it cuts down on their downtime, which I think is actually very much appreciated by paramedics because there's really nothing more boring than sitting around constantly and then they're actually doing something and also making their community a healthier place. Yeah. I thought it was funny when they were talking to some real on the ground paramedics about the downtime, they're like, well, HBO goes kind of awesome, right? Yeah. Like, oh well, I guess you got to pass the time. It's better than Nicholas Cage and Bringing out the dead. What did he do? Because I remember that movie, but I don't remember all the details. Well, it wasn't that great. I liked it. He did tons of drugs. Oh, okay. Like a speed freak or something. I got you. Yeah. He kept begging to be fired. Right. I don't remember it very well at all, actually. I think he did like that was his begged to be fired. So one of the things about those downtime, the community preventative medicine initiatives, they've kind of spread from Nova Scotia out through around the country. When you see a paramedic doing that, they're not being paid, or at the very least their unit or their county or their city is not being paid for that, which is a huge problem. Yeah. This is where I got a little confused. The way I was reading this was Medicaid and Medicare and stuff. And insurance companies will reimburse only if they have transported someone to a hospital. Yes. So in other words, if you go as an ambulance in a paramedic or ENT to a place and you actually can just help and treat someone there and they don't need to go to the hospital, then that's a freebie. Or do they send a bill to the people? From what I understand, it's a freebie, probably. Since it is such a patchwork of systems all around the country, I'm sure that you could live somewhere where you, the person would get a bill for that. I think, as a matter of fact, you do, no matter where you live. But Medicaid and Medicare won't pay for it. So there is a substantial reason to say keep working chest compressions on a person who is obviously dead all the way to the hospital. Interesting. So that you can, like, bill Medicaid for that transport or getting somebody to go to the hospital even though they don't need to, so that you can bill Medicaid for that as well. And the problem is that leads to other problems as well, like hospital Ers are very much overcrowded and understaffed and overworked. Right. Yeah. So when you show up with another person, that's one more person they have to deal with and apparently it creates a bit of a conflict. Yeah. There's a cultural conflict between the people, the paramedics and the EMTs bringing people to the Er and the people who staff the Er and are accepting these people. So much so that it's become kind of common for Er rooms to issue ambulance diversions right. Saying, don't bring anybody to our Er, go somewhere else. And on a really bad night in a really populated city, you might find every single Er room with that diversion alert on and you got to take somebody out to a country hospital that doesn't know anything about trauma and it takes 45 minutes to get there and they're not going to get the care they could receive at a good trauma center in the city. So that's a real problem. Yeah. And isn't too, in terms of pay. And we need to hear from people on the ground because it's surprisingly confusing when you research this on how it all works. And maybe that's the point, but it seems like it's also a fixed rate. There's no difference between I treated a kid for an allergic beasting reaction to I brought a guy back from the dead who had a heart attack or heart failure. Is that right? Yeah. So long as you transport both of them to the hospital, you're going to get, I think I saw as low as $25 from Medicaid in some places. I don't understand. The numbers just do not add up. I don't get it at all. I know that some places, some counties and cities fold their EMS workers under their fire departments so that they fall under the fire department's funding, which I think fire departments tend to be way better funded than any kind of EMS service. So I think that's one way that it happens. But I don't get how this actually works money wise because it doesn't add up. It doesn't make sense. Yeah. I mean, it's not often that we're a little stymied, so we're going to follow up for sure with some emails. But I think it's also going to vary from place to place. Right. Because the other thing that I got really confused about was the privatization of ambulance services. Yeah. And as I can tell is in the were a lot of small private ambulance companies, but then they merged into more regional things. And these days there's just a few big multinational companies that are the most dominant in the industry. Right, but I don't get how that works. Like if they're private, are they working with only private hospitals or do they go to a state hospital? I think that they can get a contract from the state. They can have a license to operate within a state or a county or wherever. And I think they go wherever they're called to. I know that there can be competition among them. So like, multiple ambulances will show up at a scene sometimes. It's kind of a bit of a cluster as far as competing with the local EMS services. And I think it's on the decline from what I've seen. Yeah, but when you call 911, do you have a choice? So what you can do I think it's kind of like Uber, where the 911 dispatcher has a log of companies or services, like public funded or private services that it can be issued to and they send out the alarm and whoever takes the call goes and gets it. Interesting. So the problem is I saw a Las Vegas Review Journal article about this. Las Vegas was debating whether to just totally privatize their EMS services. Their EMS just like, went berserk. They're like, no, this doesn't work. The private companies are late. I think they were late like 10,000 plus times in one year in Las Vegas. Their response time tends to be less than the actual fire department or EMS. It's just not as preferable. And the reason why ambulance, private ambulance services came about or became widespread is this idea that you should just privatize everything and then that competition will keep everything going. Right. And that hasn't necessarily turned out to be the case. And from what I see, New York is actually scaling back on theirs. Right, yeah. I think Giuliani is one of the people that really tried, and of course, no surprise, given his politics, trying to privatize the industry, but apparently a lot of those had gone out, gone bankrupt, basically. And during the housing boom, the financial collapse, strangely, or maybe not strangely, because I don't understand it, a lot of private equity firms started buying up ambulance services. Yeah, there you go. There's the downfall. It's just so interesting. I know that this is one of those where someone's going to knock our socks off with a great email. Yeah, I think. Also, one more thing about the private ambulance services, it's not like they're just a bad idea all around. Sure. In a locale that is underserved, if a company wants to come and set up ambulance services, that would be great for the area because they can get places faster in an ambulance than they could have before. In a place where you've got your EMS overstretched and the county is like, no, we're not hiring a single additional EMS worker. The company that sets up shop can actually take up the slack. Like there are good aspects to it. Like it's not just like some terrible idea, but in practice, it hasn't worked out as well as one would hope, from what I understand. Yeah. EMS workers email us, explain this. Because, like you, I do not get who's footing the bill has to be insurance companies and then if you don't have insurance, it has to be just the person, the individual. Yeah. And I think we waited into the waters of doing a 911 podcast once and didn't. Isn't that correct? Because we'll do it at some point. But I remember thinking, oh, that's a good easy ish one. And it ended up like, being super convoluted. Yeah, I think we should do that. We should also do just ers in general, too. Yeah. So that's a bit about paramedics. Sounds like there's way more to it, right? Yeah, but you got anything else for now? No, sir. Okay. Well, since Chuck said no, sir, it's time for listening to mail. All right, I'm going to call this. We helped the dude win something. Yeah, I love this one. Hey, guys, been listening to your show for about four years and always wanted to write in, but now I have a great reason. A local store was doing a giveaway a few days ago and they posted that the first people to show up and answer correctly would win a prize. The question was baking and eggs was not always a breakfast food and what year did it become so? And who was the man behind the marketing idea? So this guy sounded super excited because he knew the answer immediately. I thought of your show and the uncanny ability of Mr. Edward Bernays to pop up in seemingly strange histories. I remembered your PR episode and knew it was sometime in the 20th, so I hopped in my car and took off for the business. When I got there, I told them the answer with the start of look. They told me I want a huge case of meat. And not just junkie stuff either. This place sells to restaurants and businesses all across the country. I love that. I was super stoked. Good. He's like, I won meat. And not just like terrible meat, like good stuff too. When they asked if I had to look it up, I told them no, that I listened to Stuff You Should Know and they retained it in the back of my mind. They asked for the name of the show and they said they were going to play it for all the workers there during the day. So now they can get more difficult and random questions. That's awesome. And he said, it doesn't in there. I went back later in the week and the same girl I'd spoken to recognize me. They had two other people come in that had known the answer from Stuff You Should Know as well. All right, even though we live in super rural Utah, you apparently have a large following and that is from John Robisson. Thanks, John Robinson. I hope you have a healthy EMS service out there to come find you after you eat that box of meat. Yeah, and you know what? Let's hear from Salt Lake City because we have debated a live show there and just didn't know if we had the support. So I want to hear it. Okay. We want to hear from Utah in and EMS workers. Yeah, if we get ten people that email us and say to come to Salt Lake City, we'll come. I think we should set the bar higher than that. Okay, well, if you want to let us know that you're from Utah and you want us to come or you're an EMS worker and you've got some good stories for us, you can tweet to us. I'm at Joshua mclark and at S-Y-S Kpodcast chucks at Charleswchuckbryant on facebookcom. And that stuff you should know on Facebook as well. You can send us an email. It's probably easiest to stuffpodcast@housetoports.com. As always, join us at our home on the web stuffforyshehno.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. 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Evel Knievel Part II | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/evel-knievel-part-ii | In today's episode, we cover part two of our Evel Knievel suite. The man, the myth, the legend. Check in and listen to the latter stages of Evel's career as the world's most legendary daredevil. | In today's episode, we cover part two of our Evel Knievel suite. The man, the myth, the legend. Check in and listen to the latter stages of Evel's career as the world's most legendary daredevil. | Thu, 11 Aug 2016 15:41:39 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=15, tm_min=41, tm_sec=39, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=224, tm_isdst=0) | 41927647 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from houseupworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's Charles w, Chuck, Bryant and there's Gerry. And this is part two of of the Evil caneval saga. The sequel. Yeah. Who knew? We genuinely didn't know. Yes. That's why we didn't set it up as part one of two, because we got into it. Dude, this thing can't be an hour and a half long. No, I guess it could, but no. We found our sweet spot is not an hour and a half of content. We did a one parter on Isaac Newton, but a two parter on Evil Caneva. All right, so where we left off just get right into it, huh? Evil Knievil had just completed the Caesars Palace jump, completing it with his head and smashed pelvis. Yeah. And by the way, he was in a coma for 29 days after that crash. These were not light injuries. No. We left out a very important point. Right. When he went and did that jump on his way out to the jump area yeah. He took $100, put it on the blackjack table, promptly lost, hit the bar, got a shot of Wild Turkey, and went out and jumped, apparently with two showgirls, one under each arm, right in headlocks. That was his style. He lived hard because he was from the hard land of Butte, Montana. Right. So he lands right. And he didn't land on his bike. I can't remember what stuck, but something stuck. I guess his back tire was it. It was usually his back tire that gave him the trouble. He always almost made it like you were saying. Yeah, something I think it was a back tire. I'm trying to visualize the crash, but his handlebars just get pulled right out of his hands because the bike buck down. Well, and it's just such an impact with that 300 pound bike. He just couldn't hold on right. And so once he didn't have the handlebars anymore, he didn't have control. And he goes flying off. Oh, it's tough to watch. It is tough to watch, especially in slow motion, which is how I saw it. Yeah. It's the only way to see it. So he has finished this jump with his head, like you said, and his star is bigger than ever. Like, because of this crash, he's more famous than ever. He's making 25 grand per performance by 1968. And it was after the Caesars jump where he first starts to plant the seed to the press that he wants to jump the Grand Canyon. Yeah. For some reason, I have a feeling this just came out of his mouth. Like, what's the biggest thing I can think of? Sure. But he started a seemingly genuine attempt to get permission from the National Park Service to do this Grand Canyon jump over the years. He needed permission from I think it was the Interior Department. And they were like, no, absolutely. Not. And he said, Why? Yeah. And they were like, we really have to tell you why you can't have permission to jump that. But he did keep it up. It was a drum that he beat almost constantly during interviews. Yeah. He would say, like, one day I'm going to be able to jump the Grand Canyon. That's going to be my next big trick. And then in the meantime, he would set up these other exhibitions. Yeah. And, Chuck, you said he was making 25 grand of performance. He was doing a performance a week for a while there. Oh, yeah. I mean, he was rich. He was a wealthy man. At this point in 1971. In January, on the 8th and 9th, he broke two records. He sold out the Houston Astrodome twice over. Wow. Two shows in a row. He sold out the Astrodome in 1971, which was a record, and then in February, he broke an actual jump record by jumping 19 cars on that Harley XR 750. It's pretty impressive. It's funny when I'm looking at my liner notes on this, because sometimes I'll just put kind of what's going on? So it reminds me it just says, jump, crash, jump, crash, jump, crash, over and over. But that's what I'm saying. He crashed a lot like the Pepsi truck one. It turns out it was 13 Pepsi trucks. He crashed that one. It wasn't necessarily his fault. He had a fairly short run up distance, and it went pavement, grass pavement. Right. Not ideal. Yeah. Again, he didn't really think through I don't know if he didn't have people thinking it through on his behalf. Yeah. Well, he would just do whatever, as I said earlier, like, well, this is how much room I have. Well, maybe I don't have enough room. Right. Maybe this is a bad idea. Well, I said I'd do it, so if I die oh, well, in his famous quote, I always said was, it's not about crashing. It's about getting up and trying it again. It's kind of a trite saying it's direct from success through a positive mental attitude. Yeah, probably. So his favorite book. So the Grand Canyon thing is building steam in some ways as far as leaking it to the press, but the government is still like, no, you can't do that. Little boys all over the country, I think, is one quote, was, little boys want to be like me, men want to be me, and women want to be with me. Just FYI. Yeah, he definitely thought a lot of himself. So finally, officially, the US Department Interior said, I'm denying you airspace over the Grand Canyon. This is not going to happen. Please stop calling us. Yes. So what does he do? Well, he apparently was on a plane ride, and he was over Idaho and noticed that there was a pretty good sized canyon that was formed by the Snake River around what's that down there? That looks like a canyon. Yeah, I'll jump that. There's more than one canyon in the US. And he decided to go check it out. Outside of Twin Falls, Idaho, he found a little area that was just perfectly wide. There was enough run up on either side for him to try to jump it. Well, he didn't need much run up. Well, he didn't know at the time he thought he was going to use a motorcycle. Yeah, he did a rocket cycle. And most importantly, though, it was privately owned. So he didn't need permission from any kind of government agency. Exactly. Although he did actually he had to get permission from the local, I think the county, to register the vehicle. Is that it? And they registered it as an airplane even though it was actually rocket. A steam powered rocket. Yes. He leased 300 acres for 35 grand and said, September 72, it's going down. ABC Sports said, we're not going to pay whatever you're asking. So he said, fine. Remember how this worked out last time? I'm going to hire Bob Aram, who is a boxing promoter. Still is, I think. Yeah, his name sounded familiar unless he's passed away, but he was for top ranked productions. He said, all right, you handle the filming, and we'll do this new fangled thing called closed circuit TV show. It in movie theaters. Yeah. We're all going to get rich. Hired a subcontractor and actually got engineers for this. And they built that X One sky cycle, which, like you said, I've forgotten it was going to be a rocket motorcycle or rocket powered motorcycle. And they built it and tested it, and it went right down a mile down into the river. And he said, maybe we should just do it like a straight up rocket. Yes. And this dude this engineer. So we hired an engineer named Doug Maliwicki. And Doug Maliwicki subcontracted the actual design and construction out to another aeronautics engineer. His name is Robert I can't figure out how to say this guy's last name. It's spelled like truax. I think it's trueix. Trux, not trouble. Yeah, I think I remember the documentary. It was Robert Chewick. Okay, so Robert Chewix was the guy who actually designed and I believe built the rocket. The steam powered rocket. Yeah. The X Two that Eva Caneville used to jump the Snake River Canyon. Right? Yes. And as you'll see, it didn't go according to plan. So this guy's son is the one who is behind this jump that's being done by Eddie Braun in September because he wants to vindicate his father that this thing would have made it had this parachute not deployed and kept him from making it. So he wants to show that this would have worked and that his dad, who's had lots of scoring heaped on him over the years, including publicly by evil Knieval, that it was all quite unfair. Well, we're getting something in a minute. Which makes them seem like a bigger jerk even. Okay, but things are going well. That's not exactly true. September 8, 1974. It's going to go down. This thing had turned into the party of the century. Like a hippie Hills Angels biker party, a huge one. And this is like Twin Falls, idaho is not like a hippie biker town. It was like a normal God fearing country town. And all of a sudden, thousands of hippie biker, weirdo druggies show up and start partying in town. Yeah, they were hammered, they were drunk, they were high on grass. Setting fires to stuff. Setting fires. It was completely out of hand. They had no idea it was going to attract this many people. It became like a three day party. Right. Did you say grass? Yeah. They're high on grass. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Got you now. It's a weed. Probably herb. The herb NUGS. So it's a huge party. It's like Woodstock. People are drunk out of their minds, high on the grass. I bet you there's some LSD going around. Maybe even maybe some benny's. And on this documentary I saw, there was a real fear. They had a temporary fencing put up to keep people away because the lip of the canyon is just a straight drop, right. A mile down. Yeah. So they have this temporary fencing and we'll talk about the jump in a second. But when it actually goes down, they bum rush this thing because you couldn't see what was going on. I know, dude. And there was a real fear that there were going to be mass deaths like lemmings. Yeah. Where people would get shoved off the lip of the canyon because the people up front would just run and stop. Right. And then 5000 people behind them. I don't even know how many people there's. More than 5000 even, I think. Yeah. But yeah, they were just going to be like hundreds and hundreds of people shoved unwillingly to their deaths. Yeah. I guess more like the Three Stooges than lemmings. I think that could have happened. If you look at I don't know how it is. I saw video of this and there's just people like just looking over the ledge. I don't know how it didn't either. You just describing it scares me. You got a little shudder. So here's what happens. Evil. And evil is not feeling good about this. He literally goes to his family in the trailer and says goodbye. And they interviewed his family and they were like, this sucked. We really thought we were saying goodbye to our father forever. We thought he was going to die that day. No PT. Barnum BS going on. Right. We thought we were going to see his death in front of our face. So he goes off and the promoter apparently had these armed guards. He said that they look like they were there for the crowd control. He said they were there to make sure he got in that rocket, he said, because I was not going to let this not go down with that scene going on there. So he gets in, they do the countdown. This steam rocket goes off. It was built from, I think, the fuel tank of a jet. Yeah. It's like a little one man rocket. Yeah. And they superheated this water, I think, like 500 deg to create this blast of steam. It takes off and almost immediately the parachute is deployed, which provides drag. And it did not get very far. No, but apparently if you look at the initial trajectory, it was right on target. Which is why the engineer's son is like, it would have worked. Right. It will work if the parachute doesn't deploy. And in the engineer's defense, the promoter. And evil. And evil. So we're not testing this. We already spent a bunch of money on that X two cycle or the X One rocket cycle. Yeah. So just make it. Right. So they had one parachute. They didn't test it. And when he did this jump, it was the jump as well as the only test that they did. Right. So the parachute did deploy, but they think that had it not deployed, he totally would have made it. But the parachute did deploy it, so he didn't make this jump and started drifting, luckily attached to a parachute into a mile deep canyon. Yeah. The thing is, I can't believe they did this. They had him harnessed in. His jumpsuit was like, strapped to the seat of this thing. So they had no way of getting out. He needed help to get out. And apparently there's no one waiting in the canyon down below to help get them out. They were all on the other side of the canyon. So had he landed in the river, he would have drowned because he had no way of getting out. Luckily, he landed within feet of the river. Yeah. So it goes a mile down, drifting slowly, totally up in the air. It's like a Planko chip at this point. No one knows where it's going to land. And he landed within a few feet of the water so that he survived. Amazing. Yeah. You know how it teased you and said, there's a little tidbit that makes him seem like a jerk? There is speculation that Evil can Evil pulled that shoot. Oh, really? Because he didn't think he was going to make this thing, and he might not have thought he was going to make it to begin with. And it was all just a big publicity stunt. And he knew that he could pull that shoot as soon as he took off. Got you. And float safely down. Wow. In the documentary, talk about a little bit, I saw another VH one behind the Evil. Yeah, something like that. True Hollywood Story, I think. E network. And they talk about it in there, too. They were like, his hand was on that lever. Like he was the one responsible for pulling that thing, because they interviewed the engineer and he was like, I don't know how this thing, like, it shouldn't have deployed. He was getting all the scoring. Well, yes. He couldn't figure out how it deployed. And evil can evil even call them an idiot? He's like, I never liked that engineer. He was an idiot. That does make it way worse, because apparently, also, the engineer was very surprised to hear this because they were good friends. They'd become good friends over the course of this project. Now he's publicly calling him an idiot. Yeah. I think he took that secret to his grave, so we'll never know. But there was definitely speculation that he never intended to make that jump. I had not heard that. Yeah. Which is pretty remarkable. Well, let's take a break and we'll come back, because, believe it or not, he kept jumping. All right, Josh. Snake River Canyon is in the books. It is. And apparently he made, like, $6 million from that joke. Oh, really? Yeah. That's what he personally netted and then spend it, like, in the next three weeks on diamonds. Yeah. We'll talk more about that later. All right. So now we move forward a few years. He's in between 72 and 75, does plenty of other jumps and had plenty of other hospital stays. And then in May 1975, in front of, once again, ABC's Wide World of Sports, the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat. You watch was that still around when you were around? No, I watched the laugh Olympics. Wide World of Sports is, like, the biggest thing on TV on Sundays. Yeah, no, I think it was on. It just never caught my fancy. And it was so great. The weekend, seriously, it was just all about cartoons with me. There was that point cartoons would start at seven in the morning and then go to, like, ten, 3011 sometimes. And then, like, non cartoons would start and just be like, that's when you take it. I haven't put this on TV. He said, I'd nap till prime time. Right. So in 75, he says, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to do the biggest jump in my career in England. World renowned jumper. At this point, I can go to London, England. Yeah. Because, again, not just like he's on the Wide World of Sports, and he's known for the Snake River Canyon jump and the Caesars Palace. The Stunt Cycle toy was the largest selling toy of Christmas 1973. Yeah, he made a ton of money off that. Atari had a Stunt Cycle like, video console in 1976. There were action figures. There was a whole action figure line by ideal. He was making mad cash from being a daredevil. Yes. Adds, he was a pitch man. He was making money hand over fist, and, like we say, over and over spending it. And he was huge. He was just a huge star. It's such a 70 to be a star for being a daredevil. Yeah. It beats the 2010 thing of just being a star for being famous. No. Agreed. At least this guy was doing something. Yeah. Did Kim Kardashian ever put her life on the line? No. That's what I want to see. Being Paris Hilton's assistant. Probably, but she survived it, so she was her assistant. That's where she started out. Really? What do you mean, started out? She started out as a rich kid in Brentwood. She did, but she wasn't a celebrity by any means. Well, until that sex tape. But I think she was Paris Hilton's assistant at the time that came out. That's weird. Yeah, it is weird. You know, Paris Hilton has my same eye affliction the Ptosis. You. Paris Hilton. Forrest Whitaker. Tom York. Oh, yeah. He's got it, too, huh? Yeah. I'm going to get that fixed one day. I don't think you should. It adds a tremendous amount of character. I don't know. It's easy to say when you don't have a droopy eyelid. I think you should keep that vestigial tail. Right? Yeah. Adds character. Yeah. I like it when you wag it. We'll see what it's doing. Is it's inhibiting my vision somewhat. Well, then I can see that not a ton, but when I lift my eyelid up all the way, I'm like, oh, I can see 15% more of the room. There's the sky. Yeah. Anyway, that's my issue. So, 1975, he's at Wembley Stadium, sold out Wembley Stadium in London, England, and he's going to jump. Did you say how many people that is? Well, this says 90,000. The other article said 70. Either way, that's a bunch between 70 and 90,000 people. I don't think we could sell out Wembley. No, but we sold out two shows in London. So they clearly have a jones for the American. Americans making asses of himself. So he jumps the AEC Merlin buses. These are not the double deckers, but they're still buses. And it's a big jump. It's, I believe, his biggest to date. And he crashes, of course. Breaks his back. Broke his back. Yes. And in the very famous footage, told Frank Gifford, I came in walking. I went out walking. Because Frank Giffords like, get this guy's stretcher, right? He's broken his back. And evil is like, I'm walking out. And he did. He did. It wasn't smart, but he did it. Yeah. Then he goes to another huge jump at Kings Island theme park in Ohio. I've been there. I bet. Is it still around? I don't know, but I've been there when I was a kid. It's clearly where is it? You know? I don't know. I was always a passenger. I have no idea what part of Ohio it's in, but it's clearly second banana to Cedar Point. To Cedar Point. Pretty much everything is in the world. The second banana point. Yeah. No, your parents hate you. So they take you to Kings Island instead of Cedar Point. Got you. So he makes us jump at Cedar Point at Kings Island, and it is at the time the highest rated event in wide. It's a tough one. Wide world of sports history. Still. Still? Yeah, I guess so. The show is not around. Right? Yeah. 163 ft. Successful jump. I don't think he even crashed on this one. Yeah, this is an all around good one for him. Yeah. You got the buses at Kings Island successful, set a record, highest rated. Everything's coming up aces on this one. It is coming up aces. And he says he's retiring. Yeah, he started to say that a lot. Starting with this jump. After just about every jump, he'd be like, that's it, I'm done. I'm never going to do it again. And then he would do it again. And actually, I believe he retired after Wembley. Okay. That's the famous line. I remember now. He crashed spectacularly, grabbed the mic and told the stadium that you were the last people in the world who will ever see me jump. I will never, ever jump again. Ever. Through and then five months later, he jumped to Kings Island and then retired after that one. Right. Then he retired after that one. He did another one shortly after that at the Kingdom in Seattle. Actually, it was a year after that when he retired again. That was like Tyson's last fight. He jumped seven Greyhound buses and I guess the crowd was fine with it, but he apologized for it being not so great, for not like being risky enough. Yeah. And so he retired again and then he came back again. That's right. And this time he was channeling the fawns. Oh, yeah. He was going to jump a tank of sharks. He's going to literally jump the shark. Yeah. And he did. Well, he didn't. 1977 in Chicago, he saw Jaws the Movie and said, he kind of reminds me of my dad a little bit. My dad has this weird if he would have a ton of money, he would have had this kind of weird, excess, crazy ideas. Like the bomb shelter after. Yeah. These dudes of this generation, they're all crazy. Yeah. They still hadn't they didn't get movies yet. Yeah. So he says he's going to jump a bit of sharks, put it on TV, and during rehearsal he has a really bad crash and actually severely injured a cameraman. Yeah. The guy lost his eye. Yeah. And I guess that was a really big deal. That evil. Can even he was like, can't come back from that one. No. So did he not do the actual jump? No, I think he called it off. Had I been the cameraman, I would have been like, so I just lost my eye for nothing. Yeah. He's like, Get in that shark. Yeah. At least do the jump. Yeah. And apparently he sat on that footage for almost 20 years. And there was finally a documentary, not the one I saw, but another one where he allowed that footage to be shown, and then he did retire. This is smart. I am sure the camera operator was like, oh, you couldn't have retired before you took my eye off not a week earlier. But that was the one where he finally is like, I'm done. And he had a great quote. It was a professional supposed to know when he's jumped far enough. Good quote. It is a pretty good quote. And like you said, it wasn't just the Seattle jump that he started doing less risky jumps toward the end period that were like, I guess he lost his nerve. Maybe after Boise or Twin Falls, the Snake River, maybe, because it seems like that's where about it changed. Things changed. Although, no, I guess it would have been Wembley, because you got to have a lot of nerve to try that. Yeah. So maybe after he broke his back, he was like, probably. Who knows? All right, well, let's take another break here, and we'll wrap it up with a little bit more on his private life and all those broken bones. Broken bones? Josh, you know the old rumor that he broke every bone in his body? Yeah. Not true. No, but he does hold a record for most broken bones. He does? Oh, yeah, man. Because he said he's broken 35 bones. Okay, that didn't seem like a record. 35 bones. 433 fractures of those 35 bones. Okay, got you. And I believe both of those are records as far as Guinness is concerned. Well, when you look, his own website has a neat little chart where the injuries are broken up into fractured broken, broken and replaced and broken multiple times. The other one that I'm curious about is crushed. Like, he crushed his pelvis. Is that an actual medical term? You see it very frequently. What has to take place for a bone to be considered crushed? My interpretation of that, which is completely made up, is that it's fractured so severely it goes beyond multiple fractures. I can't put humpty back together. Or is it just crushed into powder? A fine powder. That's what comes to mind. I'm sure that's not what happens, but I think of a big pile of sawdust, and it's but if you look at his injury list, it's skull, nose, teeth, jaw, left and right clavicle, sternum, upper vertebrae, right arm, left arm, all ribs, pelvis, three times. Coccyx, both wrists, hip and ball socket. Lower Verteba femur five times. He broke his femur. Can you believe that? Yes, as a matter of fact, I can. Right knee, right chin, both ankles, toes. It looks like his left below his femur on his left leg. He was virtually unscathed. Weird. Isn't that weird? Yeah. No left shin, no left did say both ankles. Typically falling in a certain fashion. Maybe this is a complex. These are his bones, too. This isn't taking into account the coma he was in and the multiple concussions he suffered. Yeah. And I think there was like internal bleeding and things like that along the way, too. And as a result of this, there were rumors that still stand, although I couldn't find much in the way of substantiation of them that he took drugs himself. Probably painkillers. Apparently his good friends were like he ate them like candy while grandstanding against drugs. So that was a really big part of what he was doing. And one of the reasons why he did become a role model to a whole generation of young boys was he had set himself up like that at the beginning of every show. He would basically do, like, don't do drugs message stay in school, keep your word. And these were what he considered as his core values. Right. So yeah, the idea that he was doing drugs himself, I have the impression if he was, it was very much an Elvis interpretation. Like, these aren't drugs. My doctor gave them to me. Right. I'm completely hooked on them, but I got them from the doctor. I need them for pain. Right. Not like he was hitting bumps of coke or something before he was hitting the ramp. Yes. He was a bad drinker, too. Huge. Drank lots of Wild turkey. Yes. At one point he said he probably drank about a fifth of whisky a day with beer chasers in between. That's a lot. Yeah. Especially when you're trying to control a motorcycle jumping 163ft over some Greyhound buses. Well, I don't think he would do those jumps wasted or anything, but he would, like, probably drink afterward. He would take his traditional shot of Wild Turkey right before he did it straight. Yeah. I don't think he was jumping. I'm very curious, but a lot of the dirt that we know about Evil, King Evil came out in a book by his former publisher named Shelley Saltman. Yeah, that was a big deal in the documentary. So I think after the Snake River jump in 1974, saltman published a book about the jump. And it was an authorized book, but Saltman decided to point out that working for Evil Caneval a day spent working for Evil Knievel was like spending 3 hours at the dentist without Novocaine. He said that he was abusive towards his family, that he was totally hooked on drugs and drank and was immoral. And all this other stuff just completely hung out. All the guys dirty laundry may or may not have made up rumors. Well, and this is when you could still lead kind of a private life, like, you know about the stuff now, but it's not like today, if you're carousing women in bars, there's ten people filming you with a cell phone. Right. Within minutes, it's like out on the internet. No, this is like it took a tell all biography for. This kind of stuff to get out. Right. So Evil can evil goes and finds the guy and attacks him with the baseball bat and two broken arms at the time, yeah, Evil Caneville did. Oh, he did? Yeah, he, like, left the hospital with two broken arms and said, Give me that bat, and attacks his former good friend. Okay. Like, really badly. Well, he broke yeah, he shattered one of his arms. The guy had his arm up to defend himself, and that arm got shattered. And this was where everything really went off the rails. He did six months for that. Six months in jail. And this is at a time when his star is as high as it could have possibly been. Remember, he had those action figures from Ideal that he was making so much money going to prison, actually voided his contract with them. So he lost all of his licensing fees from that, and that was a huge source of his income at the time. Yeah. Him being in prison, he had started this daredevil craze, and there were lots of people nipping at his heels. Him going to jail open up this huge vacuum to where every daredevil in the world was trying to fill it now. And there was actually this guy that House Stuff Works recently ran a great article on called The Human Fly and his Star Rose because he was trying to fill this void left by Evil Caneva when he was in prison. So we're going to do a show on him, too, right? We've got to yeah. So I won't say anything more. Okay. But it was a big deal. This is where things really went downhill for him. But his son said I read an interview with his son and the Guardian, his oldest son, Kelly, who I think is, like, kind of the executor of his estate and everything. He said that this definitely was where it went downhill. But his dad's, like, never circled the drain or anything like that. Right. He didn't just go completely overboard or off the rails. Despite the fact that the family lost all their finances within a few years. He had to pay Shelley Saltman $12 million. Well, he didn't pay him a cent. Oh, he didn't? No, he was ordered to. Yeah, he was ordered to. Yes. There was a lot of all the money just went away. The reason he had to serve his full sentence, he probably would not have had the judge not found out that in his prison work release program, he was being chauffeured in a limousine convertible back and forth and arranged for other inmates to get limousine transportation for their work release. So the judge didn't think that was very funny and said, you know what? You're going to serve your whole sentence. So he did six months, did the full six months. And like you said, beyond just losing money for the licensing, everything kind of went south for him after that in life, his star was fading. It was not a great time to attack someone with a baseball bat. It wasn't like early in his career he might have survived, something like that. It's not like 1940s or 50s Butte, Montana. Yeah, but people are kind of losing interest a bit. Well, yeah, and he very wisely. Kind of faded back into the woodwork a lot. He had already stopped doing stunts, but he was still doing public appearances. But More is like a motivational speaker or something like that. This is where he really began to retire. Yeah. He made his own movie in 1977 called Viva Caneval with Jean Kelly, sadly. Wait, why was in this? Gene Kelly's great. I know it's sad for Gene Kelly. Oh, got you. He was in this garbage I movie. See? Okay. Lauren Hutton was in it, and she's great, too. Evil. Caneville played himself as evil and evil, and he was bad. And the plot was that he foiled Mexican drug traffickers, right? Yeah. It was clearly him saying, like, this is the story I want to tell. But it opens with him, like, rescuing an orphan on his motorcycle out of a bad orphanage and, like, riding them out of there. And then he foils crimes and forcing the orphan to make knock off wallets. Yeah. And I think the thing in the review I read said he, quote, eventually charms the feminist reporter assigned to him, which was Lauren Hutton. Really? Oh, yeah. Wow. So he was one of those, like, what are you ladies? You writing a bad article on me? Watch this. I'll charm the socks off of you. Right. Piss off. It's worth watching a bit of that or at least a trailer on. I'd watch that movie for sure. I want to see the George Hamilton movie of him. George Hamilton as Evil Knievel. I'm sure even George Hamilton was like me. Well, McConaughey for years was going to do a movie. He would have been perfect. I think he kind of had that look a little bit hey, man and the Swagger. Yeah. But now I think that movie has been trying to be made for so many years now. It is currently Darren Aronofsky directing Channing Tatum as evil can evil. Really? So we'll see. Okay. I like Channing Tatum. I do, too, but he's just got this vulnerability that I don't think even he's aware of, that he brings to every role. And I don't think it belongs anywhere near evil can Evil. Well, that's true, because McConaughey would have been perfect. I think he would have. But Channing Tatum, he's one of those guys that did not want to, like but then it turned out like he was a pretty good actor and funny and sort of self deprecating despite his looks. So I was like, I guess I do like this guy. Yeah. I got nothing against him. I just don't think he'd be a good evil knob. Yes, I hear you. Well, he's an actor, though. He's an actor. He doesn't have to personify the role. Yeah. I guess if George Hamilton did it, channing Tatum can do it. Right. I think I've told this story before. One of my good friends said that he saw George Hamilton on The Tonight Show in the hamilton said that he never wore the same pair of socks twice. He always wore a brand new pair of socks. And my friend was, like, eight years old, and he just thought that was the most rich yeah. Like, exotic, wonderful thing of all time. And he still thinks about George, almost. Alexander Hamilton. George Hamilton. When he gets a new socks and puts them on. So Caval ended up being married twice. His first wife, Linda, 38 years. She hung in through the thick and thin. He divorced and then married a woman named Crystal Kennedy for two years. They were married, yeah. But apparently they've been together for a very long time, and so while he was previously married, I believe so, yeah. I saw her described as his longtime partner. Yeah. She helped him after during his illness. And it was a sad thing at the end for his family and friends to see him that way. Right. Well, apparently when they were married for two years, they divorced and then reconciled and then lived together as friends, but unmarried. They never remarried, but they stayed very close. Got you. And he eventually died of well, what was it exactly? He died, oddly enough, of diabetes. Okay. Well, he had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, so I believe he actually had a heart condition, is what it sounds like. No, a lung condition. A breathing problem. And I guess the impression I have is that he just had just worn his body down. Yeah. But it wasn't like he broke a bone or slipped on a banana peel or something like you'd expect. Yeah. In any of the documentaries, his friends and family talked about how sad it is when you see someone that lived a life like he did to be so sick, and I think he converted to Christianity late in life and sort of he was baptized publicly. Yeah. Tried to come clean about not having done the right thing a lot of times, and kind of the classic story, Deathbed regrets. Got you. But he was a legend. He's an American legend, for sure. Yeah. He was buried in Butte in 2007. And one kind of cool thing that happened, he very much they call him like, the Godfather of the X Games because he kind of inspired all that stuff, and they brought him back to the X Games before he died and paid tribute to him. And it was kind of cool seeing all these kids that were like, you're the dude. Right. Like, you are evil and evil. So he got to experience that. Yeah. Because he was kind of broke at this point and not doing well. And he saw all these people paying homage to him and saying, like, you're the reason all this is here. That's cool. And I'm sure he's probably like, what? Can I get a cut of it? You just said that was the reason, right? To get my lawyer on the phone. His very famous, mostly white and red and blue jumpsuit. I've never heard anyone say it that way. And his motorcycle are in the Smithsonian. Yeah, good old white, blue and red. Right? That's how true patriots say it. That's right. If you want to know more about evil and evil, you can't, because there's nothing more to know because we said everything. But just in case, you can type those words in the search bar of your favorite search engine, and it will bring up some really interesting stuff. And since I said search engine, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this differential Equations. Hey, guys, big fan. I'm really excited on the latest show on chaos theory, maybe the most relevant episode in my line of work thus far. I'm a PhD student in mechanical engineering at Auburn University, and I'm currently instructing a class on system dynamics and controls. I can't believe you mentioned differential equations. I've been harping on my students on the importance of the dif EQ, but it is a hard sell. It's not hard to believe, my friend. Even more relevant with your decision on deterministic systems. Whereas my work deals primarily with determinism's evil relative stochastic systems, randomness. My field of research involves state estimation, which, put crudely, is the practice of applying statistics to make a best guess of a system's state, ie. Position, temperature, pressure, et cetera. Obviously, the beauty of estimation lies in its ability to use knowledge of a measurement's uncertainty, or even the uncertainty in the initial condition for producing an optimal estimate. Anyway, I could go on and on. I just want to say great show, great episode, great podcast. A side note, was the Isaac Cream Newton bit a nod to Wutang clan? No, as in cash rules everything around me. C-R-E-A-M cream. Get the money, get the money. Dollar bills, bills, dollar, dollar bills, y'all right? That's from Dan. Dan's multi talented. Yeah. He's into wutang in mechanical engineering. Yeah. At Auburn. And he's doing it all. Living the dream like an evil foul. Thanks a lot, Dan. We appreciate that. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at Syscape podcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuff you should know. You can join us on Instagram at siskpodcast two. You can send us an email to stuffpodcasterwithworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web ##yshow com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Visit howtofworks.com." | ||
3fcfdf38-121b-11eb-ba6a-4fce7039596a | Short Stuff: Sulfanilamide Disaster | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-sulfanilamide-disaster | In the 1920s, before the era of consumer protection, a poison entered the medicine supply and killed more than 100 people before the public health disaster could be stopped. | In the 1920s, before the era of consumer protection, a poison entered the medicine supply and killed more than 100 people before the public health disaster could be stopped. | Wed, 07 Jul 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=188, tm_isdst=0) | 13326261 | audio/mpeg | "What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalancho demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa lined jackets you call IBM to automate your It infrastructure with AI. Now, your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes, and you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It systems that rule of their own slaves. IBM, let's create. Learn more@ibm.com It automation. Hey, welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. Just a couple of mellow dudes about to talk about one of the worst public health disasters in American history. All right. That's right. And this one came about because we were just talking about this in a full length episode, and little Joshi said, hey, we should do a short stuff on that thing. And two days later, we're doing it. Yeah, not even two days. I think it's the next day in podcast land time. Oh, sure. It just came out. Yeah. We activated our immediate response team, which is us. Yes. And we're going to do one on the elixir sulfanylamide disaster. Sure. All right. How would you say sulfonylamide? That's what I'm going with. All right. Hey, man. Potato, potato. Sulfanylamide. Sulfonylamide. Let's call the whole thing off. Exactly. Which, by the way, I know this is a short stuff, so there's really no time to discourse, but I hate that song. The let's call it holding off. Yeah, I hate it. Yes. I told you, I think, one time about my friend Andrew in Los Angeles, whose friend auditioned with that song for a big musical production okay. And never heard it. Really? And didn't realize that you were supposed to say them differently. So you say tomato and I say tomato. You've just seen the sheet music, I guess. So that's the story. I don't know if it checks out, but it's pretty cool. Andy Kaufman performance art piece. So we're not talking about that. We're going back to 1937, back in the time where there was such a thing as the FDA, there was something called the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act. No food. Pure food and Drug Act. Sorry. Of which we talked about yesterday. And one of the things that it did was it said, there is this thing, this Bureau of Chemistry that will become the FDA, but they're just kind of there. They're not really good at what they do yet because we don't have the regulation to let them do what they do. And so under that context, the idea of medicines was pretty much like the Wild West in America at the time. Yes. I think putting it very kindly. Yeah. Earlier in that same decade, there was a microbiologist named Gerhard Domak and said, hey, I made a great discovery. This compound sulfanylamide, or nilamide, acts as an antibiotic against strep, and we can help strep throat. And pharmaceutical companies said, this is great. Let's pump out this powder and these tablets. And then someone at the Massing Gill, the Se Massing Gil pharmaceutical company out of Tennessee, said, you know what? People really want this in liquid form. Get to work. Yeah. There was a guy, the chief chemist was Dr. Harold Watkins. And he started getting to work because they told him to, and that was his job. And that was that. He started tinkering around. He needed a solvent, something to dissolve the powdered sulfanylamide into a solution, water, because it doesn't just automatically dissolve. So he used the solvent, diethylene glycol, and he ended up coming up just seeing that on the label somewhere, won't you be like, I'm going to second guess this decision? How about the deadly poison? He went whole hog on it. And so he came up with elixir sulfonylamide, which was 10% sulfonylamide, the antibiotic, 16% water, and 72% diethylene glycol. Yeah, and it gave it a sweet flavor, so the taste was good. He gave it a pinkish hue, he added a little bit of raspberry extract and said, let's hit the market. Yeah. And I guess I kind of spoiled it a second ago. But it is a deadly poison, and as you mentioned in the other episode, it's related to antifreeze, which is not good to drink, and it kills you in horrific ways. It really wrecks your kidney. Your kidneys will eventually shut down, but along the way you will be vomiting and agitated and have seizures and convulsions. Terrible, intense pain, unrelenting pain. And they didn't know this because they didn't carry out any tests on this stuff, not just to make it, but to sell it. They didn't even test it out before they put it on the shelves, mainly because the law didn't say you had to at the time. No, but did you see that quote that described the Massing old company? I think even among under the law, they were kind of seen as renegades. Right? Yeah. The quote was from the investigator. Apparently they just throw drugs together and if they don't explode, they're placed on sale. And that's at that time, like in the 30s. Right. So the Madhango company, they made 240 gallons initially of elixir sulfonylamide of this deadly, deadly poison and started shipping it around the country as medicine in September of 1937. And within just a couple of weeks, the first desk were starting to be reported. Yeah. And it wasn't like these days where they find something like, oh, this could cause a risk of cancer down the road. Like, you drink this stuff and you die. Yeah. It was that bad. Yes. So I say we take a break. The sulfon illuminate. Elixir is out there. It's starting to kill people, and we need to get some commercial messages. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalanche of demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa like jackets you call IBM to automate your It infrastructure with AI. Now your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes, and you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It. Systems that rule up their own sleep. IBM. Let's create. Learn more@ibm.com. It automation. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? For all their days at the dog park and nights sleeping in bed. Your bed. Yep. We mean that kid your dog. Halo Elevate is natural science based nutrition for their best health. It's guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands. That means digestive health, heart and immunity. Support healthy skin and coat, hip and joint support, and strengthen energy. Find Halo Elevate at Petco pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores. Learn more@halopets.com. All right, so, Chuck, the AMA was around at the time. It was a poison control up. So remember we said the AMA was formed in part as a response to this idea that people were being poisoned and didn't know why. So the AMA, like, they were keeping track of sulfanilamide, but they had not heard of this se Massing Gill stuff, and they started getting reports of people taking it and dying from it, and they wanted to get to the bottom of that, toot. Sweet. Yeah. So they called them up and they said, hey, do you mind just send over that ingredient list our way? And Mass and Gill did. And here's the thing. They didn't really realize at the time what the deal was. They had to do all these they weren't like, wait a minute. It got diethylene glycol in it. There you go. That's what's killing people, because it had only been around, I think, less than a decade or so, and obviously they didn't know where they wouldn't have used that. I don't think they willfully tried to kill people. No, certainly not. But the AMA, they had to do tests, and they started sort of ruling things out, and they eventually found out that 70, whatever, 2% of this stuff is a deadly poison. And we need to start getting the message out to newspapers and radios and telling people this. But that's tough to do in those years. It is, because, as we'll see, the FDA sent a bunch of agents out, and they were trying to get in touch with the traveling salesman for Massing Gill who were like, they didn't have cell phones. They would maybe leave a forwarding address at a hotel that you'd have to go shake down the road. Yeah, you go chase that down, and you'd find that they were already two cities beyond that last forwarding address. And you're doing this in the context of this race against the clock, that there's 240 gallons of the stuff out there, and people are being prescribed it, and you're trying to find this traveling salesman who can point you in the direction of where these things were shipped to yeah. They also got in touch with mass and Gill, and they went, yes, we know it's killing people, and we're trying to get it back too. We sent out these memos on the wire and these telegrams saying that we'd like this stuff back and it could be dangerous. And then the FDA said, no, man, send different telegrams saying you have to do this, it is killing people. Right, and they did. I mean, they complied. You get the impression that the messenger company was rather reluctant partner to the FDA, I would imagine. Yeah. But they did eventually do they took all the right steps that the FDA was kind of directing them. Too. And so the FDA sent out all those field agents, and the field agents would have trouble tracking down a salesperson. Sometimes when they got in touch with one of these salesmen, they would be worried about the company's image, so they would just not tell them who they sold these things too. And so they'd have to go through sales slips at pharmacies around the country, and when they would finally get in touch with doctors and pharmacists, they'd be worried about their legal liability, so they wouldn't be forthcoming with any of this information. Too. It must have just been really frustrating. Yeah. So you got doctors that aren't really cooperating. Some of them did, I think there was one story that you found where a doctor actually postponed his wedding just to help find one patient whose family had moved to the mountains with a sick kid and took a bottle of that stuff along that the doctor had given him. But some were more cooperative than others, I think the FDA, they didn't have the teeth at the time that they do now, and they could not force a recall of a drug. They were able to through sort of a loophole in that it was called elixir. On the label, it was labeled as such, but apparently, unless it contains alcohol, it's not an elixir, isn't that right? Yeah. It should have been called solution sulfanillamide. And the fact that they called it elixir meant that technically it was mislabelled. And the FDA did have the ability to seize drugs that were mislabelled under the yeah, but that was it. It was like getting Al Capone on tax evasion. They were able to get this antibiotic back on this technicality that it was misnamed, but that's what they proceeded under. And so they were able to eventually get 234 gallons in one pint of the 240 gallons that have been produced. Yeah. Very great effort. I think in the end, 105 men, women, and kids were killed. That's total, right? Yes. 71 adults and 34 kids. Okay. And they said if that loophole hadn't existed, that amount of liquid would have ended up killing about 4000 people. Yeah. And I mean, depending on how they were prescribed. How much they were prescribed, some of them died in two days. Some of them took three weeks to die, and they all died agonizing dust. But the idea that thousands more people could have died had the FDA not been able to do something about it he's got to wipe your forehead with that one. Yeah. Dr. Harold Watkins that we mentioned, the Massing Gill chief chemist, he took his own life very sadly. There was a lot of survival's guilt. A lot of physicians, as well as people that worked at Massing Gill, we're just wrecked with guilt afterward for a long time. One of the doctors from Mount Olive wrote to the president to FDR and said, please pass some more oversight measures over medicines, because six of my patients, including my best friend, are now dead because of what I gave them. Yeah, that doctor I have to give a shout out is quoted in a 1981 FDA consumer magazine article with the title taste of Raspberries, taste of Death. Colon. No joke. That's it. No colon. No colon. Comments, then. All right. It should have been colon. The Rise and Fall of the deadly Elixir colon. There was another death related to it, too. Chuck, remember how you said that the FDA just didn't have any teeth to enforce this? Well, they got the teeth. There have been legislation kicking around in Washington to update that 19 Six Act. And when this happened, the public outcry was so much that it helped this logic and get it passed. But it was under the championship of Senator Royal Copeland of New York, who sponsored that bill, and he dropped dead of exhaustion four days after it was passed. Whenever I see that, I think and what else? Yeah, like how many doctors cigarettes didn't smoke. I think there was a what else for sure, but I think there was some truth to it. No, I agreed, though I think that's wise. To die of exhaustion as a grain of salt. Agreed. How much salt to eat? You can die from salt. It has nothing to do with exhaustion. I got nothing else. Good one. Promise kept. Yes. Fulfilled the next day, even. And since we're done, everybody, that means short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2018-01-25-sysk-manson-family-murders-part-one-final.mp3 | The Manson Family Murders Part I | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-manson-family-murders-part-i | The '60s ended with a lot of turbulence, not the least of which was the Manson Family Murders. What made Charles Manson so alluring to his family? What makes one person kill for another? And what did The Beatles have to do with it all? Learn all this and | The '60s ended with a lot of turbulence, not the least of which was the Manson Family Murders. What made Charles Manson so alluring to his family? What makes one person kill for another? And what did The Beatles have to do with it all? Learn all this and | Thu, 25 Jan 2018 14:25:35 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=14, tm_min=25, tm_sec=35, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=25, tm_isdst=0) | 44413262 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bright. And there's Jerry over there. And we make up the stuff you should know Family. Family. The peace loving, acid loving, murdering nice family. Did I say acid loving in there? You did. Oh, it's weird. Peace loving, non murdering family. Yes. And you know what? Hopefully there are no kids listening to this one anyway, so we can let everyone else know that we take LST before every episode. Sure. I mean, the slogan of our show is WOWY. Zowie. Yeah. So, COA. For those of you who did not see the title, if you're listening to your kids about the Manson Family murders without a COA, then you need a parenting COA. Yeah, for real. But there are lots of grisly details in this, so obviously you may want to skip this one on a family. Yeah, it might kind of bring it down a couple of degrees. It might be a drag, you know, probably. So speaking of drags, Chuck, I'll tell you who is a drag. Charles Manson. He was so, like, there's this reputed legend that Charles Manson tried out for the Monkeys. It was rejected, and that was ultimately why he ordered these grisly murders. That will definitely get into, but it turns out that's absolutely false. Yeah, I've heard that, and it always sounded to me like an urban legend. The thing is, it's got, like, all sorts of interesting facets to it, though, right? It's demonstrably false. He was in prison at the time the Monkeys tryouts were held. But it kind of coincides with this larger part of Charles Manson's life that not everybody is fully aware of, which is that he wanted to be a star. He wanted to be a musical recording star, and he made some inroads into that career. And I have read theories that it is possible that these murders were ordered as a means of venting Manson's frustration that his music career wasn't going as well as he thought it should and sending a message to some people in the music industry that he made contacts with to basically say. Hey. I can't kill you because I need you. But I can kill other people to get you going and get my music career off the ground. What's the hold up? Which is just like the Manson Family murders on their faces, they're largely understood is nuts. But if that's the real thing behind all of this, that's just the depth of depravity, of human depravity that people are capable of. I bet that's not, like, the sole reason. But if you really strip reasons down, like, what are motivations for things like, is it really to bring on Helter Skelter? Is it because he was a frustrated musician? Like, you can say the same thing about Hitler. Was there a kernel of Hitler's rejection from the art world and from people at large that drove him to order the horrible things that he ordered the Nazis to do. It makes you wonder, like, what is the motivation behind world changing events when you break them down to a personal level? Yeah. I mean, well, Manson, to be fair, had mental illness in a lifetime of rejection, so this could all factor in for sure. Yeah. But you asked for this article to be written, didn't you? Was this your jam? Yeah, the grabster. We can sort of petition him to write articles at times, and this is definitely one of them. Yeah. So did you know a lot about the Manson Family murders and the family themselves and all that stuff already? Yeah. This is probably still part of the cultural zeitgeist when you were becoming aware of the world as a kid. Yeah, I definitely remember the book Helter Skelter being a huge thing. And I remember a time before media was so robust, when the idea of Charles Manson was just so terrifying to me. I do too. And then I got older and saw interviews, and I was like, oh, he's just a little, tiny redneck. Yeah, like, it all vanished. I was like, oh, my God, he's just a little redneck. Yeah. I think that's what there were two things that kids of the 80s went through as far as Awakenings were concerned that the Soviet people were not to murder all of us and that Charles Manson was not actually scary. He was just a dumb redneck behind bars. Yes. What he did was horrific, to be sure. So I'm not, like, minimizing that. But as far as the person, he was this larger than life, scary as crap dude to me, until interview started coming out and sit down with, like, Diane Sawyer, like, this guy's a joke. But for a little while there, he was legitimately America's worst nightmare. Because at the time, like, a lot of people say when the Manson family committed these murders and it came out a couple of months later that some depraved acid head hippies had actually committed these gruesome crimes that had captured the nation's attention, it suddenly gave the establishment who had been looking for anything to lay on the hippies to say, See? We told you you can't be trusted. Your whole peace, love free stuff like that doesn't work. You can't do that because this is the outcome of it. Manson was that personified. And for that reason, a lot of people say these murders ended the summer of love in the era of hippies and ushered in the 70s. Yeah, for sure. I mean, timing wise, it just seems very natural. And Ed even points out, even during the trial, that narrative was being laid down. It wasn't like years later, people looked back and said this, and he also I thought it was really interesting. I never really put it into context like Ed did, but the very first moon landing that is happen two weeks before the Manson Family murders and then a week after the murders was Woodstock. So that was a nutty month. It really was America. And again, these murders, when they took place, no one had any idea who the Manson Family was except for a handful of people out in La. And some cops that had run ins with them, but they were not famous. And no one realized that the Manson family had been responsible for these murders. They were just these gruesome, unsolved murders in between the moon landing and Woodstock. So a lot of people let's start at what a lot of people consider the beginning, which is the night of August 9 in a house at 10 00:50, which is in Beverly Hills. Up in the hills, right? Yeah. I looked up, like, three different places how to pronounce that. And they all said yellow, except for Diane Sawyer said cello. And I'm like, man, is Diane Sawyer wrong? No. About anything. No, whatever she says is absolutely right. She could make turtlenecks. Right. I used to love turtlenecks. Sure. They had a real heyday, for sure. You don't see them anymore. I used to wear them on Dumpy dumb, but it was kind of a gag. I think I could still pull one off, maybe. Especially with the beard. Yeah, the beard would definitely help because you could turn a certain way and be like, regular shirt turtleneck. Regular shirt turtleneck. Just by moving your head and your beard out of the way. Yes. And, of course, in the would rock the Mock Turtleneck regularly. Did you? I never really did. Did you wear them with z cavalry cheese? No. You didn't dress like AC. Slater? No, it was sort of believe it or not, there was like a post preppy thing where the Mock Turtleneck was acceptable and not cheesy. Really, in a preppy sense. I got you because I was sort of a prep before I became a human monster. I could see that. Did you wear the lacrosse alligator and stuff? No, we couldn't afford that stuff, so I wore the knock offs. I got you. Or if I had the lacoste, the alligator was, like, accidentally sewn onto the collars. We've had this conversation. Yes. All that good stuff. Factory second. Yeah, that's me remnant. It's nice. So on this night on August 9, are we going with SEL or Diane Sawyer's cello? No. I don't know. Let's just say the house that Satan built. Right. It's not there anymore, by the way. No, they tore it down. But not before Trent Risner went in and recorded a Nine Inch Nails album there. Because why not? Why not? So at this house at 10 00:50 it's not there any longer. There's a knock at the door on the night of August 9 around midnight. So I don't know if that makes August 9 or 10th. I couldn't get a definitive answer, but the door was answered by a guy named Voitek Frykowski, who was known as a Polish playboy. He was friends of the director Roman Polanski. And he was there because inside that house was Roman Polanski's wife, Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant with, I believe, their first child. I don't think they had any other children. Sharon Tate was pretty young at the time, but also inside was Abigail Folder, who is the heiress to the Folder coffee fortune. And I think one other guy, Jay Sebring, who is a stylist, who is known as the guy who introduced hair styling to men. So he was pretty well off and pretty well known as far as La. Went. And they're just kind of this hip industry party crowd inside this residence. And there was a knock at the door, and this guy was there on the other side of the door, and he had a mustache, and he was tall, kind of a natural athlete, tight from Texas. And he said, I'm the devil, and I'm here to do the devil's business. And that was Tex Watson, and he entered the house, and this massacre of everybody inside began. Yeah. So what had happened previous to that knock was Tex Watson climbed up a telephone pole, cut the phone line, and then climbed the fence with a couple of other people, one Susan Atkins and one Patricia Karen Winkle, all Manson family members. And we'll get into the whole family thing in a minute. And so they climbed over the fence, went in. There was a kid, a teenager named Steve Parent, who was leaving in his car already, and he did not make it out. He was shot five times. He was slashed and shot five times by Tex Watson before he could get down the driveway. So one murder had already been committed on that property by the time they even got to the house. Yeah. And if any of these people, which you can definitely make the case all of them were in the wrong place at the wrong time, stephen Parent was just doubly. So he was visiting the caretaker of the house. So he had nothing to do with the Hollywood Jetset people inside or the Manson Family. He was just friends with somebody who was like, a worker at the house. And he was leaving at the time, too. Yeah. He would have been friends with what was the guy's name? From the OJ. Oh, man. He would have been friends with Kato Kalin. Yeah. That would have been a bad thing to be, I think. Talk about a mock turtleneck. Yeah, I think he has one permanently tattooed on his neck, I think Saturday there was also a third of Manson family member Linda Kasabian, who was not in the house, but she waited, essentially was the getaway driver. Right. And she just came into the family, like, a month before. And apparently the reason she was out with them was because she was the only one with a valid driver's license out of that group. So Linda Cassavan is sitting outside. Tex Watson, Patricia Kinwickel, and Susan Atkins all enter the house, and they just start killing everybody. Apparently, Texas is the only one with a gun, but all three of them had knives. Patricia Cran Winkle found Abigail Folder reading in bed and started to kill her. I believe Sharon Tate and JC. Bring were in the living room together, and they were both killed there in the living room. Voitekfriedkowski made it out of the house, but he was killed in the front lawn. Abigail Folder, I think, made it out the back, and she died on the back lawn. And one of the things about this is, like, the reason the word massacre is, like, such an app description. I don't know how old text was. He was a little bit older. But these are basically, like, 17, 1819 year old girls who had never done anything like this before and were really not very good at it while they were doing it the first time. And it was just bad for everybody, apparently. It was very brutal. There's a lot of fear and terror and a lot of pain and torment among everybody who is being killed in this house. It wasn't easy, clean. You wouldn't characterize it as, like, a hit. It was a massacre. Yeah. Abigail Fouler herself, was stabbed 28 times, and then Seabring and Frankowski, in addition to being stabbed, were also shot. And obviously, Sharon Tate's unborn child was killed in this process as well. And supposedly and this is a direct quote, apparently, I guess, from the trial, the directive from Charles Manson, and if you don't know this, I guess we should go ahead and say Charles Manson, even though later on, other people said that Tex Watson was more acting on his own and misunderstood Manson's directive. But Charles Manson ordered these killings, which we'll get into, but he told Watson, supposedly totally destroy everyone in that house as gruesome as you can. So in addition to the mutilation of the bodies, like post mortem stab wounds, there was stuff written on the walls in their blood, like pig. And well, I think pig was the only thing written on the wall at this one, right on the front door, which is obviously was a reference to cops at the time. Right. And they wrote it in Sharon Tate's blood. Right. So pig is on the door and blood. The perpetrators got away. The Bansha family got away. They made it back to, I think, the Spawn Ranch, which is one of the places they were staying. So then two nights later, manson orders the family to go do it again. He actually said that, according to Texas and the rest of them, he actually said that they'd done it wrong. They had created panic and fear in these people, and they needed to do it right this time. But to go out and butcher another family. And he took them to a house. And it was a house next door to this house that the Manson family used to party at. It was a friend of one of Manson's record producer friend. And next door was just this normal, unassuming couple who had, from what I understand, no interaction with the Mansons at any point in time. This couple named Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, and they were just about as upper middle class America establishment as you could get. Yeah, he was actually lived less than 2 miles from his house, was in the Los Fellow neighborhood. And just the night before, they had a party at this dude's house. And the reason he didn't want to go back to that house is because he thought maybe it could be tied back to him in some way because he was there the night before. So they just randomly picked the neighbor. And there was six of the followers there, the original four from the Tate house, plus Leslie Van Houtenn and Clem Grogan, I think it was his name. And, yeah, it was talked about wrong place, wrong time. They were just in there enjoying their evening. And Manson did break. He was actually, like you said, there for this one, whereas he wasn't even there for the Tate one. And he took part in the tying up, but then he left, which very cowardly left. And the whole thing just reeks of cowardice, like, Go do my dirty work for me. Exact kind of in most of these cases, right. So they tie up the lobby anchors. They murdered them brutally. Again, they carved war in Mr. LaBianca's stomach with a knife, the knife sticking out of his neck. They left a fork sticking out of his stomach. It was just another really gruesome scene. And then again in blood. They wrote things around the house like they wrote Political no. They wrote Pigs again. Yeah. They wrote Death to Pigs. They misspelled it. They wrote Helter Skelter, which we'll get into. That was a Beatle song, which factors in pretty heavily. And then they wrote Rise. And the whole notion here and we'll cover this in detail more later, too, was that Manson was trying to or at least he says he was trying to ignite a race war and have it appear that black people and maybe even Black Panthers had killed these white people, which would and then turn, spark a race war. They would all kill each other. And the reason I'm laughing is because it's just so ridiculously implausible. And then the Manson family would be the only people left, and they could rule the world. Yeah, that was supposedly the whole thing behind Helter Skelter. So the cops in La. The sheriff's department and the La. Cops have two different murder scenes that are obviously related, but early on, they didn't connect them yet. It took a minute, but once they did these two murders, came to be known as the Tate Labianka murders before anyone knew who the Manson family was. And it was a big deal. But you have to go back even further to understand what's going on and to understand the eventual prosecution of the Manson Family to another murder. And we will dive into that one after this. Okay, Chuck? So everybody knows about the Tate Labianka murders, so much so that they're frequently called the Manson Family murders. But it turns out that the Manson family was already involved in another previous murder a couple of weeks before the Tate and LaBianca murders happened, I think in late July of 1969. Right? Yeah. I mean, there was one other murder and an attempted murder, and then not quite attempted murder also. Right. So the one you're talking about, I think, is probably Gary Hinman, who well, why don't you go and explain how he fit into this whole thing? Okay. So Gary Hinman was a music teacher who was a friend of the Manson family. I don't think he ever was considered, like, a Manson family member, but he was a buddy of them, and he either had a trust fund coming or there was a rumor that he had access to a trust fund of, like, $20,000. And so the Manson family went over to rob him. I think Bobby Bosolais was the leader of that. They went over to Robin or he had supplied the Manson Family with a bunch of mescaline that they in turn sold to a motorcycle gang that was not happy when it turned out the mescaline was bad, who wanted their money back. So the Manson family had gone to go get their money back from this guy, and apparently he had said that, I don't have any money, but here, I'll sign over the title of my cars to you. Here are the keys. And at this point, they had them tied up, and I'm not entirely certain why, but Charles Manson and this is widely agreed upon, I think even by Manson himself that Manson came over to the house to basically assist in getting this guy to cough up his money. Maybe that's what it was. And he took a sword and chopped off part of the guy's ear. Yeah. And depending on who you believe, some say Manson actually ended up killing him. Other people say that Bobby Bosolio ended up stabbing him to death. Manson was on the scene for this one, though, which was different than the other murders. And I guess it just depends on who you believe. Bussell was eventually arrested while driving that car of him. So him instead Bussell is in jail, and you have to actually go back even further to find the first, at least attempted murder by the Manson Family earlier in July, on July 1. This is just a bad jam if you really start thinking about it. Like, all these dates are so compressed, and you think about the Mansa family just being in this crazy, murderous kilspray, and it really only went for like, a month, basically four or five weeks. But they did a lot of damage in that time. But the whole thing started, and you can make the case, and a lot of people do that the whole thing. Everything else that followed actually started on July 1, when Charles Manson went to the apartment of a syndicate drug dealer, like a big time drug dealer named Bernard lots of Papa Crow, right? Yes. And Manson thought that he might have been a Black Panther. I don't think that was ever confirmed. I read a lot of articles kind of going back and forth. But regardless, Manson thought he was a Black Panther. There was a double crossing deal that went on, and they went over, and Manson actually shot Crow and thought he had killed him, but he did not die, and he did not go to the cops, because what do you do? Go to the cops and say, hey, I double crossed these weirdo rednecks hippies? No, they double crossed him. They double crossed him. Oh, see, I read that. He doublecrossed them. No. Tex Watson well, either way, he would not go to the cops, right. In his condition. And so that's why it was never reported. But he was interviewed. The transcript is pretty interesting to listen to. Yeah. And he wouldn't go to the cups because he would just handle it himself, and that's basically what he vowed to do. So there's this guy who Manson shot in the gut and left for dead, who now wants to kill Manson in the whole family and that Manson's convinced is a Black Panther, which suddenly makes sense as to why you would have found something like political piggies and a pawprint in blood at Gary Hinn's murder scene. Right? Yeah. Because this is about the time that this whole Helter Skelter thing is happening. Starting out. And the whole idea that there is a race war coming and that the Manson family might be able to nudge it along by framing the black community or Black Panthers for these murders of white people is the basis of this idea of what was behind the Mansion Family murders as far as the prosecution is concerned. Yeah. So I mentioned an almost attempted murder. Jumping back forward again. The idea of the night of the Lobby Anchor murders was to have two separate murders on the same night, and Manson ordered a few, I think three different followers, including Linda Cassavian, to murder this kind of little known Lebanese actor named Saladin Nadar. And Cassavion basically got there, didn't want to do this, and so intentionally knocked on the wrong door of the apartment, basically giving her an excuse to get out of there. So, weirdly. Saladin Nadir was a near victim of the Manson family, so that's talking about a close call. Yeah. For real. Yeah. And I looked him up. He basically was a famous actor by that time and then just didn't do much after that. So I wonder if that just broke his brain or something. I don't know. I think it would have done that to me. All right, so I think it's about time for another ad break. Let's do it. Alright, we'll be right back after this. Alright, Chuck, we're back. Should we talk about Charles Manson a little bit? Yeah, well, let's recap real quick. Okay. Manson has shot lots of Papa Crow in his stomach, lots of Pop Crow has vowed to kill the whole Manson family. Bobby Bosole killed Gary Hinman tried to frame the Black Panthers by writing political piggies and blood on the wall. Bobby Bosolay is arrested. The Manson family supposedly trying to make it look like somebody besides Bobby Bosley might have killed Gary Hinman. Kill the people at the Tate residence, kill the people at the Labyanca residence. Write things like Political Piggies and Rise and Pig in Blood on the walls there. And that's where we've left off. So far, the Manson family hasn't been caught yet. Let's talk about Charles Manson. All right, so Manson, it's sort of mixed up on what you want to believe because a lot of the information about his life came from him. And anyone who knows anything about Charles Manson knows that he had a tendency to overstate things and certainly lie about things. But what we do know is that he was born in 1934 to a teen mom and dad. And the dad basically would not assume any paternity or responsibility, sort of split. His name was Colonel. His actual name was Colonel. And he convinced people that he was an Army Colonel, even though he was not. So he was just never on the scene at all. And he ended up taking the name Manson from his stepfather, who his mom married. She was an alcoholic, may have been a prostitute. She was in and out of jail for most of her life or most of his young life. And it was just a truly bad scene for a young Charles Manson. Right. So he actually went and lived with relatives while she was in jail for a five year stretch. She got out, they reunited. He apparently said that reuniting with her was one of the few truly joyful moments in his life. But in very short order, she basically was like, I can't take care of you. I don't really want this responsibility, and handed them over to the state, which began just basically a string of institutionalization that would keep going for basically his whole life. Yeah, I mean, by the time he was eventually sent to federal prison, I think he was 32 years old when he was released in 67. And they calculated that he had spent half of his life in and out of institutions, whether it be orphanages or juvy or real deal prison, in jail. Right. And that was just the first part of his life. So he was out for two years before they got him again after these murders. By the time he died in prison at age 83 this past November 2017, he had spent, from my calculations, only 13 years of his life as a free man, 13 out of 83 years outside of institutions. So he had a lot of the deck stacked against them. But you can also go back to, I think, March 1967, when he was released on parole from federal prison, where he was given a choice, like, hey, man, here you go, you're out. You can decide what to do with your life. Do you want to go straight? Do you want to go have a nice family? Do you want to just be a productive member of society, or are you going to go the exact opposite direction? And as we know, in hindsight, charlie Manson chose the exact opposite direction. Yeah, I don't know if he was ever officially diagnosed, but I did see that doctors over the years and mental health professionals say that he was probably schizophrenic, suffered from schizophrenia, and had a paranoid delusional disorder at the very least. I hadn't heard the schizophrenia thing. Paranoid delusional disorder. I totally buy. Yeah, he was a troubled dude. Of course, not excusing anything, but it was clearly a case of mental illness combined with rejection and institutionalization really led to the man that he would eventually become. Right, so he gets out of prison, right. And he is basically released into San Francisco, 1967. So it's like hippie dumb, the kingdom of hippie dumb, where he shows up and at the time, everybody's looking for something new, something different, something that's an alternative to establishment of the mainstream or anything different. And so Charles Manson says, like, oh, I can totally exploit a lot of these people. And he starts out by meeting a girl, a librarian named Mary Brunner. And he moves into her apartment, and she apparently was very fascinated with him because she had led a fairly straight laced life. She went to college again, she was a librarian. And all of a sudden, there's this wildlife ex con who is preaching this kind of gospel of love and no materials. And apparently before November 1968, which will explain what happened then, before that time, Charles Manson supposedly did pretty closely resemble an actual hippie. He felt like he could take anything of yours that he wanted, but you could also take anything of his. And he apparently walked the walk when it came to stuff like that. And there are plenty of stories of him just giving up whatever material possessions, saying they didn't matter before things really took a dark turn. So if you really kind of dive in, it becomes clear how he could have amassed some of these early followers. And the first one was Mary Brunner. Yeah, I get the feeling that this probably. Would not have happened in any other era other than this generation when we talked about it in our brainwashing, in our cults episodes, where this time it's just a weird time in America. And people were really I don't know about prone, but at least ripe for the picking when it comes to falling into situations like this and believing these what looked like crackpots'to us now. But at the time, everyone was very anti establishment. People were taking tons of drugs and rejecting mainstream society and embracing the counterculture, and they were just really open to all kinds of weird stuff, right? So again, he just kind of figured out that he could work this to his own means. So there's a couple of things that there's two basic things that you needed to know about Charles Manson from everything I've seen. One was that his main goal was to become a recording artist, a very successful star of a recording artist. And two, that he had a good ability to manipulate people into giving him what he wanted. And mostly that amounted to sex and drugs, and he used that ability to get other people to do what he wanted. So, for example, when he started doing mass, like a substantial amount of girls in the Manson family, it was just a free love commune the whole time. So the guys who came in all of a sudden had access to these women, and in return for Charlie granting them access to them, they would basically do his bidding or offer him physical protection because he wasn't a big guy. He's kind of a shrimpy dude. But everything if you look at it from an outsider's perspective, every relationship he had was one of extraction. He was taking something from everyone around him. It wasn't just a normal friendship or a normal relationship. It was, what can you do for me and what can I use from you to get something out of other people? Yeah. And if you've never seen an interview with them, I encourage you to check some of them out. He does have a very stream of consciousness, circular sort of talks non stop and doesn't make a lot of sense. But one thing that's often said about him is that he can be mesmerizing with the way he does that. And I imagine in the late 60s, if you got a headphone of acid and there's this guy that has the ability to almost rebreath like a trumpet player and talk for minutes and minutes and hours on end, they would fall under this weird spell. Right? So I definitely don't get it because now when I watch them again, tiny, weird redneck. But when you see him doing his thing, even if, like Diane Sawyer who doesn't fall for it, by the way, she clearly is just like, very it's a great interview. She's pro, and she stays very on point, basically. Kind of like, you're not going to get me to fall for your charms. Right. But it's pretty interesting. So he's got Mary Bruner as his first girlfriend. Then he said, hey, what do you think about a triad? Or rather, what do you think about a triad? That's how it sounded, yeah. And Mary Brunner, from what I understand, wasn't super into it but she was under his spell. So she said, sure. So Squeaky From lynette Squeaky From came into the picture and they lived as a threesome that travels together up and down the coast out there. And he just sort of started accumulating mostly women along the way to this sort of traveling party is probably how he framed it. And people were hip to it. There were men, though, besides Tex Watson and Bobby Bushlio this guy named Danny de Carlo who were kind of early men who joined up. And by all accounts, most of those men who joined up were there because Manson was said, you can have these women. You got plenty of drugs. And so before you know it, the Manson Family was born. Yes. And they were just kind of this weirdo hippie group that used to commit burglaries. Manson has long been said that he beat a lot of the women in the group and would prostitute them for cash to pay for things for the Family, like rent. They ate a lot of their food from going through dumpsters behind grocery stores and stuff like that. And they just basically hung out and did drugs and had sex all day. That was basically their aim and their goal. And then at night, they would have bonfires out in the desert and they'd all take a bunch of acid and listen to Charles Manson do his mesmerizing thing. And again, at first it was weird. There's a lot of ideas that Manson was this reincarnation of Jesus Christ or that he was not even the reincarnated Jesus Christ. He was the same Jesus Christ who'd been alive for almost 2000 years. And just like all the stuff you would find in the desert among hippies in the late 60s on acid at night around a bonfire. Right. But by the time they're out in the desert Manson had this really amazing chance encounter that you just would never have. And the fact that it did happen is just totally mindblowing. But become a recording artist. To help ensure the success of becoming a recording artist he moved the Family from San Francisco down to Los Angeles to be closer to the center of the recording industry. And it just so happened that one night in 68 a couple of mansa Family girls were hitchhiking on Sunset Boulevard and were picked up by none other than Dennis Wilson one of the co founders of the Beach Boys. That's right. It was 69. The same deal. All those years just ran together back then. Dennis Wilson, he was a party dude and liked his ladies because it sounds very weird to say that he picked up a couple of hitchhikers and basically brought them home. But it was a different time. And like I said, he was a party dude. So they ended up being eligible Bailey and the aforementioned Patricia Crywinkle. So they move in, basically, and he goes to the studio, comes home, and the Manson family had moved in, which, again, it sounds really strange, but at the time, Ed said he was frightened. I get the feeling he was more like, what trip are you on? Not like, oh, my God, I need to call the cops. Yeah, because they lived there for a while. He let them live there. Yeah. I think it was partially out of fear. I read an interview with Charles Manson. He was talking about Dennis Wilson, and he was like, you know, I'd say, whatever. He just lay his weirdo trip on Dennis Wilson. And Dennis response would be like, yeah, man, it's cool. Look, I got to go. I really got to go do this thing. Just always trying to get away from Charles Manson. So maybe he was afraid that they were going to kill him. Maybe he liked having access to all his free love from all the Mansion family women. Or maybe he just felt like he couldn't get out of it. But he did let them live there for a few months. It wasn't like they crashed there for a weekend. They moved in. They wrecked his Ferrari. They met a bunch of his friends. It was a big deal that Dennis Wilson came into Charles Manson's life because it really bolstered this idea that, yes, he is going to become a recording artist, because not only did he hang out with Dennis Wilson, he hung out with a guy named Terry Meltzer, who was a record producer, hung out with another guy named Phil Kaufman, who was a record producer. And he met all these people in the industry who were in a position to get Charles Manson's career off of the ground. And when you're dealing with this crazy little ticking time bomb like Charles Manson, who wants you to do something like get his musical career off the ground, but you don't think his music is good enough to actually launch, you got a problem on your hands. And Dennis Wilson and his buddies all knew this. Yes. And two quick things. Here one big shout out to Dennis Wilson's only solo album, pacific Ocean Blue. Is it good? I think it's great. I got to check that out. I love The Beach Boys. Dennis Wilson was clearly not the brains or voice behind The Beach Boys as the drummer. And he was always sort of, I think, kind of picked on a little bit for not being the most talented dude, and he was just in the band because he was handsome and related. But I think Pacific Ocean Blue is like one of the great lost classics. I'll check it out. It's very good. He was supposedly also the only true surfer in the band. Yeah, exactly. And the other thing was that Terry Melter, the producer that you mentioned, the reason he factors in so heavily is because he actually lived at the Tate house in Beverly Hills before Tate and then moved in. So that was sort of the connection there, I guess. Manson was going to kill him, right? No. So here is what a lot of people think. They think that, again, he was sending a message to Terry Meltzer saying, I can't kill you, but I can get close to you. And I know you're going to hear about this because this happened at the house you were living in a month or so before. I'm just going to go in and have my people indiscriminately slaughter whoever's there. But this is you. This is what's going on. He supposedly was well aware that Terry Meltzer didn't live there any longer because he'd spoken to the guy who actually owned the house and was asking him where Terry Melter went. And all the guy would tell him was Malibu. So he knew it wasn't Melter in that house in Melture. All right. So they eventually leave Dennis Wilson's house. Dennis Wilson's like, you guys are great, and all the ladies are nice. The acid is decent, but it's time for you to go. So they leave in 1968 still, and they go to Spawn Ranch, which you mentioned earlier, spahn. And this was kind of weird that they ended up living here, but it was out in kind of the outskirts of La. There are lots of ranches like the Disney Ranch or the Universal Ranch, where they shoot a lot of stuff, and they have old sets that are still there, whether it's Mash or Planet of the Apes or just an Old West set. And Spawn Ranch was one of these that had closed down, and it was an Old West set. And they actually it's a state park now, but they did have permission to live there. They didn't just squat there. They sort of had a little agreement to do a little maintenance work, and they were allowed to stay. So some of them are there. Some of them are in places like at a camp in Death Valley and then just scattered all over La. As far as Manson family members and just random houses and apartments. Right. But the main place that Manson and the inner circle was at Spawn Ranch. And they would go on what they called creepy crawls, which were these little crime sprees. Like you said. They would go out in burglar cars or rob people and just to kind of keep the money and the drugs flowing. Right. Spawn Ranch was almost like a little more legit. They were in much closer contact with other people out in Death Valley at the Barker Ranch, that was far more secluded, way out in the desert. Way more disconnected from society. And that was the place where they expected to wait out Helter Skelter while everybody else in the country killed one another. That's right. So you've got this whole weirdo family. They're criminals, they're engaged in prostitution, there's violence, there's physical violence, but ultimately they kind of resemble hippies here. They're super counterculture. But things turned dark and they turned dark after this seminal thing that happened to the rest of the world but really spoke to Charles Manson in particular. And that was the November 2268 release of the Beatles White Album. Alright, you know what, this is going to be a two parter, it's pretty clear. So let's go ahead and end this one on a cliffhanger featuring the Beatles, right? Does that sound good? Yeah, it does. Pick back up part two with a White album. Let's do it. All right, well, in the meantime, while you guys are chewing over what Chuck just said, you can tweet to us at syscast or on facebook. Comstepyteknow. You can send us an email, know the stuffpodcast@houseupworks.com, and as always, join us at our home on the web STUFFYou know.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com." | |
What is exploding head syndrome? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-is-exploding-head-syndrome | Exploding head syndrome isn't nearly as weird as it sounds, and there are no brain parts being damaged. But if you suffer from it, you will definitely be freaked out. The good news is, despite its name, it's not dangerous at all. | Exploding head syndrome isn't nearly as weird as it sounds, and there are no brain parts being damaged. But if you suffer from it, you will definitely be freaked out. The good news is, despite its name, it's not dangerous at all. | Thu, 28 Jul 2016 15:49:30 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=15, tm_min=49, tm_sec=30, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=210, tm_isdst=0) | 33098689 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry. Jerome Rowland over there. And this is stuff you should know. For a second there, I thought you said Jerry the drone. Roland And I was like, what a weird nickname. Yeah, jerry talks like this. Oh, as in droning. I was thinking she was like a remote control plane with a camera attached. No, that's not what I meant. Or that she was bombing women and children. No, not that either. I didn't even say that. I said Jerry Jerome. Yeah, I get it. Okay. You're feeling all right today? Yes. You? How was your sleep? You know, dude, I have all but stopped drinking lately. Oh, yeah. Lately. Okay. And so I'm sleeping like a champ. Yeah. And waking up like a champ, too, I imagine. Right. Makes a big difference. Huge. Especially at our age. Yeah. I've only had the alcohol once in the past two weeks. Wow. And I'm sleeping so good. I'm not quitting drinking. Let's be honest. It doesn't sound like you need to. No, but it just one day became two, became three. And I was sleeping like a champ. And this was after a couple of nights of bad sleep due to too much booze. Yeah. So I'm like, man, that's kind of nice. Yeah. You're like, oh, yeah, life is enjoyable. I forgot. Yeah. Anyway, I think it's super healthy you and I have talked about this before. I think it's super healthy to do at least a month out of the year straight through where you're just like, I'm not having a drop. Yeah. This is good for you. Yeah, I had a couple of years ago, I went exactly one month without a single drink, and I still ate like crap, did not exercise, and I dropped, like, \u00a313. Oh, yeah. Just from not consuming alcohol. From beer. No, I don't drink much beer. That's right. But, I mean, gin and tonic is a ton of calories. Yeah. I drink diet tonic when I have a genetic you get used to it. And there's good diet tonic out there. Like, you just have to treat yourself. I guess so. I've never diatonic. Really? Tastes gross. Like the swill that they have in, like, the little leader bottles. That's diet. That's what's good. Like the handmade brand fever tree. Yeah. Like the crafted stuff. Okay. Like artisan tonic. Yeah. Tonic for rich people. Yeah. Tonic made by a guy whose mustache is wax. We'll have to try that then. I think he should. And, yeah, it is expensive, but don't drink eight gin and tonics. Or gins and tonic. What would William Sapphire say? Gins and tonics, probably. I told Emily the other day, I was like, I wish you could drink into your mouth and taste it and have a nice little effect afterward and have it just leak out a tube in the side of your body. I think that's called like a stoma. So you don't get the calories or the lingering effect. Yeah, and she said it's probably good that you're not drinking. You're like, no, really, let's flush this out. There's got to be a way to do it. Anyway, long way of saying I'm sleeping. Great. I'm glad. Have you ever been falling asleep? And right as you were about to enter the land of slumber sure got you saw out, putting it to a log. You haven't started sawing yet, but you're about to, and then all of a sudden, boom. And you sit bolt up, right? And you're like, what was that? I don't think so. I can tell you for a fact that's never happened to me. Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty sure it's never happened to me, but unless I'm misremembering, I just don't see how you could forget something like this. It seems pretty significant. You know what? I agree. So we're talking about exploding head syndrome, which, before we started recording, you were angry. You weren't angry. I'm always angry. So not true. No, it is. I need help. You're picking at the name of the syndrome because it's very overblown. Yeah, to say the least. Exploding head syndrome. What did you say? It should have been called crazy Sleepy sound. Sleepy head, loud noise thing or something. What syndrome? I'm trying to sleep. I got work in the morning syndrome. Stupid brain. I could do this for an hour. Well, maybe we should. Okay. Release it as a blooper reel. So exploding head syndrome is a nighttime hallucination. Also, you can classify it as a parasomnia. Did we do one specifically on sleep paralysis or just talk about it a lot? No, and, buddy, it deserves its own I can't believe we haven't done it yet. I know. We talked a lot about it in sleepwalking. Sleepwalking and cranial magnetic stimulation. Yeah. I think we did one on sleep period, too. Didn't we? Or did we? I think so. It's hard to recall. Yes, but for the most part, we have skirted around it and I think we should continue to because I think it definitely deserves its own episode. So we should continue to screw it around it? Yeah, by not doing it. No, I mean in this episode. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. I think it deserves its own freestanding, stand alone, vertically integrated episode. Got you called. What's the deal with sleep paralysis? You got it. So this is a night time hallucination or a parasomnia, like I said, of which sleep paralysis is as well, that's all I'm going to say. Don't give it away. And here's the deal. Like you described, you're either already asleep or I think a little more typically, falling asleep. And you hear a loud booming sound like a gun or an explosion. Symbols crashing. That's a good one. Something that catches your attention. What else? Falling down the steps a big person carrying a drum set falling down the steps. Right. One of those one man bands falling down some stairs. Totally. Which everybody wants to see. Even if you don't have, like, a mean bone in your body, you still kind of want to see something like that just to see how it sounds. Crazy. Yeah, it might play a little too you never know on the way down. Yakity sack. All right, so it's just a genuine disorder. And I did a little Facebook survey. Yeah, hats off to you, man. You're basically a citizen scientist now. Were the respondents all weird? No. Were they weird stuff? You should know. Followers. I know what you mean. The acronym weird, right? Well, I meant it both ways. Okay. They were neither. No, we have, like, a very wide demographic. It's great. Yeah, it is good. And basically I just said, has anyone ever been afflicted with exploding head syndrome? Then I explained it because a lot of people, as we'll find, responded with, oh, my God, that's a thing? Yes, I have it. That's really cool. That showed up in one of the articles that we researched. Yeah, and I got about 150 by the time I cut it off, respondents that said yes and wait a minute. You got 150 yes responses to whether or not 150 total responses, including, like, comments on responses. And I would guess probably 100 of those were affirmatives. That's amazing. And about 70% of those are women. Did you notice how much reach that post got? Can you figure out roughly what percentage of people who saw that responded? Well, we could, but I didn't not take the time. Okay. Still, it's an amazing response. Yeah. I mean, I got to you know, it really wasn't that hard, but I think it's neat. It shows a lot of initiative. It is neat. I got a lot of responses. Meredith said it used to happen a lot, but now not so much. It's even worse when the baby is sleeping. Interesting, because she's worried that the baby's falling out of the bed. Caitlin it happened only once? Yes. I have it frequently from Melissa. Man, this is so bizarre. Lauren said I tried to explain it to my family and they thought I was crazy. It's more of a distant exploding noise for me, though. It doesn't startle, so that may not be it. And a few of these that might be the mining operation off the edge of the county. Yes. It sounds like a gunshot. No pain or anything like that, but it is startling. Most people in here. Crack of a baseball bat hitting a ball from Christian. Yeah, you're right. They are mostly women, huh? Yeah. I mean, there's dudes in here, too. I'm just not reading those. Here's a guy. Adam? Well, not exactly. Jonathan? Yes, I live near a train. All right, guys. Jeffrey? Yes, I have it. Thought there was something seriously wrong with me. But then I heard the term on a radio story and I realized what was happening. It's a huge relief. So what all these people are saying, and this is astounding, right? It is. What you're reading directly reflects what we found in our research for this article right. That has been published here. There very scattershot in medical journals. And look for Chuck study, by the way, in The Lancet this fall. This is the pattern. This is the description or the experience of exploding head syndrome. Yeah. No pain. No, nothing more than inconvenience, really, other than I guess it could trigger a heart attack. Yeah. And that's one of the associated symptoms. So you're falling asleep, you're almost about to sleep. Suddenly there's a very loud, sharp noise in your head, but it's just in your head, but it wakes you, arouses you very suddenly and usually scares the bejesus out of you. So tachycardia or very fast or irregular heartbeat is one of the reported symptoms of exploding head syndrome. Yeah, it can go on a bunch of nights in a row. It can be very sporadic. It can happen once. Yeah, once. It never happened again. Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. And it's unusual that a few people said it happened to me when I was a kid, because it seems like it does not happen that often with children. No, but it can. At least one reported case of a ten year old, but apparently it mostly seems to onset in the person's. Fifty s. Yeah. And that women tend to be at a higher risk for it, as your findings suggest. Yeah, and I didn't, like, be a creep and try to determine how old these people were. Okay? I wasn't like, oh, this dude looks like he's 40 ish. This lady has got to be 60. Got. You just left that one alone. I thought you were going to say, like, you weren't going to be a creep by being like, you smell nice, like, every response. This guy, I can't tell because he just has an avatar of a Mortal Kombat character, which means he's, like, 40. Ouch. Should we take a break? Yeah. 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 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. Where does all this come from, sir? It comes from your head. Where was this first described, sir? Back in the I think there's a guy for standby for the most 1870s name you'll hear today. Silas Weir Mitchell. Yeah. And he was a physician who apparently was a magnet for exploding head syndrome. Oh, really? Well, he described several cases among his patients. Yeah. And he was, as far as anyone knows, the first in the medical literature to describe exploding head syndrome. He didn't call it that, though. He called them sensory discharges. But what he described as clearly what we now understand is exploding head syndrome. Yeah. He had one patient called Mr. Vee. That's who he called. It. Him. Right. The guy's real name was Mr v, spelled V-E-E but he abbreviated as Mr V. He said he experienced a, quote, sense of a pistol shot or a blow on the head, man. And he complained of a noise in my head, which is sometimes like the sound of a bell, which has been struck once, or else I hear a loud noise which is most like that of a guitar string, rudely struck, which breaks with a Twang. And I presume he did not live above a folk singing cafe. Oh, man. You know what you do when you live above one of those? You move. Yeah. So like you said, Silas went on to say, it's a snapping of the brain, then a little bit later and a little bit that's a lot of it. Neurologists from the UK named John ms. Pierce of Whole Royal Infirmary. Man, that is super British. And in The Lancet, one of the great medical journals. He is the one, I believe, that gave it its name. Correct. Yeah. We can really lay the misunderstanding at this guy's feet for giving it this awesome name. Yeah. He was like, I'm going to celebrate finishing this paper and naming it Exploding Head Syndrome by watching Miami Vice. That was still on it. I don't know. Did you watch that? Sometimes. It was a little old for me. Yeah, probably like I was like, man, that boat is so fast. Right? Man, that guy's blazer is so pastel. That was about the extent of Miami Vice for me. Yeah, that was kind of the extent of the show. Was it? No, it was good. I watched it. It was Michael Man, wasn't it? Like a Michael Mann movie every week. That's pretty awesome. Yeah, I think he got it going. And then state executive producer might be wrong. I don't know. Who knows? I think he did the movie version, too, like the remake. Years later, he did, which I did not. I mean, it's got him written all over it. I think that was his best one. Oh, yeah. Good movie. Although did he do to live and die in La. I don't know. I love that movie, though. Yeah, if he didn't, he should have. But that's a great movie. I think that might have been him. You're correct. No, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Chuck. I know that this is a tangent. I'm trying to avoid it, but I just can't let it stand. I think that Michael Mann accused whoever did to live and die in La. Of ripping them off somehow. What? Yeah. Is that correct? I'm pretty sure. Which means not necessarily. Well, I had a great theme song. I know that. Yeah. Wang Chung Baby. They were one of those bands from the 80s where you're like, oh, these guys were actually way more talented than their decade gave them credit for. It's not Michael Mann. Okay, so Michael Mann accused whoever did that of ripping them off for some reason. William Friedkin didn't. He directed The Exorcist. Yeah. Wow. He's all over the place. He's got some cahones after Billy Friedkin. Sure. How do we get on that? Miami Vice. Yeah. 1988. So let's go over some stats. There was a study in 2015 of talking about bad studies. 211 college students. Okay, so your study already trumps this one. Sort of, actually. Yeah. Not even sort of. I would say legitimately, the study you conducted is better than the one you're about to talk about. 18% of people experienced it, according to this survey, but most experts say that's probably high because these are college students. They don't get a lot of sleep. Right. And that can affect whether or not you have this disorder or think you have it. Yeah. People who are sleep deprived are more likely to have it, I think. Yeah. Psychiatric patients tend to have a little more 13 and more if you're talking about 10%, which is, I think, what generally people have settled on. Yeah. But just a little more like 3% more. 4% more than the average three healthy population. You know something I thought was very weird that I saw people with other sleep disorders have it less frequently. Oh, really? Yeah. About 10% of people with sleep disorders have exploding head syndrome, but, like, 10.8% of the general healthy population has it. So if you suffer from the one that we dare not speak its name, then you are less likely to have this. I guess so. But apparently it does happen in conjunction frequently. Interesting. Just not as frequently as people in the general population who have just exploding head syndrome. Got you. What else? There's some people describe a physical sensation as well, like an electrical shock of sorts. Yes. We should say I don't know if we said it really explicitly enough. Like, when you have this sound that wakes you up as you're about to fall asleep. And it is very clearly the sound of an explosion or symbols crashing or a gunshot. Again, there's no associated pain. Right. Most frequently, the only physical symptom is your heart pounding because you're scared to death. It would just be like if someone came in with symbols in your bedroom and smash them together, but you would wake up and say, you're a jerk. Right. But you wouldn't be in pain. Go back to bed, Stanley. But I think there's not even the attendant, like, pain in your ears. Right. I think it's strictly in your head. Yeah. There's almost no physical sensation except for the electrical thing. You're about to be electrical shock. Just that. And that's only in some people. And it's literally just a feeling of a current that starts at your torso or so. And torso or so. I didn't even mean that. And it travels up to the head. But again, not everyone experiences that. So I think the interesting part of this I mean, that's interesting, but is where this possibly comes from. And, like, the process of going to sleep. Yeah. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? And you could be using Stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses. Because Stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and Ups shipping services you need right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with Stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. All right, friendo. We definitely, I think, did a show on sleep, but as a recap. We did. You're right. It must not have been very memorable. When you go to sleep, it's not an instantaneous thing, as you likely know. You fall asleep and they call it that for a reason. It's a process. Yeah, that's true of your body kind of shutting down. I've never really thought about that before, but it's a pretty accurate description. Yeah. Otherwise they would call it lights out. Yeah. What were you going to say, finding yourself asleep? I don't know. That's probably not right either. Or just becoming sleep. Yeah. Or sleep instasleep. Are we doing good on this one? Not so much. All right. No, we are. We're fine. We're getting the facts out. We're just cloaking them with a lot of BS. Okay, that's fine. All right. So when you fall asleep, your body slowly shuts down and the brain is kind of closing down each little store. Yeah. Let's say your brain is a small town. Okay. It's closing each store. Your brain is Sam, the night watchman from today's special. Walking around, shutting lights out, right? Yes. Do you remember that show? No. It was probably way too young for you. It's called today's special kit show. And what was the idea that every day is special? There was, like, a mannequin that came alive and it was weird. Yeah. That sounds like a nightmare. It was set at night in, like, a department store, I think. Oh, okay. So I guess Today's Special might have been, like, what was on sale? Got you. I was kind of young. That reminds me of my favorite book as a child that I read, the Great Christmas Kidnapping Caper. Well, I never read that one. It was wonderful. It was about three, I think three mice in New York City that broke into Macy's department store and lived there. Nice. And had great adventures in the department store overnight. And Santa was kidnapped, and it's up to these mice to solve the crime. Oh, wow. And it was my first book. It wasn't a ten page picture book, right? It was a book book, the first one I really read. And I was like, wow, this is amazing. Were the mice up to the challenge? What do you think? I don't know. No. Santa died. I totally forgot about that book. What a great memory. Yeah. That's why I'm glowing right now. And you can enjoy it because you've been off the sauce for a little while. You've been getting good sleep. I'm lucid. So when you are making that transition into sleep from being awake, your brain is closing down the little shop stores one at a time. And when you have exploding EHS that is there's something that happens. There's a glitch in the matrix, essentially. Where somewhere along that path of your brain, walking around, shutting it down, it just sort of trips up. Yeah. So the part of your brain that is responsible for shutting things down bit by bit, region by region, it's called the brain stem reticular formation. Yes. Very ancient part of your brain. Right. And they think that something goes wrong, like you're saying when it's going through its duties and there's a glitch. But the glitch that happens is the alpha waves that are associated with the beginning of relaxing for sleep are good stuff, are suppressed, and suddenly there's a huge burst of neural activity in the region associated with hearing. Right. So your brain has a glitch. Your brain stem has a glitch while it's shutting your brain down for sleep, and you hallucinate a very loud sound that startles you awake. That's exploding head syndrome, right? Yeah. Hallucinatory. Total hallucination. It doesn't exist. The neurons in the region associated with hearing going haywire. Yes. It's crazy. It is. What's crazy to me, though, Chuck, is that it's a glitch in your system, but that it can happen in different people. It's not like one person is like a malfunctioning part of their brain stem. That process can malfunction in exactly the same way across people. It says something about the architecture of the brain. What it says, I don't know, but it surely says something that glitch can happen in different people in the same way. I just think that's fascinating. It totally is. And that theory that we talked about is well, first of all, they don't know for sure because it's so rare and it's such a non. I mean, it's invasive, but it's not threatening. You don't spend a lot of time studying stuff like this if it's not super threatening. No, but they used to think it's rare. They don't necessarily know if it's rare any longer. It's just it hasn't been studied. There's been basically four, five papers on it. So no one cares. Apparently not, because it's not life threatening at all. Yeah. It's not even harmful. It's a benign condition. It's just very surprising. And apparently people learn to live with it. At least one's on Facebook. Oh, no. They all said they're in living hell. So that theory is the one that is most agreed upon right now. But some of the others over the years include a shift of the middle ear components. Wrong. Or an ear dysfunction, maybe at the root. No, they've done EEG testing to rule out which did rule out temporal lobe seizures. Epilepsy. Yeah. But not the case. No. What's another one? There was one more it could be a side effect of drugs. Right? Yeah. Drug withdrawal. Yeah. Specifically benzodiazepines. Or it could have to do with calcium ion channels. Right. And calcium ion transportation, which I think we've talked about before, that calcium does a lot of stuff in our brains and throughout our bodies. I think that that's not necessarily discarded. It could be the mechanism that it happens that's on the table. Yeah. For me, I'm a fan of that one. I don't think that they're mutually exclusive. The reticular formation and calcium ions could go hand in hand. Yeah. You know what's funny to me? I was thinking about when I was prepping for this, whenever there's usually a medical podcast where there's different theories, you and I was like, well, this is the one. I got my money on this one. Right. And it's just armchair doctoring, of course. Sure. But I feel like I could heal somebody if I really try, just through my opinion. Yeah. So what do you do if you have this? Well, one of the funny things in The Atlantic article, which I sent, and in our own article, they said quite often simply being diagnosed and told by your doctor, yes, you have exploding head syndrome, and no, it will not hurt you at all. Can cease the exploding head syndrome. Yeah. People will go into Remission, which indicates to me that stress has something to do with it. Yeah, I could definitely see how if you worry about it, it could affect your sleep. And then once your sleep is affected, you're more prone to keep having it, the cycle. A lot of people who this happens to mistake it for a stroke or that they've developed epilepsy or something like that. And so they will seek out medical help for that. And hopefully the doctor has heard of exploding head syndrome and can recognize the symptoms. Yes. The very least, you can self diagnose and take that to your doctor because they love that. Yeah. Tell me you google it. Like when he starts to talk to people. Like, doctors love that. It is also not to be confused with PTSD, something we did. I thought it was a really good show, actually. I want to say when he or she starts to talk. Sure. Remember the PTSD? Yeah, that was a good one. That was a good one. And it's not to be confused with that. Even though similar things can happen with PTSD, it's usually some kind of a flashback. And with exploding head, it's not associated with anything like that. And it's just a straight up hallucination. There's no memory associated with it. Yeah, exactly. But what they will say is sleep hygiene. Work on it. Yeah. Brush your teeth while you sleep. I think hygiene is one of the most disgusting words in the English language. Interestingly. It is gross, even though that means it's like paradoxical to its meaning. Yeah. The word itself, it does sound the feel of it, the look of it. I totally agree. Gross word hygiene sounds, I think, because when I hear hygiene, I think you're usually hearing it because there's poor hygiene. Maybe people just say, like, oh, you got some good hygiene going on. Yeah. You smell wonderful. I always think of it in relation to eugenics, like that kind of thought pattern hygiene. So sleep hygiene is a weird gross way of saying best practices to fall asleep. Sure. And that means regular schedule stuff. Yeah, like draw the blinds, make it quiet. And this one not reading in bed. That one to me, it's like, no, if I read in bed, it's like I might as well have just taken a handful of volume. Well, reading a book book, sure. But a screen has been shown to keep you awake. Well, some recommendations are that you don't even read books in bed, that you train yourself to associate bed with just sleep. When you get into I read a book and I'm done, you're like, Well, I'm sleeping. Yeah. Not for all people, though. Like, if you have bad insomnia, they'll recommend you don't do. Anything but sleep in bed. Yeah, I mean, I get that, like they said, take the TV out of your room, all that stuff. Yeah, but no, I'd be like, you're a fool. I can just read a book instead. I will never have insomnia because as long as their books bound books are around, I'm good. What always kills me is when I see friends on Facebook, like 03:00. A.m. Total insomnia. Put your phone down. Yeah. You're being counterproductive because it's not just keeping your brain engaged in thinking. Apparently that blue spectrum light really does something to your brain, and it's not good. What else? No booze or coffee after five. Only booze before five. I was like, that's happy hour, I think they were saying. Yeah, they know booze after five. I mean, if you got a sleep, a parasomnia, you go to great lengths. You're going to skip happy hour, maybe to get some sleep. Do we have anything else in here? We do not. All right. I think that's so great that you conducted a study. Hats off to you. I think it's funny that you thought that was so great. I'm just impressed. All right, if you want to know more about parasomnias, like exploding head syndrome, you can type those words in the search bar howstep works.com. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. So instead of listening to mail, I conducted another study. Just kidding. All right. I thought, this is really neat. This is Chernobyl. Hey, guys, thanks for the fantastic podcast on radiation sickness and for talking a bit about the Chernobyl disaster. It really captured my imagination. As a little girl, I remember one of my primary school teachers telling the class the disaster would mean the end of life as we know it, and it terrified me. Anyway, as the years went by, my interest grew, and back in 2013, I finally took the plunge and booked myself a trip to Kiev to go and visit the disaster site. Wow. And she said something about I had to edit this because it was long, it was good, but something about how I know that probably sounds weird as a vacation, but she really, if you're into it, awesome vacation. The exclusion zone around Chernobyl is about 10 miles in east direction. It's largely deserted, although I was surprised to find that there are still people living and working there. The nearby town of Pripyat is completely abandoned and very eerie, to say the least. You spent the day carefully walking on concrete and trying not to touch any of the moths growing between the concrete because it's highly radioactive. Yes. I'd be a little concerned as a visit. Oh, yeah. As a visitor, it's an extremely dangerous visit. We were able to get surprisingly close to the destroyed site as well. It was a very somber experience. There were a couple of very unnerving things that I learned that day that have stuck with me. The government of the then USSR tried to cover up the accident, didn't tell the people of Prepyacht that they needed to evacuate for two whole days, inevitably causing many more deaths from radiation sickness than the inevitable. There were several reactors at Chernobyl. Reactor Four blew up. Reactor Four was right next to Reactor Three, which they thought was going to blow up. Had Reactor Three blown up, it really would have been the end of life as we know it. Europe would have become completely uninhabitable. We all owe our lives to the unsung heroes who sacrificed himself to save Reactor Three and save Europe. Well, much love that is Kate Nottingham, England and Kate is coming to see you some Manchester. Awesome. Kate, thanks a lot for that email. That's a really cool vacation. Yeah, she took her mom her mom and sent photos and had a lot more to the email. Super interesting, very cool. Thanks a lot Kate. And if you want to get in touch with us like Kate did, let us know about your super cool vacation. You can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can join us on Instagram too. At the same handle, you can hang out with us on Facebook.com, participate in our studies that Chuck conducts@facebook.com stuffychannow, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housetepworks.com. And as always, join us at home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com. Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer school's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free 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." | ||
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Thu, 02 Sep 2021 13:09:04 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=13, tm_min=9, tm_sec=4, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=245, tm_isdst=0) | 46617575 | audio/mpeg | "With no fees or minimums on checking and savings accounts. Banking with Capital One is, like, the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Kind of like choosing to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with Capital One's top rated app, you can deposit checks and transfer money anytime, time, anywhere, making Capital One an even easier decision that's banking reimagined what's in your wallet terms apply. Capital one NA member FDIC hey, everybody, chuck here. Right now, there are millions of people around the world hosting on airbnb. I mean, there's no doubt it's a great way to earn extra income, but I've always wondered about their stuff, like, what happens if somebody drops a wine glass? Well, now I know. Thanks to Air Cover for Hosts, people can welcome guests into their home with confidence. Air Cover for Hosts gives you damage protection for free every time you host. Learn more and host with peace of mind@airbnb.com. Aircoverforhosts. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of. iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry over there. And this is the podcast known as Stuff You Should know. Podcast? We all three on our group teleconferencing thing here had our cameras on for the first time. Yeah, it was great for about, I don't know, 45 seconds before I turn mine off. Yes. And then I was like, well, I don't want to just be observed. I'm no goldfish. Then you turn yours off. I like Jerry's long hair, though. I know. Jerry just looks like I just don't quite know how to put it. Just like a wealthy middle aged person who could buy and sell your sorry ass if she wanted to. So we're cutting now, I think so. You said the D word not too long ago, so I feel like I'm allowed at least one. Well, we'll probably bleep that out for fun. D word? Which D word? D-A-M-N no, I didn't. You did, and I don't remember when, but you said no, the P word. I'm sorry? You said the P word. What's the P word? You know, the P word. I can think of a few bad P word. It was P-I-S-S-E-D period. That's not a cuss word. Yes, it is, because you didn't mean it like drunk. You meant it like powed. Oh, goodness. You don't even know what a cuss word is in your mid 40s. This has become one of the most juvenile introductions we've come up with so far, and we've said some pretty juvenile stuff over the course of the years, Chuck, but I think it's fine. Shake it off. Okay? Get serious and prepare to rerecord an episode. No, you decided we were going to do this one, this episode on criminal records, and I hit you back and said, hey, we've actually done one. We did an episode back in 2012 called Why You Probably Have a criminal record, and there's going to be some overlap when we're talking about criminal records, but this is definitely different. And even more to the point, this is an important enough thing that people don't really think about or know about unless you're suffering from it, that it's worth restating every ten years, basically, as long as it's a problem. Yeah, there's a little more robust. And I know we talked back then I did not have a criminal record ten years ago. I'm happy to say I still don't. Oh, that's good. I have not been arrested in the last ten years, but that was something I don't remember. I'm sure we talked about it, but I don't remember the first time is that this is sort of getting ahead, but you can have a criminal record if you just get arrested. And they're like, oh, sorry, you didn't do anything after all. But you still have a criminal record. That's precisely right, man as a result of that rule, something like one in three Americans have a criminal record. I saw one in three. I also saw one in four. And if it's one in four, that means that as many Americans have a criminal record as have a four year diploma. Yeah, that was pretty mind boggling. And it's kind of like, okay, well, I have a criminal record. I was arrested once. It's part of my checkered past. I don't like to talk about it, but it's not really stood in my way. Well, I got a little bit of the birth lottery in a lot of ways, and I was able to navigate and make my way through life having a criminal record without it actually proving a problem. That is not necessarily the case for a lot of people, including people who have only been arrested but weren't even convicted of a crime. They just happen to be of a different race or a different sexual orientation or something like that, where having a criminal record can prove to be a real problem for you. Sure. Especially if the deck is already stacked against you, almost as if employers are looking for a reason not to hire you. They can legally not hire you because you have a criminal record. There's a lot of problems with it, and we'll get into all of that, but I feel like we need to just generally explain the whole thing first to the whole process and what they are and how they're dealt with. Right. Unless you live under a rock, you know what a criminal record is, right? That's right. A criminal record. Like you said, it's very simple. It's literally just government information that the government in the United States keeps about you that says it's data, and it says, I guess we can go, like, what's on the literal criminal record? Once you get arrested, they've got your name, they've got your date of birth. If you have any known aliases, which I wish I did, but I don't I'm not nearly cool enough to have aliases. Johnny Tightlipped physical description of me. Blah. Yeah, that's funny. Physical description. A little known fact that usually includes looks on a scale of one to ten. Yeah. Mine just says Harry loaf. And they're like, is that his name? They're like, no, it's his name description. This should be an alias of yours. H-A-R harry luck. L-O-A-P-H-I haven't seen people in a while. I don't think your alias should also describe you, though. That's probably a bad idea. Yeah. You want it to be forgettable and make you more forgettable. That's true. That's like rule number one of aliases, right? Current address, the type of crime you committed, allegedly, outstanding arrest warrants, dates and arrest of your conviction, fingerprint data. And that mug shot. I know it's weird to feel like I wanted a mug shot at one point in my life, but it's a weird thing in this country because mug shots are kind of one of two things. It's either really embarrassing or it's kind of like this weird badge of honor. I'm not sure how that happened, but yeah, but I mean, that's how you might view it from a privilege point of view, right? Yeah. But from society in general, that's a stigma. And there's entire businesses basically like patent trolls, but with mug shots that just accumulate these things because they're a matter of public record and publish them online and you have to pay them to take them down. Yes. Which is a problem. But it does go to show like yeah, it is. It's a social stigma to have a mug shot of you. And even beyond the social stigma, it can be really problematic and prevent you from getting a lot of normal things in life. Well, and I was kind of kidding when I said I don't know how that happened in America, but I do know how that happened. And that's the internet when they started just publishing, like, oh, look at Nick Nolte and look how awful this person looks on their worst night. Poor Nick Nulty. So that's how it became a cultural sort of badge of honor is probably the wrong thing to say, but something to be shared. Well, it's kind of like owning it, where if everybody's going to judge you, you might as well own it and be like, yeah, I've got a mug shot. What are you going to do about square? You got a mug shot. Well, that makes you square if you don't. Yes. My favorite ones are when the celebrity is super smiley. Right. They like, I defy you to I'm not going to look like Nick Naughty here. Yes, those are funny enough for fine, but the ones where the person really, actually committed a terrible crime and they're still smiling, those are enraged. Well, those are disturbing. Yeah, but poor Nick Nolte rift tracks find people who basically made the second iteration of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and now carried on and make perhaps an even better version of that as Rift tracks. Yeah, stuff you should know, listeners. Yeah, I think some of them are friends of the show. They perennially. Especially Mike Nelson picks on Nick Nullty every chance they get, right? Kind of painting a sketch of him as a really unsavory and grizzled and terrible person. But it's hilarious. But also it's like, what did Nick Noltzi ever do? And I genuinely don't know. Yes. I'm not sure what that mugshot is even from, aside from probably drugs. But I know the one you're talking about. He's wearing like a Hawaiian shirt that's like ruffled and rumpled and the collar sticking up on one side. It's not a Einstein here. Yeah, it's not a good picture, for sure. But here's the good news. In the United States, and by the way, this doesn't include traffic violation. So if you've talked about having speeding tickets still on your record, quote unquote, it's not your criminal record. That's something different, which we'll get to. It depends, though. If it was really big, it was a crime committed with your car, like DUI, vehicular homicide, but not hitting run. Right? Those would be on there. But yeah, speeding ticket or something. I think even like a suspended license due to points or something like that. That's on a different database. But yeah, it wouldn't be your criminal record. Right. But if you do have a criminal record, you can and you've heard this on TV shows plenty of times when I have that expunged, you can have your record expunged. Sometimes all it means is it's not active anymore. It's not like they take your file and they burn it with a torch lighter and they say, have a great life. The government still has all that data. Like, that record is still there. But it's just and it varies from state to state, like how you go about it. But that just means that your record is now sealed. And if you want to do this, the best place to start is where you got pinched to begin with and they will help you from that point forward. You may have to hire an attorney, but you may not. Well, yeah, even if you don't hire an attorney, if you do it yourself, there's a lot of court fees and court costs associated with it's a really long, hard, difficult process, which makes sense in a lot of cases. But in other cases you're like, this is unjust. We need to make this easier. Right. But I actually saw and I think the reason is because different states call different things expunging or ceiling. But I saw in a lot of cases, those are two different things. And in the case of expunction isn't that a terrible word? Pretty bad. They actually do destroy the case. Oh, really? Yes. It's gone. It didn't happen. The crime happened, but as far as you're concerned, your case file is destroyed. So you're not in the database anymore at that point? No, it's gone. And then ceiling is more like what you described, where they actually keep the records, they might destroy the things like the evidence that they gathered from you, like DNA evidence and all that stuff might be destroyed, but the record, your criminal record associated with the case itself, that will remain, but it's just really hard to get to. And usually you need a court order and a judge will have to weigh the benefits or the pros and the cons of unsealing it for whatever it is. And usually it's like, I mean, anybody who's watched enough Law and Order knows this. If they have you on a crime and they suspect that you've committed this crime, before, they'll go to the judge and ask to unseal that criminal record, to just kind of find out this guy is a repeat offender or whatever. Yeah. And as far as whether or not they will either expunge or Seal to begin with, they're going to consider obviously sort of the no brainer stuff, like what it was you did, whether you were convicted, how long it's been, what you've been like since then, your looks on a scale of one to ten? The hairy loaf. No, thank you. No. Expungement. Expunction. I'm serious. You can't help but kind of, like, drag up a little bit of slim from the back of your throat when you say that word. All right, I think we should take a break because I'm thoroughly grossed out right now. Okay. I'm going to go check my privilege, and then we'll talk about juvenile criminal records right after this. Well, now, when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know. All right. Hey, that's the sound of another sale on Shopify, the allinone commerce platform to start, run and grow your business, isn't it, Chuck? That's right. 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Now, with extremely limited availability, contact your local retailer for inventory information. All right, so you're talking about juvy records that are coming up now. We're coming up on criminal records for kids, which I think, by the way, I think we should do a whole episode. I kind of thought Crime and Punishment, our series, was over. No, but now there's this, and I think we should do one on the juvenile I think we should do one on juby. It'll be over, Chuck. When we do an episode that's actually about the dustoevsky book, when we do that, that will be the final seal on that. Okay, I need to get started. Now. We will seal the Crime and Punishment suite with that one, but we were talking about juvenile criminal records, not juvy itself, but you were saying you want to do an episode on that. I think so, for sure. I'm done with that. But at least in the United States, and I assume in plenty of other countries as well, that share similar sentiments about Crime and Punishment and justice. If you're a kid, the crimes you commit, especially nonviolent crimes, especially if you've only committed, say, like, one crime that's typically treated differently than if an adult commits a crime. And one of the major ways that it's treated differently well, one of the first ways it's treated differently is it's tried in a different court, the juvenile court. And one of the things that seems to be pretty much agreed upon across the board is you shouldn't have this criminal record follow you around for the rest of your life because of some mistake you made as a kid. And as a result, I don't know if it's automatic, but I think it's at least so common, you could almost call it automatic that the juveniles records will be sealed when they turn 18, as long as they've kept their nose clean, right? Yeah, there's a lot of qualifiers with that, and that's a big one that it needs to have been, number one, a small enough crime or a nonviolent crime so that it makes sense to basically protect protect you from society's judgment rather than protect society from you. Which is right. I don't know if we really said one of the big reasons criminal records exist or are searchable, say, like in the case of a job search or a landlord or something like that. Is it basically saying like, you're not really trustworthy. You gave up the base trust that everyone has walking around when you committed a crime. We need to let other people know that you're not trustworthy in that sense so your criminal records can be accessed like that. This is the opposite of that. This is saying like, you screwed up once as a kid and we don't want to just ruin the rest of your life because of that. So we're going to just make it like you never even had a criminal record. It's not going to be searchable, it's not going to pop up. And you can legally say when your record is sealed or expunged in particular, that you don't have a criminal history from that point on. Right. And we should point out that this all means that you are a juvenile who was tried as a juvenile in the United States. As someone under 18, you can still be tried as an adult. And this is obviously something they do when it's much more serious crimes. Definitely serious, serious felonies, sometimes the more serious misdemeanors. But in this case, it's just as far as your criminal record goes and expungement and ceiling and everything, this is just the same as you were an adult, as is with the case with registering as a sex offender. If you are a minor who is a convicted sex offender, you have to be on the sex offender registry, just like an adult would be, and that is on your criminal record. And maybe at some point we should do one on the sex. I know we've talked about it a couple of times, but we should probably do a full episode on the sex offender registry. It needs to be discussed because it makes a lot of sense in a lot of ways and then there's a lot of problems with it that ruin people's lives. Yeah, we definitely need to do one on that. Agreed. Yeah. Because that's one where that database is open to the public, you can go online and you can search your neighborhood or search specific people or addresses and so parents and the public at large can track the whereabouts of registered sex offenders. Like you said many, many times, that is a great thing to happen. But I know in a recent episode we talked about the fact that I think if you get arrested for public urination, you have to register. Is that right? Yeah. Another big one that can be really life ruining is consensual sex with a minor when you're like one year over the line. Like if the line is 17 and you're 17 and she's 16 or vice versa. You can end up on the sex offender registry for life. And again, it's needed and necessary. The sex crimes are just treated differently and I think rightfully so. I think most people agree these are special kinds of things. One of the reasons why they're treated differently is because sex offenders have been shown to have the highest recidivism rates of any criminal. I think you threw an extra D in there. Recidivism? No, I nailed it. Is that right? It's a bonehead word, admittedly, but I think I nailed it. Recidivism? No. Recidivism. Oh, man. I'm pretty sure this is deletrious to my self confidence. You made that joke before, the same reason. Joke, sure. Acidivism. There's only 1D. Well, you have to make that joke every time you say that word. Yeah, of course. It just comes frequently in the movie is so good. But the point is that sex offenders have a reoccurrence. They commit crime, they're more likely to recommit sexual offenses than the average criminal is a reac occurrence. You got me on that one. It's true. And also I've noticed I've been saying, like, shut up lately and I am sorry, I don't know where it's coming from. No, you don't mean it. I'm not supposed to say the S word. I know. And you know I won't do it anyway. It's futile. Tow so as far as storing these things, in the old days, it was exactly like you probably think it was, which is these things were kept at local police stations and that was kind of the end of it. Maybe they would share things between counties, which meant probably somebody driving over and looking in their file cabinet and then saying, thanks a lot, and then putting the file back and shutting that file cabinet and leaving again. But these days, of course this is all going to be done on databases, but it's still really I don't want to say Willynilly, because I feel like that's a little too critical, but it's definitely not some national, really codified thing where this happens. That first database is at the state and local level, and then if you're convicted, you may have that uploaded into a larger state repository or you may not. And then that state repository may be linked to the national Crime information centers interstate identification index. Or the Triple I. But maybe not. It's hard to tell unless you really do all this investigating about your own criminal record, where it lies. Yeah, there is a federal database, like you're saying, that does exist, but it's just not compulsory among the states or among the localities to submit it to that. And some people are like, this is ridiculous. This is the dumbest thing ever. Like every crime committed, every maybe arrest ever made, certainly every conviction ever made in any locality in any state on the federal level should all go into the Interstate Identification Index, which is, by the way, open or available for searching only to law enforcement and like the courts, it's not private background check, company could get their hands on it, that kind of thing. Right. Level. You can right? Yes. If you're a cop in Atlanta, you could go on to the III and search it. But if I were an employer and I hired a company to conduct a background check, they couldn't gain access to that. No, I meant on the state level. If you're convicted on the state level, a regular citizen can search public records. That's viewable by anyone right now. That's correct. That is true. There's really no distinction between the criminal record you would have in that state repository and that same criminal record, that state repository uploads to the state identification. Good point. So, yeah, you could conceivably have that same criminal record checked. It's just that particular database. It makes you wonder what they got in there that isn't elsewhere or they just don't want to give out the password to any schmoe. I don't know. But the whole thing starts and the responsibility for keeping the record begins at the local level in that local law enforcement agency. Or if a state trooper arrested you, the state, or if the FBI arrested you, the feds, whoever arrested you, or whatever court convicted you, I should say. And or because you can have multiple criminal records from the cops and from the court, they're responsible for maintaining, creating and maintaining that, and then they're also the ones that upload it or don't upload, depending on the state laws. Right. And we mentioned the traffic stuff earlier that is on the national driver register. If you have that DUI or suspended license. I think failure to help someone at the scene of an accident is a pretty serious offense. Any kind of fatal accident or even lying perjury about driving or operating a motor vehicle, all of that stuff can be on the national driver register and that can be accessed by an employer. Like if you want to go drive for Ups or something, then they're for sure going to probably look into that stuff. Yeah, but again, that kind of stuff is not going to come up on a criminal background check. And the average employer for a non driving job is not going to bother to look into the national driver database, from what I could tell. Right, but an employer might ask you that. It's actually very frequent. I think something I saw like 80 something percent of employers ask for or do background searches on potential applicants. And something like 73% of employers in the United States have like a stated background check policy. So it happens a lot. And prospective employers are one of the few groups that you can say, yes, you may access my criminal background records. Like, I couldn't give you permission, Chuck, and you go off and access my criminal record or vice versa. I've asked and I've given you permission. But when you went to the sheriff's office, they were like, Beat it, loaf. I was like, how did they know my alien? Right? They said, what? Yes, that is true. But you also, as an employer, have to have permission for them to go through a firm or a credit agency or something. They can't just do that on their own. You can say, no, don't go look up my criminal record, but you're probably not going to get that job. If you are getting interviewed and you do have a criminal record or arrest for something, it's best to own up to that in the moment and don't try and fool them because they can probably find out and you probably have a good excuse or a good reason if you're trying to put your life back together. And it was something when you were younger or maybe a really minor offense, it's just best to be honest about all that stuff because it will probably come out in the end one way or another, right? Yeah. Especially if they end up doing the background check. I think there's like two boxes, like, have you ever been arrested? Which is way different from, have you ever been convicted? Yeah, which is what I've always seen is, have you ever been convicted of a crime? But apparently on some job applications, they ask if you've ever been arrested. So if you say no and you ask but then you give them the authority to do your background check and it comes back and you lie on your application, they're just going to turn you down. I saw even if you say yes and they come back with and find out that you have a criminal record, I think something like 50% of employers said that would be it, like they would just move on to the next candidate. But that's really high. But that also means that 50% of employers would not say that that disqualifies you. So if you're truthful and honest and especially if you have an explanation for what the crime was, then there's a really good chance that among that 50% of employers, you're going to move on and, like, that will be sorted and you'll just continue on the application process or even possibly get the job. So I didn't see anywhere that said you should totally just lie on the application. They'll never find out. Nothing like that. Everything I saw is like what you said. You should just be upfront and honest about it and have an explanation at the ready too. Not just like yeah, I know, but anyway, you were asking me what my greatest fault is and I would say perfectionism and working too much. Yeah. And that arrest, like you mentioned earlier, you can be discriminated against because of the job, because you are no longer what's called being in a protected class. You can be discriminated against. You can be refused that job. You can be. Refused public housing. Many, many things can say, and agencies can say, no. No, thank you. Because of your arrest record, I think if you have a felony drug use convention convention conviction, what the heck of a convention? I know. Man wow. Henriette Thompson. Sit right in. Exactly. That means that they cannot, in most cases, discriminate against you because of that conviction. So they made a little bit of headway, and we may have talked about that in our drug courts episode, but I can't remember. Yeah, but we did. So there are a couple of things that we'll talk about, I guess, that reformers are basically saying that we need to do something about this. But one of the first kind of bandaids that the federal government came up with to help people who have a criminal record get a job despite having a criminal record is something called Fidelity Bonding, which I didn't even know existed. Did you? I had heard of that because of the film industry, and I don't know that they called it Fidelity Bonding, but it's sort of like back when, you know, Robert Downey Jr. Was having all his troubles years ago. Yeah, that was fidelity bonding. Yeah. These movie companies would have to put up these really big insurance bonds to ensure that they're spending a ton of money on this movie. You can't have Robert Downey Jr. And he's turned everything around, which is a testament to him he really has and his wife's help. But, yeah, he's got to show up to work, and it's a real risk hiring him in this state or any this goes across the board. It's not just movie stars, but yeah, you can put up and pay for a Fidelity Bond to kind of cut their risk. Yeah. So I saw here that you can, but it looks like it's pretty common that the federal government will actually issue them free of charge to the worker, where the federal government is basically saying, give this person a chance. If they steal your whole stock room, if they rob you, if you suffer a loss because you hired them, we will compensate you. That's what that Fidelity Bond does, which I think is really cool. I don't know. There's just something I didn't know, and it made me think the world is a slightly nicer place than I realized it was before I realized there was federal bonding or fidelity bonding or any kind of bonding coupling is what you're thinking of. Okay. So there's a kind of a push among legal legal types to standardize criminal records. And if you take all of the information on a criminal record together, it's called criminal History Record information. That's like what all the details are. If you're a researcher, that's what you would refer to it as. Everybody else calls them criminal records or rap sheets or whatever. But there's a push to people, among certain people to say, hey, we need to standardize this. It needs to be compulsory to report crimes to the federal database that law enforcement can search. We just need to make this a better, more robust thing. And there is another group, there's a whole other camp that says these are really ruining people's lives unjustly, and we need to take another look at this. And they don't necessarily disagree with the people who say this needs to be standardized and compulsory, but they do say it's being left to hang far too long. And I say we take our last break and then come back and talk about the pros and the cons of criminal records. What about you? Let's do it. Well, now we're on the road, driving in your truck. I don't learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck. It's stuff you should know. All right. 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. 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Now, with extremely limited availability, contact your local retailer for inventory information. All right, so if you're a fine, upstanding citizen out there and you've never been arrested, you might think, well, there's no downside at all to keeping these robust records. Anytime you think there's no downside, to something, you should stop right there and just reflect on it a little further. Yeah, absolutely. It doesn't matter what it is. There's a downside to sugar cookies with icing. There's a downside to teddy bears. Somewhere there's a downside. That's my new motto. Chuck. I just came up with a new model. Somewhere there's a downside. What's the teddy bear downside? I haven't researched them enough. Probably choking hazard from the eyeballs. All right, good point. Yeah. Thank you. I just came up with that top of my head. I'll come up and send more things if you give me a few minutes. So some of the pros of keeping good track of criminal records is you have a robust data set. And it's not just like, look how many bad people there are in the world, because I think we've hopefully already gotten across. That doesn't necessarily mean you're a bad person, but you can use this data for recidivism research. It's a really valuable source of data. Instead of having to go to all these different agencies, it is nice to be able to go to one place, kind of a one stop shop, to find out if some of these programs are effective to keep people from recommitting crimes or going back into the criminal justice system. Yeah, that's a really important thing to know and to have, like, actual data on. Oh, absolutely. Another thing. And it's not just recidivism, but redemption. There are people that do research on redemption. And it's not just like I mean, that's sort of a broad word to call it, but that's really what it is. These researchers, Alfred Bloomstein and Kimonoi Nakamura, have done a lot of research trying to find out, basically, like, if you're trying to get a job, where is the reasonable point in your life after you haven't done something? Like, done something wrong again, that it's null and void and an employer shouldn't even have to ask you anymore? Basically, like, when are you fully rehabilitated? As far as the law enforcement goes? Yeah. What's the point where criminals stops being a criminal? When they stop committing crime? How long after that? And they actually studied something like 88,000 criminal records from New York State. Yeah. First timers. Yeah. And then followed them for 25 years. So this is a really robust study. And what they found was that there actually is a point, a quantifiable point, where somebody stops being a criminal. And they found that if you committed a serious offense, as your first offense, typically it was about eight years where you are no more likely to be arrested than the average citizen, which is a really kept your nose clean. Yes, exactly. That's the key. Because every time you commit another crime, you're, like, still a criminal. Right. But if you commit, like, say, just one crime, that's the easiest way to do it. But ostensibly, it would work for people who commit multiple crimes and then stop which is something called desistence. It's where criminal stops committing crimes. At some point, if you care about rehabilitation and reintroduction in society, you have to say, okay, you're no longer a criminal. And these two researchers, Bloomstein and Nakamura, quantified it eight years for a serious offense with no other offenses in between, and then three years for a less serious crime. I didn't see what they were. It takes about three years before that person who was once a criminal is now statistically no more likely to be arrested for a crime than the average person who has never committed one before. And I think that's fantastic. The thing is, in this case, criminal records are a paradox. You need to have criminal records to study them, to figure out when the criminal record is no longer needed, and it's, in fact, actually harmful to the person. It's not serving any benefits for society. Person is no longer a criminal. Now it's actively harming this person who is no longer a criminal by keeping them from getting jobs. Yes. And I think the last part of that quantification for that study is the most important part, which is, after a certain time, they are just like everybody else. Right. Like someone who's never been arrested before. They are no more likely to commit a crime than you are just because they did it one time eight years ago or three years ago. Yeah. And that is not the way that society, at least as far as in practice goes, is set up. It's now the way it is now, generally, although the minds are changing, as we'll see, once you're a criminal, you're criminal. That's it. You're a criminal for life. And these research like this is saying, that's just not true, and this is really unjust after a certain period of time. Yeah. Obviously, the cons we've kind of dabbled in that through most of this episode don't help ourselves. We have a mass incarceration problem in this country, and we're not saying, like, oh, just don't police and let people do what they want. It's no big deal. But that's different than mass incarceration when one, like you said at the beginning, one in three adults has been arrested by the age of 23 in this country. And not only that, but if you include jail along with prison, the number of people behind bars in the US. And I think this is pretty accurate right now is about 2.2 million. Yeah, that was the latest I could find. I think it was in an article from 2021. So it's pretty accurate. Did you say it's quintupled since 1980? No, but that's a pretty staggering number. You should see a graph of it. It just shoots up starting in starting around the 1980s. Crazy enough, can't quite put my finger on why that would have happened, but it just goes through the roof, right? Yeah. And of course, this is no surprise. I suspect even the people who don't want critical race theory taught in schools. But if you are of color, or if you are LGBTQ, if you are transgender, although I said t in there, didn't I? If you have a mental illness, you are way more at risk of being incarcerated than somebody who doesn't check those same boxes. And in America, black men are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men, and Hispanic men are two and a half times more likely to be incarcerated than white men. And so it kind of starts to become clear, especially when you realize that having a criminal record is a big driver of poverty, that this yeah. That's fortunately affecting communities of color and other minorities, which makes it so much easier for society at large to just ignore this problem. Yeah, for sure. The obstacles in your way, it's not just getting a job. It's building credit. It's getting housing, any kind of public assistance education, getting back together with your family. It really creates sort of a wall around you and the rest of the world. Even if you were trying to get back into society and be a good citizen and you want that job, I think more than 60% of people who were formerly incarcerated or unemployed a year after being released, and that's like an open invitation to recidivism. Totally. I mean, you got to make somehow yes. I mean, not trying to excuse saying, well, you should just go out and commit crimes then, if you can't get a job. We're not saying that at all. But it's certainly a barrier. If you can't get a job and you're trying to reintegrate into society, and 60% of them a year later can't get those jobs, and then if you do get a job, those who do have the jobs, you're getting 40% less pay annually. And I guess over the years, you can build that back up, and it's good that they get that one job at least. Right. But there's an imbalance here in this country as far as trying to genuinely rehabilitate people, and that doesn't just mean, well, you got out of jail or you got out of prison, and we feel like you're a pretty good person now, and you're on your own. Good luck. Like getting a job or getting housing or anything like that. Right. And even if you're the kind of person who's, like, I only vote on the economy. That's all I care about. There's actually something here for you, too, to be interested in making criminal records less of a lifetime stigma. They found that there was a center for Economic Policy and Research study from 2016 that looked at 2014 just to confuse things a little bit. And they said that the people who are shut out of legitimate work due to having a criminal records represents an overall reduction in the American workforce by zero 9% to 1% of the workforce. Which is something like 1.7 to 1.9 million people. And it concluded that means that the gross domestic product lost out that year, just in that year, between 78 and $87 billion. Just because these people have been shut out of work, just because they had a criminal record, in some cases for an arrest that they weren't even convicted for, that is a big problem. And it's also a problem for employers, too, and that if you just go by criminal records because you're legally allowed to, if you just say you got a criminal record, we're not going to hire you. Some companies even advertise that. Like, basically, if you have a criminal record, you need not apply. They're saying that in some cases, or that sets the company up to go hire a less qualified and possibly less competent candidate who doesn't have a criminal record. Right. So the whole point, the whole push to all this is like, okay, there's nobody, including me, who's saying we should do away with criminal records. There are indeed very bad people out there in the world. They do exist. Right, but there's also in this dragnet that we create to catch as many people of those bad people as possible. Other people who aren't necessarily bad or maybe even were bad ones and aren't bad anymore, get caught up in that. And that there are things we can do without doing away with the criminal record system. And one of the big ones seems to be like, putting a finite time on that after you've kept your nose clean. X number of years. Maybe these things should just get sealed automatically. That's a really big one. Another one is looking at employers and being like, we don't really know if you should be asking about this. For some professions, like some professions, it doesn't really matter if you're Starbucks. Does it matter that this person had an arrest that they showed when they were 18? Exactly. Should they really be denied a job? So there's some laws that are called ban the box laws that people have been thinking of. Yeah, those boxes is like you were kind of talking about earlier. When you fill out applications for jobs, there's always that little box that says, have you been convicted of a crime? It's also called fair chance legislation in some states. And it's basically what we've been talking about is maybe you should at least have a limit on what you can ask in that initial interview. Maybe you should have a time limit on how far back into somebody's past you can dig. Yes, that makes sense. Maybe in the application process, at least, there's a place spelled out where you may be allowed to ask that if it's the kind of job that you should ask that. Yeah, because there definitely are jobs like that, like ones that work with vulnerable populations, like the elderly, and they cut those out of this legislation. You can't get a job working with kids or something, like you said in a nursing home or something like that. Right, agreed. But I mean, there's like, if you need to be a barber or something like that, do you have to have a clean record? And you don't necessarily. And actually, barber is one of the problem professions, because you need a license to be a barber, which we're going to do short stuff about that. Somebody wrote in want to tell us that we should look into that. But in any profession, almost any profession that requires a license, and there's a lot of them, and barber is one of them, that licensing board will almost always say, if you have a criminal record, you don't qualify, so you can't get that job despite being born wanting to be a barber. You're out. Can't do it by cutting heads. I mean, it's different kind of cutting heads in that case. Exactly. You got anything else? I got nothing else. It's a good one, Chuck. I like this one. We'll redo it in ten more years. Unless there's been some real reform. Yeah, we got a chance to soapbox it a little bit. I know. It was fun. Yeah, it is. Well, if you want to know more about criminal records and criminal record reform in particular, start reading about it on the Internet or turn to two other of your friends, because there's a really good chance that one of them has a criminal record, and they might tell you that things have been kind of hard because of it, and you can hear their story. And since I said you can hear their story, it's time for listen or mail. I'm going to call this MRI follow up from a pro professional. Nice. It's always good to hear from the pros that say, we did a decent job. It's never a great job, but I'll take decent. I'll take decent, too. And we're explaining things like MRI. Let me see here. Hey, guys, big fan, long time listener. Listen on a daily basis. I'm an MRI radiographer or radiographic technologist in your country, and I work with MRIs every day. I wanted to commend you on the accuracy. Overall, the MRI physics can be confusing, if not near impossible to understand, especially to someone who doesn't have experience in the field. I myself went to university for three years to become a radiographer. You gave a really good summary of the physics involved, so hats off. A couple of things to add. It's true that a lower power magnet can produce decent images comparable to a higher strength magnet, but you usually do so with the trade off of an extended scan time, which takes me ten minutes on my three Tesla machine, might take 20 and a 1.5. And as you rightly said, you have to stay completely still, because if you don't, it'll be blurry, and then you have to repeat the scans. I drive a three Tesla machine, which is the highest strength magnet widely available for clinical use. Seven Tesla MRI machines have been approved by the FDA for clinical use. And ten Tesla machines you're referring to are for research purposes only and have some interesting effects, such as being able to levitate a frog awesome. Or causing the mercury and dental fillings to leach out. Oh, my God, man. And then Russell here in Sydney, Australia, goes on to say, point out that I got a CT scan for the diverticuli search, not an MRI. So that makes sense. I was not an MRI. So have you had an MRI then? I have, and again, it was years ago, and I want to say it was my back. Okay. Which is now fine, but I think it was a back deal. I'm glad your back is fine. It's been fine. Good. I mean, I knew it was do you complain? Yeah, but I'm glad that you're back is fine, that you have a nice beard. It was a brief time where I had some back issues, but it was pretty brief. It was a few months, I think. Well, is that it? That's it. That is from Russell in Sydney. Russell. You can use my name in Sydney. That's awesome. Thanks. Russell. You can use my name in Sydney. That's a great name. Very odd one, but good. And I really feel like we need to put more cadavers into ten Tesla MRIs and watch the mercury come out, because that must be amazing. If you want to get in touch with me. Yeah, me too. If you want to get in touch with us, like Russell did, we love hearing from experts who say we did a so so job. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My heartratio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we'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." | |
c60f6800-5460-11e8-b38c-174aa31d5e2f | Selects: Is the Pied Piper About a Real Historic Tragedy? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-is-the-pied-piper-about-a-real-historic-tr | 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. What about the Pied Piper fairy tale is real? Find out in this classic episode. | 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. What about the Pied Piper fairy tale is real? Find out in this classic episode. | Sat, 26 Feb 2022 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=57, tm_isdst=0) | 39695364 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, it's your buddy Josh. For this week's select, I've chosen our May 2018 episode on The Pied Piper, one of those rare fairy tales that actually may be rooted in fact and history. And it's a good one. It's got a weird start. For some reason, I almost sound like I'm mad at Chuck, but rest assured, I wasn't. We finally catch our feet a few minutes into it, and then the episode really takes off. So I hope it takes you on a wild thrill ride like it did me, listening to it again. And either way, just sit back and enjoy, as I know you will, our episode on The Pied Piper. 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 over there. This is stuff you should know. Fairytale 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? No. Oh, jeez, I hope not. Jerry knows it. Can we at least get these two in the can first? Yeah, well, probably, unless something really crazy happens in the next hour or 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 Fisher, the 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. Chuckers, 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 backtobacker with the dark origins of fairy tales and how the Grim's Fairytales 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. That's how I feel about your limb is torn off now. What? That was a good one. That's a good title about reattachment surgery. Remember that? Yeah, I think that title is all you. It's a Josh Clark title. You've got some good titles out there, too. 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 Trickbox. Right. 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. Hit 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 actual, 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. This is your first clue. Yeah. Most fairytales 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. Right. 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 we'll get to in a second, there's, like, a specific date. Yeah. That also is very unusual for the point fairy tale. 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 grims brother's tale of the Pied Piper. Richard 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 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, it's like 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 multi colored people didn't dress like that. I reckon I saw, though, that it was also like a splendid outfit. That he attracted a lot of attention. And people were like, I wish I had the kahoones to dress like you by Piper. Dance around with a panel. And he had called it a musical pipe or some kind of flute. Not a smoking pipe. Potheads. 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 sound 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 quent? 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 today. 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, 1000 pieces of money. And this town of Hamlin was so overrun by rats, apparently all their cats had died. That 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 town is overrun. Okay. Which is a weird little thing, don't you think? Yeah. Because my first thing was like why a pie 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 floors 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, alright, 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. 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. And he's in that abandoned mindshaft. 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 fluid. 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. 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? The big yeah, I mean, 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, 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 in each hand. Sure, like a pro. Not like a pro. They were pros. What? 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 prosting singing their Germany and beer hall songs, as they are wanting to do. And then King Cadillac dude says, what's up with all those florins? 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 thousand? 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 floors. 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 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 just 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. Someplace 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, like, 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 probably with their magic flute. I need to do something. It's gotten out of hand. Yeah, you got to do something almost. 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, I'll turn the light on and a dozen will scatter. Wow. Jerry's going, nope. 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 plant. Yes. You throw a rock in the catering, you'll hit a lavender dust. Right? 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 that little everybody, you can't see me, but where you flick the underside of your chin, I think it's Italian. Well, I mean, this is Germany. It's Lower Saxony. It wasn't too far from Germany. No, but it's 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. It's 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 as 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. Right. But this time he is wearing hunter's clothing. 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 many times over that, but yeah, I shouldn't have said anything. Alright, 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. Yeah, there goes my baby. There goes our labor pool. Who's going to service at the beer gardens? 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. Like, even though your daughter's grown, I'm going to encourage 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. A 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 is 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, 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. 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 fairy tale 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, like, 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 historian 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. Yeah. Very weird. Especially in the church. Yeah. 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. And 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. Yeah. And what is this? The Loneburg Manuscript? This was about a hundred 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.org manuscript. You mentioned the Piper, but no rats in any of these, right? Not yet, but the other thing about the Bloomberg 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 done 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 has remained the same is 130 children leaving even before the Piper shows up in the story, 130 children are cited each and every time. Yeah, but in what? We don't know, is that, like, some symbolic thing? Is it all metaphor? Should we take a break and get to the theories? Yeah, sure. All right, let's do that. 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 Zumer. Can you say it like that? Froben? 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 Christof von Zimmer. You can only say all of his names. You can't. 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. Ratcatcher, yes. Which was a job. It was. And I mean, this town would have had rats. Any town would have had rats. So it would have been like it's understandable 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, 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 yeah. 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. Yeah. Which is a stupid theory. It's a terrible theory. Huntington's disease is an inherited disease. Yeah. That doesn't make sense. That would mean that every kid in the town had inherited Huntington's from their parents, who apparently weren't showing any symptoms. Who put that forth? 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 in. 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. They were like eight year olds participating in the Crusades, one of them would have a vision from God and say, you know, we should totally cover the Crusades. I don't think we no. Have we done that? No, not yet. There's a really good article on the site, too, that'd 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, 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 Crusades before documented. It's possible it happened a decade or two later. Like, 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 OCD. 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 their children, they weren't kids. They were young adults who would have represented a lot of the workforce. So it 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 I kind of teased it with that dumb Bono. Poor Bono. That's 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 rest of the town, the whole town is dedicated to this legend. Yeah, I thought you're going to 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, like, 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 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 that would explain why the whole thing is written in such vague, flowery language. To me, that indicates that they're working out guilt. There's guilt by this town. Does that make 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're still 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 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 rapondel and probably no rumples. Stilt skin and 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, parents, one more thing. One more thing. I'm glad you brought that up. So the execution place, the Copen Mountain or Cavalry Mountain or whatever it was, supposedly that was where they buried people, too. That's right. So 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 Ink, and 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. I mean, there are probably children, or 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. By 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 Blum House 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. Okay. You got anything else now? I got nothing else, Jerry. No? Okay, well, if you want to know more about the Pied Piper and all that stuff, you can type that word in the search bar housetopworks.com. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this a double quinceigneta reply we heard from a couple of people with some good insight. First, Alexandra. Long time listener from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Loved episode on Quintin. Eras 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 Francis, 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 and spend the 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 quintaniae 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 localish. He said disclaimer I'm a white person from Georgia, so I have no authority here at all, but we'll 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. Latina. 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. That's into a horn. It's nice to that ty von Flintsky. If you want to get in touch with us, like Ty and Alexandra did, you can tweet to us at fyskpodcast and Chuck at moviecrush. You can join Chuck on Facebook@facebookcom. Charlesw chuckbryantandstepychnow. You can send us all an email to stuffpodcast@howstephworks.com and as always, join us at home on the web. Stuff You Should Knowcom 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." | |
8a9304ec-4a58-11e8-a49f-3b71d3aad368 | SYSK Selects: How Igloos Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-igloos-work | Igloos were traditionally used by Inuit Indians as temporary shelter while on hunting and fishing trips. In this episode, Josh and Chuck look at the design of igloos, from their impressive heat-catching properties to their ingenious construction. | Igloos were traditionally used by Inuit Indians as temporary shelter while on hunting and fishing trips. In this episode, Josh and Chuck look at the design of igloos, from their impressive heat-catching properties to their ingenious construction. | Sat, 15 Dec 2018 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=15, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=349, tm_isdst=0) | 27376407 | audio/mpeg | "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 Haloopetscom. 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 about tackling some of today's biggest challenges, like climate change, education, access, and global health. Listen in as host Baratoon Day 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. All right, everybody, it's Chuck here. It's Saturday, and you know what that means. It's time for The Stuff you should know. Select episode curated by me. This one's about Igloo's. How much fun, right? It's from March 29, 2011, and this one should be landing here in the winter as well. So you can go out and build an igloo yourself. That's what I say. But be safe while you're doing it. This is a fun episode. I remember enjoying this one quite a lot, so I hope you guys like it. 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. Hello, sir. That makes this stuff you should know. Right? That's right. Unless I'm in the wrong place. You're a little under the weather still, aren't you? Just as sick as I was when we recorded fainting goats? Yes. Not 10 minutes ago? Yes. So Chuck hasn't been sick all week? No. It'll probably just be a couple of days. It'll clear up you have a robust immune system for a man of your age. Remember when you were actually sick for weeks and weeks, like in year one? Yeah. And I think, like, 18 podcasts were screwed up because I could not get better. Those are the unhealthy days. So you need a much healthier lifestyle. Much, much healthier. We don't need to check you into the sanitarium like we had to back in the day. I'm okay now. I've gotten over my consumption. Hopefully you will very soon. I have all faith that you will. Right. So, Chuck, while we're waiting for you to recuperate, I want to talk to you about technology. Okay. Specifically, some of the oldest technology known to man. Clothes. Clothing is technology? Yeah. I don't think so. But it is, Chuck. Probably more than anything else, the thing that defines humanity is our desire and our ceaseless striving to become more than human, to take ourselves out of the rat race of evolution, the crapshoot of genetics, and to basically take hold of our biological destiny. Right. Yeah. We sort of did that with clothing many years ago. Yeah. So that's what we do. We use technology to do that. And clothing was one of the earliest ones because we are a subtropical species. Humans are yeah. We're not supposed to live in really cold places. Right. But we do. We've managed to migrate from somewhere near the equator where we can run around without clothes. Yeah. To those are what they call the sexy epoch. That's right. To some colder climbs. Thanks. To close along the way, we figured out that we could use hammers and use stones for hammers and other tools. Sure. And we figured out that we could build our own shelters, make things warm on the inside. Right. So eventually, over the years, we figured out enclosed heating systems, and then now, thanks to all this, we have swedes. Right. ENGOs envos. Thanks to the swedes. So the technology of Volvos are a direct result of the technology of clothes. Wow. In a weird way, you're exactly right. But somewhere along the line, there was a branch of that linear development of thought and talent of technology all the way to enclosed shelters that house swedes, where somebody figured out that you can make an enclosed shelter out of blocks of hard packed snow. And we know those today as igloos. Yes. And do you know what the Inuit called the igloo? Igloo igloo. Yeah. Trick question. That was a good question, though, because it's an Inuit word for what I believe it means snowhouse. So the Inuits are just among, like, the most pragmatic speakers on the planet. They're very cut and dry. Yeah. They call their snow houses igloos. Right. That just makes a lot of sense. We're talking about the Canadian tundra, josh and teepees and castles and other things that were being built were all well and good if you're in Europe or if you are in a warmer climate, let's say, like the Florida Panhandle. Right. You don't have to take 50ft of ice to Corey Stone. Exactly. But if you're on the Canadian tundra, those aren't really good options. So snow, hardpack snow became the masonry, if you will, for the Inuit. Right. Let's go ahead and get to this Eskimo thing. Yeah. Eskimo and Inuit are one and the same. They're two different terms for the same group of people. These people who inhabit areas spanning from Siberia to Alaska, Canada, Greenland, 3500 miles range. Right. Yeah. Which makes them the most widely spread Aboriginal group on the planet. Yeah. Aboriginal, for those of you don't know, doesn't just refer to the Aborigines in Australia. It's indigenous. The first people in that region yes. Would be Aboriginal. Yes. Okay. That was the one who get pushed around by the Europeans. Exactly. Aboriginal, yes. And if you want to insult and Inuit, you just go ahead and call them an Eskimo. Yes. Apparently, it's a Derogatory term because it was a term that the white man gave I think it was another tribe. Was it? Yeah. But it was an outside group. I was just figuring out the White Man. Yeah. So it was another group named the Eskimos, which was thought to mean eaters of raw meat or raw blubber is what I've heard as well. Raw blubber. But then they later thought that Eskimo meant to net snowshoes, to build snowshoes, and linguists can't prove it, although that's kind of what they think. But in the glory that is language, things can go from their original meaning to a popular meeting, and its old meaning is meaningless. It's only what people think or use. Right. Which is how lol is the word. That's right. Law. So we're going to refer to them as Inuit because that's the way to do it. We don't want to alienate anybody. No. Especially the Inuit, because they are tough people and they have survived for many years in conditions that don't seem to be survivable, especially way back in the day. But they made it through. Right. And they're thriving, actually, too. We'll get to that in a second. Yeah, I was surprised to see that. But, Chuck, a couple of other facts about the Inuit, which means the People. Right. So they call them snowhouses egg loose. They call themselves the People. It's very spare. I could have been a good neighbor, I think. I think so, to keep things simple. Fall down goat. Yeah. They have never really established a formal system of government. It's the family is generally the center of the community. Yeah. No class system. Males are the figureheads, yet no class system is pretty cool. And basically, if you're a boy, you're a hunter, if you're a girl, you marry a hunter and hopefully produce more boy hunters because everyone is equally responsible for coming up with food. And I imagine every family that's what that means. Every family is equally responsible for contributing to the food in the community. Yeah. So the more boy hunters, the better. So, fascinating group. And they have never lived in Igloo's permanent shelters. Well, yeah. And it's important that you mentioned hunting, because clearly, if you are living on the Arctic tundra, there's one thing that you're probably not going to have, and that is a vegetable garden. So they are very carnivorous as a people. They do a lot of hunting. They did a lot of hunting of seals, which is probably they were called blubber readers. Blub readers. And where there are seals is going to be a lot of ice. Sea ice. Yeah. Which leads to another peculiar trait of the Inuit. Peculiar meaning unique and interesting. Yes. Kayak angst. Remember we talked about that on the webcast, like, a long time ago? I remember that. And everything was cut off in the middle of it and it was Geicawasaki Day. Oh, yeah. And I wrote a blog post on it saying, like, as I was saying before, I was cut off and kayak angst. Is this a condition specific only to the inuit, where Inuit males, too, where you become afraid of going out to hunt seals in a kayak, usually following an episode where you've been up for several days. The sun very rarely sets because it's summertime, which is the only time when you can hunt seal. Really? Okay, so you have a loss of sense of time. You are completely without any landmark or reference point. It's all just horizon and sea ice. Right. So you're with no bearings, no sense of time, and you doze off and wake up, and you have no idea how long you've been asleep, how far you've drifted. And you may be out there drifting for the rest of your life. And you finally do find land again. You make your way back to your community, and you become terrified at the thought of getting back in a kayak again for a kayak angst. Wow. Yeah. Specifically to the Inuit. I don't remember that at all. That's so weird. Well, you should read my blog post. I usually have an inkling, but that one doesn't ring true for me. So the Inuit did not live in Igloos? Josh as he said. That is not true. People might think that Inuit tribes just had Igloos all over the place. And that was their house. They were really hunting shelters? Yeah, it's like a hunting camp. Like Robin Williams Fishing Camp in Insomnia. Yeah, except nutty because of no sleep and too much sun. Well, Al Pacino was. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. That was Christopher Nolan. Yeah. He's just amazing. Yeah. Although you had Inception problems, right? It was really just Ellen Page. Get her out of the movie. You're okay? It wasn't even her, necessarily. Although I'm not a big fan of hers. I think she's a good actress and everything, but I'll never forget for Juno. But it was more her character. Clearly her character was put in afterward because the producers were like or the studio execs were like, Wait, what is going on? So they wrote in Ellen Page's character to explain everything to everybody at each step so that you can keep up with this really dense movie. Yeah. Good. You love getting wound up about that Inception around John. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical gold mine for identity thieves. And stealing your identity, it turns out, can be dangerously easy, which is not good. But now it's easy to protect yourself with LifeLock by Norton. Yeah. LifeLock monitors your info and alerts you to potential identity threats. And if you are a victim of identity theft, a dedicated USbased restoration specialist will work to fix it. Identity thefts have had it easy for far too long. Now, finally, it's your turn. Just remember, no one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses. But everyone can save up to 25% off their first year by going to LifeLock. comStuff that's LifeLock.com stuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock identity theft protection starts here. Do you know you're a pet mom when your camera roll is all pics of your pet? At Halo, we get it because we are pet moms, too. And just like you, we know their nutrition is one of the most important decisions you'll make. Halo is natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science and thoughtfully sourced. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Find Halo at specialty pet stores and online. All right, where were we? The Inuits were hunting camps, like we said, and they're still around today. And they are booming. Not Igloo's, actually. They're not quite as common, but they did a study who is this? The Human Rights program in Canada. In Canada. Department of Canadian Heritage said that there could be as many as 68,400 Inuit in Canada by 2017, and in 1996, there are only 41,000 in change. So, yeah, they're booming as a people. Pretty cool. So they're thriving. Igloos were never permanent shelters or structures for them. And they had kayak angst. One other thing, too. Eskimo kisses. Yeah. What's the deal there? So, you know it's like rubbing the tip of your nose. Yes, it's cute. It is. It's not entirely accurate, though, I'm sure, but they did kiss with their noses. Oh, really? Yeah, but you would put your nostrils to the face, usually around, like, the cheeks, right below the eyes. You would put your nose to a loved one's face like that and inhale deeply. And that's the real Eskimo kiss or Inuit kiss. Interesting, isn't it? Yeah. They had it wrong, though. You know how to write, the French. Yeah. They figured it out, and everyone was like, oh, yeah, this is the way to kiss. Forget that. No stuff. All right, so let's talk about Igloos for a second. Okay. They're built out of blocks of ice. They are not built out of the kind of snow that you probably have in your front yard in Ohio in the wintertime. It depends on how wet it was. Yeah. Although my cousin in law, Alex Schreiber, ohio State University student, built in Igloo last winter. He and his buddies. Nice. Check this thing out, dude. Nice, right? Wow. I should post this. I'm going to get permission to post this. What is it? It's like, 7ft tall, at least. It's huge, and it's really well constructed. He's sitting on top of it. Yeah, and it's not caving in. If I built an igloo, it wouldn't last very long. Pretty cool, though. That is a backyard in Ohio, too. Nice. Gray day, leafless trees everywhere. He and his buddies clearly had enough boredom in time to build this. Awesome. Alex driver, huh? Yeah, awesome. Is he listening right now? I hope so. Yeah, he listens. Okay. And I told him I gave him a heads up. Yeah. We have to post that. He's going to write back and say, don't mention the igloo. Don't they always yeah. So, Chuck, even though, like, say, a hunting expedition went out, or even a single hunter went out and built an igloo, it wasn't just the single igloo every single time. Sometimes they lived in them for longer periods, sometimes more people lived in a group, and they would actually create compounds out of igloo's by melding them together, creating walkways, breezeways. It's pretty cool. And there are some that basically igloo cities that came about where I think they would have halls for banquets and beats and balls and stuff, like Inuit balls held in an igloo. A large igloo. Pretty cool, though. I didn't know this. I had no idea. I always pictured just the single and also thought they lived in them. So this one, because we're like the totem poles, we should probably also, while we're just, like, busting things left and right, chilly Willy, helpful little penguin from the he was so cute. I went and watched one to refresh my memory. Chili willy the ding Dong. He was very cute. I thought he would be mischievous or I remembered him being mischievous, like Woody Woodpecker, who was a jerk, right? No, Chili Willie was a very helpful, cute, sweet little baby penguin and his little igloo. The typical igloo that you think of a dome with, like, a rounded entryway, pretty much dead on. Yeah. But it looks like your cousin. Cousin in law. It looks like he knows what he's doing. Yeah. Alex. Yeah. Matthew. No, I said nephew. Oh, sorry. Yeah, there's no penguins in Alaska, either, so that's the other problem as well. Chili William is not accurate, but cute nonetheless. No, but the igloo he built was accurate. That's right. And Josh, since we're talking igloo's, here's what a naive person might say. Why in the world, if you're freezing cold out in Alaska, would you build a room out of ice and snow to sit in? Yeah. How warm could that be? It would take somebody pretty naive to say something like that, though. You know how warm it could be? Up to 40 degrees warmer than it is outside of the igloo, buddy. Yes. And why, Chuck, where are these furnaces coming from? Well, your body, for one human body is a pretty good furnace. And when you cut down the wind chill, you're going to take a big bite out of the cold. You put a couple of warm Inuit bodies in there and imagine these are big, tough dudes anyway. They're probably just, like, exuding warmth. It will radiate out and insulate. The igloo will insulate that heat in. Right? It traps the heat. Yeah. So, I mean, if you're talking negative 40 degrees, that's really cold. But if you could bring that up to zero, that's still cold. But it ain't like, negative 40, which is the same in Celsius and fahrenheit. Good point. So the snow is an insulator, right? Yeah, it cuts down on the wind. The melting, that's the other thing, too. Yeah. When you build an igloo and don't worry, we're about to give you step by step instructions on how to build an Igloo, we should get Alex on the horn. Yeah. Really, bro. At the very least, you can verify it, right? That's right. When you build an Igloo, the sun, when it does come out, or if it's out the whole time, especially during the day, it will heat up enough, possibly to melt some. Refreeze at night, which is what you want. Melt refreeze. And your body heat also may melt it from the inside out some. And then when you go out to hunt, it'll refreeze every time. More likely. It's probably the more likely scenario. So this thawing and freezing and thawing and freezing basically turns the igloo into this really strong and insulated structure. And badaboom, bada bing. You got yourself an insulated place to fish, or at least to bunk down while you're fishing. Yes, these days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical gold mine for identity thieves. And stealing your identity, it turns out, can be dangerously easy. Which is not good. But now it's easy to protect yourself with LifeLock by Norton. Yes, LifeLock monitors your info and alerts you to potential identity threats. And if you are a victim of identity theft, a dedicated US based restoration specialist will work to fix it. Identity thieves have had it easy for far too long. Now, finally, it's your turn. Just remember, no one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses. But everyone can save up to 25% off their first year by going to LifeLock. comStuff that's LifeLock.com stuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock identity theft protection starts here. You know you're a pet mom when you growl back during playtime and you insist on feeding them the highest quality food you can find. Enter Halo. Holistic made with only whole meat, no meat meals, and probiotics. For digestive health, our first ingredient is always responsibly sourced protein raised with no antibiotics. And bonus, our fruits and veggies contain no GMOs. It's a lifestyle and a pet bomb thing. Find Haloholistic at chewie. Amazonandhalopeets.com so, Josh, are we at the point where we tell people how to build an Igloo? I don't think we can delay it any longer. Oh, we can? OK. You mentioned that Igloos are kind of out of fashion with the Inuit these days. Yeah, not as common, but they are becoming increasingly common at ski resorts, apparently. Yeah. If you are such a ski junkie and that you want to just basically wake up, roll out of bed, put on your skis and start skiing immediately, they have igloo is usually on the slopes that you can rent igloo villages, that you can rent an igloo overnight or for as long as you stay there. Well, pretty sweet. Or if you're feeling squarely, you can build one yourself. True death. Is that a segue? It is if you've done it before, like your cousin in law, it could take as little as an hour. If you don't know what you're doing, it could take six or more. Yeah. I want to ask Alex, actually, how long it took, because the first pictures are at night, so it clearly took them longer than a few hours yes. When I saw that someone could build one an hour. I don't know about that. I don't believe that. I'm pretty sure if you were raised as an Inuit and you were, I don't know, in your 20s, I'll bet you could build an igloo in an hour. Yeah, maybe so. Yeah. And it looks like Alex and his buddies used a tub, like a shallow plastic tub, to pack the snow down that's smart. And form the blocks. Yeah. So the way we're going to teach you how to do it requires a snow shovel, which looks an awful lot like a drywall, or not a snow shovel. It does require a snow shovel, but a snow saw. Yes. Which looks an awful lot like a drywall saw. Indeed. And basically, you want to go find some ice, like you were saying, you normally wouldn't find ice or snow that's just fallen. It's going to work for an igloo. Yeah. You want to find wedding hard packed like that's, more solid, the better snow. Right. And what do you want to do with that snow, Chuck? Well, you want to use your little saw. You want to cut large blocks. I guess you can vary the size, but they recommend, in the Complete Wilderness Training Guide, they recommend 3ft long, 15 inches high, eight inches deep. Right. So once you get your blocks, you want to start building, put your foundation in a circle and start building up that foundation, working your way up as you go, decreasing in size as you go. And you also have to shape it at a slant, obviously, or you're just going to have an ice block tower and not a domed roof. Correct. Yeah. You want to shape it at a slightly, like you said, but you also want to make the blocks decrease in size as you get bigger. Decrease and overlap. See, you did some brickwork, and it's sort of the same principle there. I never built anything that was tall enough that I had to really build it back to stagger it. And when I did, it was like that premade castle rock wall that's designed to set back. Right. So it didn't require any thought. But yes, if you kind of have something that's technically at a slight incline, it will provide structure if you can get it to connect right. As a dome, like Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome. Exactly. Very super strong structure. So as you're building this and you start to make the dome part, it should support itself if you've done it right. But you can always use sticks on the inside to support it temporarily until you get the dome complete, and then it's all pressing against each other. And then how do you finish it off with the top? Well, you want to take a chunk of ice. What you're going to have is this perfect dome with some variation of a perfect dome. Right. And there's going to be a central hole in the top, right? Yeah. Like a little chimney. Yes. But you actually want to plug this one. That's right. This is one chimney you want to plug. And you cut another block that's going to be bigger than the hole, and you want to shape it so that it basically fits this hole that's left over, which should be something like an octagon, maybe, roughly shape. And you want to fit it in there perfectly. You want to cut it, shape it, put it in there so it's in there perfectly packed in there. Because this is your load bearing keystone, basically. Yes. As long as that thing is intact, everything else should be fine. Right. You lose that, you're in a lot of trouble. Right. And then after that, you're ready to start insulating it, filling in the cracks. You want to shovel snow on top of everything, and the loose snow is what you want now. You want to work with it. Yes. And you're going to use some insulated gloves on your hands or else you're going to lose your hands to gangrene in a few days. Prospect. Sure. And you fill in the cracks with the snow. You just kind of smooth it over with your hands so that the snow packs into the cracks and all of a sudden this separate block pattern is lost. And you have basically a smooth dome. Yes. Is what you're going for. Right. Yeah. And at the end, it's a lot harder to try and build a door into your thing. It's easier just to build the dome and then cut your door out after it's finished. That's a good point as well. And a lot of people, a true aficionado of the Igloo, would build a little L shaped entryway tunnel because that will cut down on the wind coming in even more. Yeah. Because the wind has to turn a corner. That's right. So you cut that hole in whatever shape you want, whether a key shape or a lot of people use, like a tent shape. An aframe. Yeah. And then you cover it with blocks. You make like an entryway shelter, basically. And then, like you said, you might want to put it as an L, and then you dig a hole into the snow so that you can get into it. But basically, you're kind of crawling into the entryway, it looked like. Yeah. Right. And then after that, you get inside and there's a very vital step that you might not think of. Yes. And that is drilling air hole. Yes. Because once you've packed it full of loose snow and it's basically mortared, and the thing melts in thaws and freezes and thaws and freezes and becomes even more of a solid structure. If you don't have air holes, you'll suffocate and die. Yes. Especially if you do something like bring a camp stove or a Coleman lantern or that kind of thing in there. We don't want to see that happen. No. I don't even know that we should recommend bringing a stove at all. Yeah. Which this article says you can, as long as you have enough air holes for ventilation. I just say build it for fun and just keep the noxious fumes out of it altogether. Yeah. I should say that this article also specifically says that it is in no way, shape, or form meant to be a comprehensive guide to billing and Igloo. It's just the basic. Yeah. There are some good how to photos, though, if you want to check it out. For sure. Yeah. Some really good illustrations right. As how stuff works is lousy with that's. Right. So I guess that's it for Igloos. They are everything we thought they were and more. Yeah. A lot of times you think, oh, I bet you it's just our interpretation that you see in the movies, all these things. But they really do look just like that, and they're built just like that. And not a lot of surprises here, which is kind of reassuring. In a lot of ways. It makes me feel good. Yeah. So I guess if you want to catch up on your Chilly Willy, we won't blame you. I found plenty on YouTube. He's adorable. More butter, more butter. More syrup. More syrup. I don't remember that one. That was a good one. No, it's a parquet commercial. Are you sure? Yeah. Okay. Well, check out Chile Willie and be sure to go on to How Steve Workss.com and type in Igloo igloo. And it's going to bring up a pretty cool step by step illustrated guide to building your own Igloo sans camp stove with air holes. That's right. I think did I say handy search bar? You just did. Okay. Well, then it's time for a listener mail. Yeah, this isn't so much a mail. This is something I want to mention a long time ago and kind of forgot. Remember the lifestyle podcast? Yes. You want to do a quick recap of what a Life Straw is. Yeah. So Life Straw is a portable device for purifying water, and it's cheap, it's easy to hang on to, it lasts for up to a year, and if you are in a place that's infested with kidney worm, you still need to drink water. But you don't want guinea worm. Lifestyle helps. And I think the Rotarians are big into getting them all over the world. They are. And so is Stephen Neiman. And Steven wrote on our Facebook, well, after the lifestyle podcast, that he was pretty blown away by this thing. He thought it's a pretty cool invention and that he and his company, the result of this podcast, their company is going to donate a minimum of 6000 life straws this year in 2011. Nice. 6000. Not bad, huh? Yeah. And I asked him if he minded us mentioning this. He said not at all. His company is 11th hour search in Alexandria, Virginia. It's a very small staffing firm, so it's not like even some huge company that's doing this, right. And he said his wife works in Haiti for the US. And that's where he is right now. I don't know if he still is a little while ago. And they like the podcast on Haitian voodoo and so good on you, brother. Donate in 6000 livestocks. That is awesome. Yeah. So we just want to recognize more than awesome. I mean, that's very cool. That's got to be worth a t shirt, I would say. So. Steven, you got his email? I don't have his email, but it feels right in. Yeah, right in. Send us your email, Steven, and your t shirt size. Sorry it took so long to mention this. It got lost in the shuffle. Well, good going, Chuck. If you are saving the world, we want to know how because we want to send you a t shirt. If you're saving the world in a verifiable and inspirational manner in a dramatic fashion, yes, you can go onto our Facebook page, facebook. Comstuffyou know you can tweet to us syskpodcast and you can send us an email. Stuffpodcast at how stuffffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Want more housestuffworks? Check out our blog on the housetofworks.com. Homepage. A summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Erkart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen. Today. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural sciencebased nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leaving brands? Find Halo elevate at Pepco pep Supplies plus and select Neighborhood Pet stores." | |
The Great Nuclear Winter Debate of 1983 | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-great-nuclear-winter-debate-of-1983 | At the height of the Cold War, a group of concerned
scientists promoted their findings on the horrific aftereffects of nuclear war
and were accused of fearmongering. But were they right after all? | At the height of the Cold War, a group of concerned
scientists promoted their findings on the horrific aftereffects of nuclear war
and were accused of fearmongering. But were they right after all? | Thu, 17 Sep 2015 13:53:58 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=13, tm_min=53, tm_sec=58, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=260, tm_isdst=0) | 51983764 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. Jerry's over there somewhere off in the ether. But I don't think it's on ether. Just in the ether. Oh, man. We try not to breathe right now. We had a tank of ether in here. Be a much different podcast. Josh and Chuck's Ether cats. Do they put those things in tank? Oh, I don't know. Surely, yeah. Right now, is it, like, in the bottle still? Like the don't know. Yeah, I think you just have it in a little milk bottle, you put it in a rag, put it in your face, and then go to Happy Town. Yeah, exactly. If there's any pharmacists out there that want to set us straight, let us know how ether comes these days. It's probably a gas. Yes. I imagine it's not like Henry Thompson. I think we talked about it before in anesthesia probably ether gas. What a weird start. Yeah. That has nothing to do with what we're about to talk about. I was trying to relate it, but there really is nothing. One of my favorite topics of all time nuclear holocaust from the Cold War. Yeah, we did one on the Cold War. Did not. We we've done several. Yeah, we've batted around this thing, but we've never done a full nuclear holocaust podcast, have we? No. And nuclear holocaust. That's not quite right. That's not the right way to put it, because what we're talking about is actually the after effects from a nuclear holocaust. Isn't that the Holocaust? If you want to be a purist, the nuclear holocaust is the immediate destruction as a result of exploding nuclear bombs over, like, population centers and stuff. Oh, I didn't know that. I thought it was the whole kitten caboodle, I should say. If you're a purist and you want to say it from my opinion, that's what a nuclear hall cost is. Okay, I think we know what's going on here. Got it? Yeah. Robert Lam wrote this stuff to blow your mind. Yeah. I have to say, I said, man, way to go on. Now, that's a good one. You told him that? I did. I actually uttered those words. What do you say? Thanks, ma'am. That's nice. But the thing that gets me about nuclear winter, which we will talk about in depth, what fascinates me about it just as much as the nuclear winter itself, Chuck, is the controversy debate that arose from it throughout the 80s. There's a huge debate. Debate on the severity yeah. Debate on whether it's something to worry about or not. Yes. Well, I looked up because I was like, does anyone think that this is a myth? An outright myth? And from what I saw in my research, is that no, this is fact. It's just a dispute. What's a dispute is the scenario and the severity of what would happen. But no one says, like, no, there would be no nuclear winter. There would be no problems after a nuclear bomb trial. So there used to be like back in the early 80s, when this was a huge new thing, there was a group of scientists who were hawkish very much in favor of the US building up its nuclear arsenal as much as possible and started basically a PR letter writing campaign to discredit the science behind this. And these guys don't know what they're talking about. So what do they think? That the bomb would drop and then the next day the birds would be out? They said initially, yeah, that was kind of their position, was just to poke holes in this and that it wasn't legitimate science. Right. Yeah. It didn't sound like and then ultimately, the whole point was that this came from an argument over whether the US should engage in the SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, which is the lasers that shoot nukes from space. Right. They shoot down nukes from space. We did a show on that, didn't we? We did. That was another one. Yeah, but that's what the whole thing was. It's the context of it. It was an argument over either nuclear disarmament, which Carl Sagan and his friends were in favor of hippies, or nuclear proliferation. And the Star Wars program warmongers. Right. The hippies versus the war monger. But the weird thing is this debate, Chuck, took place in the pages of, like, academic journals, and it ended up being a fight between science and science deniers. Yeah. It sounds like these scientists that you mentioned might have had their coffers full from the US government, potentially, or private industry or something like that. Yeah. And the thing is, they use this old chestnut. So if you're a scientist, there's no certainty in anything you say. Sure. It can always be disproven. Remember, we talked about this in the Scientific Method episode? Yeah. All your stuff can be disproven, ultimately, which is why it's just a theory. So no science is going to be like, this is 100% certain. Right. Well, these other scientists who are poking holes in it would point out these guys aren't even certain, which means that there's disagreement over whether we'll have a nuclear winter or not. So they were being very disingenuous in poking holes in it by saying, these scientists aren't even certain in their findings. Well, no scientists are certain in their findings. So dangerous. But to the public, you think, oh, well, these scientists can't say that they're certain, so they must not know what they're talking about, for that's dangerous. That's why we're at three minutes to midnight on the Doomsday Clock. Exactly. Right. Because some people might say, well, you're not certain, so let's just not act fast enough. And I should say also check. We should prepare for a lot of listener mail because this is a conservative flashpoint. Nuclear winter is long standing. One great. Sounds good. Let's talk about this. All right, well, Robert starts where most people should start when talking about nuclear weather, and that's in the atmosphere. It's a very finely tuned system we have. I want to say it's like homeostasis, but it's not people. So I guess it's like an eco stasis, where the sun, just enough sun, gets through to make the Earth habitable and proliferate with plants and water and humans and animals and all kinds of great stuff. Too much sun, even by a little bit, could be catastrophic. And too little sun, but even by a little bit, could be catastrophic. Right. So thanks to humans, we've struck a great balance here with the sun. A great deal that I made. You can shine the sunshine. Too much sun. Yeah. And it's working out awesome. The idea of nuclear winter is that there would be enough ash from and smoke. It's really not the fallout from the nuclear bombs themselves, from what I understand. It's more the smoke from the resulting fires that would cause the blacking out of the sky and the sun not getting through. It's actually all of it. Yeah. But everything I read across the board said it's almost 100% the smoke that goes on. Yes, it's true. You shouldn't negate the idea that nuclear radiation poisoning is going to kill a lot of people as a result. But the blacking out of the skies is due to the smoke from fire. Exactly. From the bomb that happened. Right. So this whole thing, the context of it again comes from the 70s, right, chuck yeah. And 80s. Yeah. Back in, I think, a group issued a statement that said there probably wouldn't be that big of a fallout from nuclear explosions. A few years after that, another group, I think the first group was the National Academy of Sciences. Another group said, you know what? We don't think that's exactly true. We think that there probably is some sort of there will be something, but our models are too primitive to say for certain what the fallout would be. Sure. A few years after that, Carl Sagan and his crew got together and said, no, there's going to be serious consequences. And here's what they are. Billions of lives lost. Billions and billions. Right. And one of the things they base this on, this idea on, that if you spew a bunch of smoke or particulate matter into the atmosphere, that it'll have a negative influence on the global climate. Is past history from volcanic eruptions? Yes, most notably. Well, there are a few over the years, but one of the notable ones in the time, then the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia Crackatoa. That volcano was massive, to the tune of 36,000 deaths just from the volcano. And this is in Krakatoa in 1883? Yeah. There's only like, ten people there somehow. It's not like it was super populated. Right. And two thirds of Krakatoa collapsed. The smoke rose up and warmed the global temperature. Global by 2.2 degree. No, it lowered it yeah, lowered. Sorry. It took five years for temperatures to return to normal, and it affected this was in Indonesia, and it actually, they think, increased the rainfall in Los Angeles by more than double that next year. Wow. That's in La. In Southern California. So that was the Crackatoa blast from 1883, right? Yeah. And it literally changed the color of the sky for, like, years afterward. The sky was red such that they think the scream, the painting, the screen munch. Yeah. The red sky. They think that's the way this guy looked was because of this volcano. That is so neat. Isn't that crazy? That guy was like, that volcano was crazy. That's what the man is saying. And that's just one of them. What was the other one? In Mount Tambora? Yeah. Indonesia, once again. Yeah. Indonesia's got bad luck with the volcanoes back in the 19th century. And this was actually earlier in 1815. Yeah. I remember learning about this when I was a kid because Ohio got it really bad. A volcano went off in Indonesia in 1815, and the following year, much of the United States did not have a summer. It was actually called the Year without a Summer. And Ohio was affected. Yes. Oh, wow. Yeah. There was, like, snow on the ground in the middle of July. Did you learn that in state history class? I did. I remember that. Georgia State history. That was, like a full course at our school. Yeah. Half of it was just sitting around with the teacher, like, staring off into the distance. Right. I remember ours was just, like, a lot of talk about Crawford Long and the Civil War. Yeah. We didn't talk about Crawford Long and ours. No, this wasn't from Georgia. We talked about Anthony Wayne. The battle of Fallen Timbers. Yeah. Well, that summer without a winter. Year without a summer. I mean, and then there's some, like, canals and locks that donkeys used to pull barges on. Yeah. I just remember Crawford Long and a lot of racism, basically. Yeah, that's right. So that was Mount Tambora, the year without summer. There have been other events, like when the oil fields burned during the war in the early 90s. Yeah. Apparently, Carl Sagan predicted basically a nuclear winter from that. Yeah. That pan out. Yeah. That's where they take some flak. It was not nearly as bad, the fallout from that smoke, as Sagan predicted. No, but what can you do but predict you're going to be wrong? Yeah. Surely you're going to be wrong. It doesn't mean you should be like, oh, well, that smoke didn't do much, so let's start building nuclear bombs again. Yeah, well, that's the whole thing, Chuck. I am so glad you said that, because that's the whole mad thing to this argument. What are you arguing in favor for? If you're arguing against the idea of making what precisely are you arguing for? Yeah, like, it won't be that bad. We'll talk a little bit more about it later on in the show. What some people have argued about. But it seems like what you say ultimately you're arguing in favor of more nuclear weapons. That seems wrongheaded by definition. Well, not even just that, but using them won't be as bad as you say. Right? Not just have them, but well, the follow up wouldn't be as bad as they all predict, so use them. You almost get the impression, like, they're just like, well, let's just find out. Let's just shoot a couple of find out what happened. Come on. You'll see them, right? And then as they die from smoke inhalation, they say, I was wrong. What have I done? Oh, goodness. Let's take a break. All right, let's do and we'll come back and we'll talk a little bit more about the nuclear winter. I said nuclear ingest, but I know I heard the break. That was good stuff. I just want to point that out, because some people might think I was serious. No, and now that you said it was ingest, some people are like, what? Jerk. Maybe that man was my hero. I posted something on Facebook the other day that said, you're sciancing wrong as a joke. And people called me out. They're like, you can't use science as a verb. I thought in the last century you could use, like, everything as a verb. Yeah, that's true. Yes. People have gotten extremely serious, extremely self serious. I'm a not self serious person, so I don't fit in today's world. You're a relic. You're an old dinosaur. Stupid, laughing dinosaur. Speaking of dinosaurs yes, what? Well, I guess we should talk about the KT Boundary Extinction Event, which was some people, some in science have theorized that's what happened to the dinosaurs was there was an impact winter, not quite the same as a nuclear winter, but the same effect as a nuclear winter due to the impact of an asteroid. That's right. And that would have happened at the border of the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, again, when the dinosaurs all died off. Still inexplicably there's? No definitive answer. Again, though, we're talking science. No one found a journal diary today. Something is streaking through the sky, and it's making everyone nervous. It's very hot now, but I noticed the dinosaurs are dying, so that's good. Oh, this is a dinosaur writing. In my opinion, that's bad. Right? Okay, so let's talk nuclear winter, right? You kind of said it earlier, but the whole idea behind nuclear winter is that if you shoot off nuclear bombs, especially a bunch of them and you have to understand at the time that the scientists were really starting to debate this, there were, like, 700 nuclear warheads, many times more nuclear warheads in existence in the early 80s than they were today. And when they started debating them, they really took up this cause because the Reagan administration was saying, we need the Star Wars program because we can prevent almost with 90% Soviet nuclear attack. Right. With laser guns. Exactly. And so the scientists who were concerned, scientists, basically anti nuke scientists, said, wait a minute, there's something that you guys aren't thinking through here. If you do that, the Soviets are going to say, well, wait a minute. If this thing is 90% effective, then we need to build up our nuclear arsenal so that when we shoot everything we got at them still, that 10% will totally annihilate the United States, that the presence of the Star Wars program was going to put the nuclear arms race into even higher gear than it already was. So they very much took it upon themselves to tackle this with science, but also publicize it and sell it to the public. And it's that that stuck in the crawl of a lot of other scientists, particularly scientists who were in favor of nuclear proliferation as a matter of national defense. That's right. The point of it is, when they tackled this, they said, here's the big problem with it. If you shoot off a bunch of nuclear bombs, a lot of nuclear bombs which could totally go off as far as the nuclear war is concerned, it's going to cause a lot of smoke to enter the atmosphere. And that is where this domino effect is going to create this global catastrophe. And the whole outcome of it is based on the number of nukes that you shoot off, which is basically what Carl Sagan and his buddy Richard Turco divided the different types of nuclear winter into. That's right. Mr. Sagan and Mr. Turco. Are they doctors? Let's just call everyone a doctor. Well, yeah, Carl Sagan was a doctor of astrochemistry, I believe. And Richard Turco. Is he's a veterinarian? I can't remember what he was. They wrote a book called A Path where no man thought A path where no man thought. Right. And it seemed like there would be one more word there. And they have 12345 six scenarios for what a nuclear winter might look like, ranging from minimal to extreme and minimal. Best case scenario, which is just a little bit of a nuclear attack, not many bombs going off, maybe like, let's say, Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Kilotons yeah. That means that there will be minimal cloud cover, not much environmental impact globally, and the targeted areas would be wiped out, of course, but the world itself would not have big consequences. Right. Atmospherically. So if you are talking nuclear war, especially a cold War nuclear war, that was a fairly unlikely scenario by the time the early 1980s rolled around and people started talking about the concept of a nuclear winter, those like Hiroshima and Nagasaki level nuclear bombs were, like, attached to the average fighter jet. They were considered just tactical. You just could shoot them off on a battlefield if you needed to. So the idea that it would just amount to that is unlikely. Yeah, it was, but it would be nice. That's the best case scenario. They're trying to cover all avenues here. Yes. Number two is marginal, and that's a few detonations, again, in the Northern Hemisphere. And they said it would lower the temperature by a few degrees, and there would be some crops in some agriculture that suffered and probably some famine, but it would not. Oh, black rain. Of course. Yeah. Who wants that? Did happen in Hiroshima. Yes. They drank it and died from drinking it. Yes. Because it was radioactive rain. Yeah, but they drank it because they were thirsty. Because they had no water. Yes. It's devastating. You and everyone should have to go to the city of Hiroshima. It is amazing what they've done to preserve what happened there as, like, a teaching lesson for everyone. It's really moving. We should have one of those here. We should. Instead, people are like, yeah, Japan forced the US. To drop the bomb. It's fact. Right. Which is not correct. Right. So black rain would happen in that marginal scenario. Man, this is a really political episode, isn't it? I think anytime you tackle nuclear war, it's going to be divisive. Yes. Because some people think it's awesome. Nuke. The whales got a nuke something. Things below the equator in that scenario in the Southern Hemisphere would be just fine. So here's something that I found really interesting and wrong in this analysis of it. Sagan, I guess he was strictly talking about atmospheric effects. Yeah. But he mentioned, like, famine and stuff like that. The thing is, that would have a global effect, for sure. Yeah. The rest of the world depends in large part on North American wheat and corn. So if there's a nuclear fallout in North America that affects our crop yields dramatically and causes fame in the US. It's going to cause fame and elsewhere, too. Yeah, I think what he's saying is, as far as Climatologically speaking, what he and Turco are saying is as long as you're not shooting off nuclear bombs in the Southern Hemisphere, it's going to, Climatologically speaking, be unaffected, or largely unaffected, because the wind goes down to the equator and then back up. Like the equator separates the hemispheres as far as the atmosphere is concerned. Yeah, totally. There would still be global troubles. Yes. But in reading all these scenarios, it made me really want to move to Australia. Well, that's another thing, too. How many people would be like, I need to get out of the United States, so I moved down to Mexico, or, I'm moving down to Brazil, or I'm moving down to Australia? And then the infrastructure in those countries are just super stressed because of the Northern Hemisphere that survived is suddenly moving down to the Southern Hemisphere. Yeah. Another widespread effect. Mexico would help you too much, though. Well, weren't they, like, super helpful in independence Day. Was it Independence Day or the morning? No, the day after tomorrow. Everybody starts having to move south because North America has just frozen ice sheet. Yes, but I just mean as far as you'd have to go pretty far further south than Mexico if you want to escape the atmospheric fallout. Oh, you're right. So, Ecuador. Yeah. What is it? Like half of Africa and South America in the southern hemisphere. Yes. Probably not half. Yeah. So the Northern Hemisphere would show up at the Southern Hemisphere's doorstep. It would be like Christmas in July. We'll get used to it. That's right. Your drain goes the other way when you release the water from the tub. Yeah, Nedo. And I know Christmas doesn't fall in July. It was a metaphorical statement everywhere. I get you. Nominal nuclear winter is number three. That is what they consider the low end, full scale nuclear war. Right. But still full scale. 6000 to 12,000 nuclear weapons. That's all just six to 12,000 nuclear bombs. Right. And we're talking a megaton or more bombs. And a megaton was, I think, 50 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined. Wow. So 12,000 times 50 of those for this kind of nominal nuclear war? Yeah. That's a lot of zeros. Yeah. They predicted noon sunlight would be about a third of what it was. Global temperature drops of 18 degrees. That's bad news, my friend. It would destroy a lot of the ozone layer. And again, the Southern Hemisphere wouldn't experience major climactic change to cut to the Southern Hemisphere. They're all at the beach. There's like tropical music playing, but they have no wheat. Who needs wheat when you got wrong drinks? That's a T shirt. Josh clarke said that one. Yeah. Number four, substantial. That is full scale nuclear war. Freezing temperatures, big time fall out. The whole day would be like it's overcast. Billions of humans dead. Billions. Billions and billions. Species going extinct. And finally, possible damage to the Southern Hemisphere. Finally. Possibly. Okay. And then the last two we can just bunch together, I think severe and extreme. Less than 1% of the sunlight getting through for months and months on end. Global temperature dropping, no photosynthesis happening. Right. Every crop dying. All life perishing. Let's just go ahead and wrap it up right there. Yeah. As Robert puts it, most of the planet's life would perish within the chilly confines of this black atmospheric tomb. Yeah. He's got a little lovecraft in him. He does. This unnamable tomb. Chuckers, let's take another break and then we will come back and talk about the fallout from nuclear winter theory. So, like we said, Carl Sagan and his friends got together and basically took it upon themselves to educate the public about the potential catastrophe that could happen as a result of nuclear war. Everybody before was like, yeah, that would really suck to be in a city that a nuclear bomb went off on. Yes, but maybe it wouldn't be my city. I live in Skinned City, New York. No one's going to bomb Scott Nectar, so I'm probably going to be okay. These guys said, hey, Western civilization, not just in the US. But also the USSR. That's not necessarily the case. You too will be affected. There's going to be big problems after a nuclear war, so much so that let's make sure that our leaders never do this. Right. Wake up, basically, is what they were doing. And so Sagan and his friends created a paper, and it's now called the TTAPS Paper, after all of their names, right. Turco Tune, ackerman, Pollock and Sagan. Okay. And they wrote this paper and had it published in Science, the preeminent scientific journal in the United States. Yeah, it was a big deal. They also held a very well publicized conference, and Carl Sagan, apparently without the group's knowledge or blessing, went off and also wrote a piece in Parade magazine. Oh, wow. Yeah. To make sure that every Dick and Jane in the US. Knew about this. It was like a three page article about the nuclear winter, which is a new term at the time, complete with illustrations where the Earth was like this dead, lifeless, what's called like a gray chalk billiard ball, basically just really scary stuff. Sure. And then he also simultaneously wrote another longer piece that was in foreign affairs that's a little more wonky. So Sagan went off after writing this scientific paper and publicized it to policy makers and to the American public. Yet this is the early 1980s, this is before all the sciences, and this is from the first paper, before the first papers conference was even held. Right? Yeah. And a lot of people, including people who were on his side about this issue, were really mad at him because it opened up this group and the whole idea of nuclear winter to allegations that they were fear mongering and that they were basically trying to sell the public on science, which is that's not what science does. Right. Yes. Pure science is about research and coming up with facts, and whether they're popular or unpopular, it doesn't matter. Science is science and fact is fact. Right. A good theory is a good theory. But these guys, again, were concerned that something really bad could happen, and they went to the trouble of taking it upon themselves to advertise it to the public. But again, they can go off and do this. It really opened them up for a lot of allegations and debate that took place afterward. Yeah. But some say that their work and the TTAPS report actually did help cool things down in the Cold War a little bit. Yeah. And it wasn't just the American scientists. They work with Soviet scientists as well. And apparently sometimes it went good, sometimes it didn't go so well. But both sides were working on this issue, and the fact that it got so much publicity actually created a firestorm of back and forth in the scientific community. And this issue ended up getting really well studied. Yeah, it did. And seven years later, they revised the report in 1000 1990. And it had new, more modernized data and it wasn't quite as dire, which some critics were like, all right, this is a little more reasonable. Yes. They revised it to call it the nuclear Autumn. Yeah. And everyone loves autumn. Yes. Autumn is great. Autumn all the time. That would be wonderful. Oh, man, that would be wonderful. That'd be Chuck's World. And there are disagreements over that still. And basically there's a few variables that are always the factors that are the unknowns. And they're all, to me, kind of four versions of the same variable. Which is we don't know how much smoke there would be. Yes. We just don't know. And number one is how much material is there to burn? The idea is you drop a bomb on a city, a nuclear bomb, and everything catches on fire and that creates tremendous amounts of smoke. But since these are all theoretical and you don't know what would happen if you dropped something the size on, let's say, a major city like New York, what would be there to burn? Like we just don't know. Yes. So if you dropped it on the city, is it an old city that isn't super modern? Sure. And therefore isn't built out of, like, lots of plastic that can get into the atmosphere and really mess things up? Yeah. Like the really bad stuff. Yeah. If it's an old city, maybe the burning wouldn't be so bad even after a nuclear holocaust. Or maybe you're not shooting nuclear bombs two cities, but to other nuclear installations that are out in the middle of nowhere in Nebraska. Right. There's been like, 2000 nuclear bombs detonated. But they only two on the cities. Right, exactly. Everything else has been out over the ocean and out in the middle of nowhere and there's been no fire. Right. The assumption is that, though, if you shot a nuclear bomb at a modern city, a lot of really toxic smoke would be produced. That's probably the worst case scenario in both the immediate nuclear holocaust and the fallout, the nuclear winter as a result because of all the smoke that would be created. I mean, look at the fallout from 911. And that was two buildings, right? Yeah. The second variable is how much would remain in the atmosphere and then how much goes back to the Earth. Yeah. No one really knows that at all how much sunlight would be deflected. Again, just theorizing. And you can go back and plug in these numbers. The problem is, if you're a detractor of nuclear winter theory, you would say, that's a guess. Right. Where did you get that number? And you could take every number and come up with a different model for each one. They usually don't do that, but. Even still, it's like, which one is going to be the one? And again, it goes back to how much smoke would there be to begin with? And then finally, when did it happen? If it was actually in winter, perhaps it's not so bad. Yes, nuclear winter. And winter, ironically, is the best case scenario. The best case scenario of the bad scenarios. Right. So they did initially back off of their findings. They said that there could initially be like a 35 to 40 deg drop in global temperatures. It's Celsius. Yeah. So we're talking like 70 degrees, 72 degrees Fahrenheit drop in temperature. And that's full on nuclear war. Yeah. Later on, as they revise their findings, and again, more and more scientists got involved and studied this issue, they came upon what seemed to be a consensus that you could probably count on something like a 15 deg Celsius drop in global temperatures, which would be substantial and could still have widespread effects. Right. Yeah. So from this debate, nuclear winter kind of got settled on. There was a scientific consensus that came about, and there was also consensus that not only would there be huge problems inland, there would be oceanic problems as well, because one of the great casualties of detonating nuclear bombs is the ozone layer. The fireball from the blast burns up nitrogen, converting it to nitrogen oxide. Nitrogen oxide just punches holes, basically chemically burns the ozone layer. So then when all that smoke that's acting as like an umbrella that's blocking out the sunlight falls back to Earth. All that particulate matter falls back to Earth and is radioactive, by the way. Now the sunlight that does come through is way hotter and has way more UV light than it had before the nuclear bombs went off. We had our little delicate balance that's now disrupted. Exactly. The problem with that for the oceans is that that UV light would likely be too intense for phytoplankton at the ocean surface. Yeah. Well, that is the keystone species for the ocean aquatic environments. The ecosystems all start with phytoplankton. Zooplankton feed on phytoplankton, little fish feed on zooplankton, larger fish feed on little fish, and so on and so on. So if you get rid of the phytoplankton, you're in big trouble. Big trouble. So there would be huge ramifications. And science came to a consensus on this, but again, it was attacked very early on by nuclear proliferation hawks as basically being against the interests of United States national security. Right. And then later on, it continued to be attacked. It became a customary traditional flashpoint among conservatives as a great example of the links that hippie environmental scientists will go to, to dupe the American public into being scared about nuclear bombs and just nuclear stuff in general. Like, Michael Crichton famously attacked it in a 2003 speech. And his whole thing, he was very famously a climate denier. He was a climate skeptic until his death. As far as I know he did. Yeah. And he wrote some great books, but he was also, like, contrarian by nature is what he said, as well. But I get the impression that he tended to land on the more conservative, anti environmental side, and on this case, he also attacked the nuclear winter as well. And what he accused these guys of doing is creating science by consensus. Right. That, to me, is just like a one two sucker punch. So the initial scientist that challenged nuclear winter said, you guys can't even agree. There's no consensus. You can't be certain in what you're saying, so therefore, we don't need to take you seriously. So they said, okay, you know what? We're going to get all these scientists around the world together to study this issue, and we're going to come to a consensus. And when they did, years later, guys like Michael Crichton said, you guys are practicing science by consensus and politicizing science. It's not real science. So it's like they were very much damned if they did and damned if they didn't. And ultimately, you just have to kind of decide, is it worth the risk? Maybe we can't say for certain. And at the time, you couldn't say for certain. What's cool is that some of these same climate scientists are still at work, and they have come up with fairly recent models using very sophisticated climate models compared to the stuff they were using back in the even the 90s. Yeah. The stuff they're using now says, actually, we think nuclear winter might be worse than was initially predicted. Yeah. And even if it's not a full scale nuclear war, I think there's not as much worry these days for something like that. What the worry is now is that some rogue nation gets a hold of one, or maybe even not a rogue nation, just India and Pakistan dropped a couple of nuclear bombs. Well, that's the model. And that is entirely possible. I think, of one megaton detonation is what they did this model on, and it had a substantial effect. Yeah, they said ten years of smoke clouds and a three year temperature drop of about 225 degrees Fahrenheit. Which doesn't sound like much, but if you go back and you read that scientist study, his executive summary of the study, he points out that kind of drop ultimately equals a shortened growing season by ten to 20 days. And that lasts ten to 20 days, makes or breaks a crop. Like, that means you can either harvest it or it dies before it matures and can be harvested. So even just a couple of degrees can lead to widespread crop failure. Yeah, but this is just if India and Pakistan shoot 50 bombs at one another in a regional war, it could have that effect around the world. So we mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those are the only places we can look. But like we pointed out, the bombs were so different back then. It's not the best comparison, but as far as looking at what kind of fires could happen, you can't tell a whole lot. In Hiroshima, there were more fires than in Nagasaki, just because of the way the geography is in the two cities. But in neither case did they see a ton of secondary fires. Like, it wasn't blacking out the sky, there was black rain. But apparently, like, a week later, most of that stuff had cleared up. But again, you can't even really compare the two. No, it's a single 21 kiloton bomb. Yeah, exactly. We're talking 50 of those going off in the same area. But that report that you mentioned on, just, like, if India and Pakistan how much was it? Ten megatons? 50. 50? No, it was one megaton. So 50 of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs? Well, it was enough to cause the Atomic Scientists, Science and Security Board to move the Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight. Yeah. And the Doomsday Clock is some people say it's good science, some people say they're fear mongering. But what it is, it's a design that basically says, here's how close we are to destroying ourselves as a civilization. And there are a lot of factors that go into it, like biotechnology or cyber technology. But the main two are obviously nuclear weapons and climate change are the two main things that factor into where the Doomsday Clock sits. I think in the 1950s, they've only changed it how many times? 18 times since it was created. 1947 have they changed the hands on the clock? In the 1950s, it was at two minutes till midnight. In the early 1950s, the best, I think it's been in the early 90s was 17 minutes till midnight. Oh, nice. Yeah. Doesn't that feel good? Yeah, that's a lot of time. Where are we at right now? Right now, we are the closest we've been since 1983. And on January 22 of this year, it was changed to three minutes till midnight is where they sit. And they had a big press release. I'll just read the opening and closing paragraphs. The opening paragraph. In 2015, unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapon modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenal pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity. And world leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe. These failures of political leadership endanger every person on Earth. And then the final paragraph. And there's lots of fun stuff in between, just like, fart jokes and stuff. And then they close. In 2015, with the clock hand move forward to three minutes to midnight, the board feels compelled to add with a sense of great urgency, the probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risk of disaster must be taken very soon. They don't mess around. No. And even though we have been doing a good job of reducing the amount of warheads between the United States and Russia. But things have slowed to a sales pace. Now, from 2009 to 2013, obama cut only 309 warheads from the stockpile. And they're basically saying, we're not doing this as fast as we need to. We need to act now. Yeah, well, there's other people who are saying we need to rebuild our nuclear arsenal because it's aging and rotting and will be useless by 2020 to 2030. How are we going to drop nuclear bombs on people in the future? Right? It's weird. Like, some people are trying to reignite the Cold War. Well, trust me, on both sides, I don't agree with it, but I know that most of those people aren't saying, hey, so we can bomb people so we can keep each other in check. Yes. Which was the Cold War all over again. Get rid of nuclear bombs entirely. We could do that Sagan's whole thing, I should say. And it's funny that he's kind of like the villain of this whole thing, of the whole nuclear winter debate because he's such a revered figure, such a great guy, but he really I purposely made some serious missteps as far as publicizing the results went before they were fully in. But his whole thing was and if you read his foreign policy thing, his article, it's really good. It's not too obtuse, so it's kind of fun to read. But it's called nuclear war and climactic catastrophe. Some policy implications. And he says, we don't know what the right answer is. We don't know if it's entirely possible that nuclear winter, maybe our ideas are overblown or whatever, but he says, I'm not willing to take the chance. Right. Why should we take the chance? That's my thing. Why risk it? Right? So his solution is, how about this US. And USSR? How about you de escalate the arms race deproliferate until you get down to a threshold that science has said, okay, nuclear winter probably couldn't happen beyond this payload, right? Yeah. So even if all the nuclear bombs in the world at this lower number were set off, we still wouldn't go into nuclear winter. Right, but you guys can take out all of your major city centers and still fight your nuclear war, but the rest of the world won't be destroyed by it. Yeah, that was his solution, and no one took him up on it. I've never understood I don't know, man. We'll do one on climate change at some point, too, but I've never understood why people and I get the economics play a factor, but why risking the future of mankind for your ancestors to follow is worth it? A lot of it is fear. Like, a lot of these people who have, over the last decades push for that kind of thing. Like fear. That the US. Will be caught with his pants down, like, genuinely feared the Soviet Union and their heart was in it like that. But it's fascinating to me, this whole, like, basically secret publicity war that's been going on that went on throughout the 20th and it's well into the 21st century. There's a book again I think I mentioned it called Merchants of Doubt that everybody should read. Yeah. And you know what? Save your emails to me because you can still think what you want to think. Yeah, I just personally don't get it. I'm not going to throw stones at you and say you're wrong. I probably should, but I won't because it's not nice to throw stones. It isn't. Chuck, are you good? I'm great. If you want to know more about nuclear winter, you can read this fine article written by Robert Lamb by typing nuclear winter in the search bar@houseupworks.com. Since I said search bar, it's time for listener manual. Oh, no, my friend. It's time for all right. This is the time that we all know and love. When Josh and I read out and say thanks, we give thanks. We should call this Thanksgiving and not administrative details. Okay, ready? No, that's okay. Because Administrative Details is such a weird name. This is long. It's meant to be. So this is when we thank people for the very kind gifts that they have sent us over the months. And dude, I think this goes back all the way to January for me. Oh, man. I've got one for Christmas cookies. The Mona Collantine and Grandma Colentine. I think we always say her name wrong, by the way. No, I think she corrected us and said it was like Valentine. All right, so I think I'm saying it right. Man is going to be so mad at me. Calling Tine. All right. Is the administrative detail music playing? Sounds like it. Great. Can't you hear that? I'll get it started with richard sent us a guide to the round things of the solar system. Very fun. Very nice. I remember that. Yes. Blair sent us a plug in key holder. You come home, plug your keychain in, and you never forget it. It's pretty awesome, actually. You can get them on Amazon. Electric socket, unplugged chain holder. Search for that. It will bring it up. That's right. I got a postcard. Very nice. Postcard from Jeanpierre Bonasco and Stephanie Crick from Port Lockroy, Antarctica. Nice. And it's worth saying, again, thank you to Mona Collantine and Grandma calling time for our Christmas cookies. We look forward to them again this year. Yes, we certainly do. Oh, we've got homemade NuGet from Kristen Ferguson. It's so delicious. I am hooked on that stuff. It's great. You can find her at Solace. Sweet, man. It is so good. Yes. Christian's been sending us this homemade nugget for years and I was always like, Homemade? Nougat, I don't know about that. And then I put it in my mouth. It's amazing stuff. It's really good. And then we also got some sweets from dude, sweet chocolate out of Texas. I think they might be out of Dallas. They sent us really great chocolates, but they also make these incredible marshmallows too. They made a sweet potato marshmallow. Wow. And dude, sweet chocolate. Thank you for those. They were amazing. Yuumi was crazy for those marshmallows like I am for the nougat. That was quite the bounty. I remember that as always. Every Christmas, our buddy Aaron Cooper in Kansas sends us great print outs of these great photoshops that he does of us that he puts online. And you can see them on Internet roundup. Yeah, we even got a t shirts this year of Shay Gavara, Josh and Chuck. So coop, you're the best. That is true, Coop. Mark Allen and the trademarkky team sent us some beautiful jewelry made by female artisans in Southeast Asia and traded fairly awesome key. Our buddy Van Nostrin send us a book. Which book? Well, he's always sending us stuff, so I honestly can't even remember which book. But we have like boxes full of things that he sent. He sent us a CD of the Shaggy philosophy of the world, what's known as the worst album ever recorded. That's a symptom. The problem is my computer doesn't have a CD drive any longer. Have you noticed that it's gone? No. Yes. Computers don't have those any longer. Try to find it on my computer. I defy you. I was like, what's that little slot? And you're like, that's where the tissues come out. It's the coffee cup holder. Our buddy is from Venice is sinking band. So it's LP, sand and lines and a CD. What we do is secret. And there are friends from Athens. Yes, Georgia. Huge thanks to Hillary Lozar who has sent us a lot of cheese over the last year. Some of the best cheese. Flathead Lake cheese. Yeah. Montana, which like they make a hoppy gouda that's to die for. It is very good flathead Lake cheese. And she sent us some awesome tshirts that say mouthfeel on them. Yeah. Bar episode. She's the best. She and her husband Mike have been big time fans. They're very active on our Facebook page. And they drove to Seattle for our show from Montana. Yeah. She's a teacher. Yeah. And they sent you me and Emily earrings. So thanks for that from all of us. That's right. Jerry got nothing. Tommy Luckridge, lucre Lutrich. He sent us a nice letter. The man his last name, you say four times. Well, he's the guy. He's walking from Seattle to New York City. And if you want to follow this, he might be there by now. Tommywalks Tumblr.com. You can check that out. Okay. Huge thanks. For me personally. Dolores no. I don't know if you remember when we did the Hot Wheels episode. Why do I I said that the Hot Wheels I would love to have is this station wagon camper that said Good Time Camper on it. I remember she mailed it to me. That's pretty remarkable. Yeah. So, thank you very much, Loris. That was very nice of you. Yeah. If anyone's listening, my favorite Hot Wheel was the one that had $1,000 stuffed in the body of the car. That's a good one. Stephen Brom, he sent us some currency banknotes. Yeah. Which I've never collected money, but he sent a 1950 $3 certificate, a 1957 series two dollar bill, and an 1874 fractional currency tencent note. Yeah, that was pretty neat. I think you got the ten cent note, didn't you? Because we spent it up. I spent it on candy. No. What's this? It's $0.10, sir. It's a fraction of a note. Meteorologist Michael Erb, who also moonlights as a young adult murder mystery author, sent us a book of one of his murder mysteries. Kevin McLeod in the seaside storm. It's about a little weather, Detective. It's pretty cute. Jeff Peyton sent us a book. Darwin's black box and Bethany at the baseelementd. Baseelement@gmailcom? If you want any of the floor to sell caramel she sent us, we can highly recommend them. And I got one more from both of us. Chuck. Thank you. Dan Kent. Name ring a bell? It does. He sent us the pints of Pliny the Elder. Yes. Thank you, Dan. That's why it rings a bell. You're a top notch human being. I think we met him in San Francisco at our show. Yes, thankfully. The famous world renowned planning the Elder beer. Yes. Which I finally tried, and it was delicious. It is delish. Thank you very much, everybody. We have more if you didn't hear your name, hang tight. We've got probably a couple more episodes worth of administrative details. That's right. Or Thanksgiving is what we're calling it now. And in the meantime, you can get in touch with us if you want to tweet to us, it's S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on Facebook.com. It's facebook. Comsto. Send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyoushouldnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer school's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. 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How Megalodon Worked | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-megalodon-worked | Between 2 to 20 million years ago, the biggest shark with perhaps the most devastating bite of any animal ever ruled the oceans with an iron jaw. Despite its fierceness, megalodon went extinct while other species that swam with it survive today. Why? | Between 2 to 20 million years ago, the biggest shark with perhaps the most devastating bite of any animal ever ruled the oceans with an iron jaw. Despite its fierceness, megalodon went extinct while other species that swam with it survive today. Why? | Tue, 03 May 2016 14:01:44 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=14, tm_min=1, tm_sec=44, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=124, tm_isdst=0) | 31038138 | audio/mpeg | "This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Start building your website today@squarespace.com. Enter offer code stuff at checkout to get 10% off Squarespace. Set your website apart. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W. Chuck Brighton. There's Jerry. This is Josh again. And this is stuff you should know. Jerry, where's yours? Nice. Jerry? Yes. She's trained well. So, Chuck yes. You ever seen Megalodon? No. You haven't? Neither have I. Neither is any human being. Because they're extinct. That's right. But they are pretty awesome. And when they were alive, you would not have wanted to see one anyway. Well, maybe from shore. Maybe until they learn to walk. And you would have been like, oh, I regret coming to the shore today. Caracadon Megalodon. I don't know if that's it. Carcardon. What's that? Kircharadon. I like Kacharadon. That's the official name. And it was a real thing. It's not made up. No, it is not the invention of a cryptozoologist or a Sci-Fi writer. No, it was a real thing. It was a real thing. Giant shark. I mean, so giant. I don't want to overuse the word mind boggling, so I'm just going to say incredibly remarkable. Should we go and just say the size of a school bus? Yeah, I saw the size of a Greyhound bus. It's about the same size, I guess. Yeah. One smells a lot worse than the other. Which 01:00 a.m. I right, the Greyhound. Okay. The school bus just smells like fear and disappointment. The dray out bus smells like all that. Plus days and days of body odor and farts and cigarette butts. Yeah. Have you ever taken a long bus trip? No, I took one from Arizona to Atlanta. It's the worst. Yeah, I think I might have talked about this. It didn't dawn on me until day two. I was like, wait a minute. Nobody is able to shower. We're all just getting stinkier. We're all eating garbage food oh, wait a minute. And farting into our cloth seat. It was awful. How long did the trip take? It feels like it was like three days. You stop every freaking 2 hours because you got to account for however many people on there and it breaks down. Didn't break down. Oh, yeah. You just had to stop a lot for breaks. And we got stopped in Mississippi for a drug dog to come on. Oh, really? Did anybody get in trouble? No, they just randomly stopped for the drug dog? Yes. And this German shepherd jumped all over the seats and they opened up the baggage underneath and he ran all over the place. So I guess then he went home and took a shower. Yeah. He was like, man, get me out of there. I guess smuggling drugs on a bus is actually, when I thought about it, I was like, what a great idea. Yeah. Because it's apparently under the radar yeah. And everybody else's smell is overpowering. The smell of the drugs. I think there probably were tons of drugs on that bus. And the dog was just like, I had \u00a310 of cocaine and they didn't smell that. Just kidding. So, like you really needed to say just kidding. Well, you never know. Kids, listen to this. Yeah, probably especially this one. We want to say hello to all of the 6th grade classes that are listening to this right now. We'd also like to say a special hello to our new sponsor, greyhound Bus Line. Leave the driving to them. So, Chuckers yes. We are talking about the Megalodon, the biggest shark that ever lived. And it may have had from what I can understand, it makes sense, too. If you stop and think about it, it may have had the most devastating is how I've seen it put bite of any animal that ever lived in the history of Earth. Yeah, I would say that's accurate. It was bigger than Trex. Trex is very ferocious, had a very ferocious bite. Ergo, IPSO facto, it was probably more ferocious, bite wise than trex or anything else. Yeah, let's talk about it. All right. Before, like, 400 years ago, people were dumb and they found these fossils of these humongous six inch teeth. Like, a tooth itself is like, larger than a hand, a human hand, like a larger human hand. Again, to put this in perspective, because everybody knows what great white teeth look like about the size of a shot glass. It's a great white tooth. Yeah. Okay, so about two inches. These were six. So three times larger than a great white tooth. And Trex is right in the middle at something like really? Yeah. T rex is at about four inches. So we're talking a Megalodon tooth is 15 CM in length, where great white sharks is about 5 CM. Yeah. That's for a single tooth, just one tooth, very large. And I saw that they actually go up to seven inches as far as what they found. So 400 years ago, people found these fossils and they said, oh, my God, it's a petrified dinosaur tongue. Dragon tongue. Oh, even better. Well, I have dragon snakes and dinosaurs. Okay. Down in my research, I saw dragons, only I believe in dragons 400 years ago. Sure. And then in 1667, Danish anatomist named Nicolas Steno said, these aren't tongues, they're teeth. Don't be stupid. Everybody yeah, these are gigantic teeth. And everybody's like, don't be ridiculous, they're dragon tongues. I'm wearing one around my neck as we speak, and I use it in my potions along with eye of newt, probably. So, yeah, apparently they did use it in medicine. Oh, I'm sure you find something that big, it's got to have great powers. Short when you grind it up and snort it. So they found these teeth over the years and these fossils, not only just the teeth, but something called sentra C-E-N-T-R-A. It's not vertebrae, but it's a part of the spine that doesn't deteriorate. Right. Because here's the problem. A shark skeleton is made up almost entirely of cartilage. So no matter how big it is, over time, that cartilage is going to break down and return to the dust on the bottom of the sea floor. That's right. And you'll never know what was ever there. But luckily, those teeth in the center are made of harder stuff, and the teeth actually become fossilized. And there's another one of my favorite episodes that just flies under the radar. Fossils. Fossils was great. And that's an old one. So you remember the fossilization process is where the individual atoms of this stuff are basically replaced by stone, and the thing literally turns to stone. So anything organic in it is replaced by stone, and it becomes fossilized in that sense. So that's why something like a tooth could survive. Amazing. It becomes stone. And apparently the same thing goes with the Sentra. So taking Megalodon teeth and Megalodon Sentra, they started making calculations and measurements and figuring out, like, oh, my God, this thing was enormous. Yeah. And we've mentioned the trex and dinosaurs a couple of times. If you're picturing in your head dinosaurs roaming the Earth and the Megalodon swimming in the ocean, fighting one another. Yeah. They didn't overlap by about 45 million years, so it wasn't even close. And of course, humans, we haven't been around that long at all in the grand scheme. No. Homo sapiens, maybe 100,000 years or so. Yeah. So obviously we were not there during the time of the Megalodon either. So our opening bit about standing on the beach watching them, it was jokes. It's stank of BS, just humor. So dinosaurs were around from 200 million years ago to 65 million years ago when the big asteroid hit, and then Megalodon was from 20 million years ago to about 2 million to one and a half million years ago, it seems like. Yeah. So, yeah, absolutely no overlap whatsoever. And I was just helping out a 6th grade class, just so you mentioned before. The scientists were left with quite a task. It's not like finding 80% of dinosaur's bones and saying, well, we can put it together. They didn't have a lot to go on with just the centra in the teeth, but they're much smarter than we are, so they were able to do so. Yes. And one of the things that the Sentra actually shows, too, is growth rings. Right. So just like a tree, sharks actually have a signature of growth, I guess you'd call it, like a tree ring on their central, on these kind of vertebrae like structures. That's key. They get one every year. Every season, when it changes from, I think, warm to cold, they get a little growth ring. And so if you're an ichthyologist or a paleontologist or a paleoic theologist specifically, you could look at one of these things and be like, oh, well, this megalodon lived to 150 years old. 150 rings. Yeah. And apparently, wide light rings means you grew faster as a megalodon, and narrow dark rings means you grew a little slower. So they can look at these growth rates in the age of death and just understand a little bit more about the great journey to extinction. Right. So you, too, will understand a little bit more about the great journey to extinction right after these messages. So check. They found teeth. Yeah. And they found teeth, actually, all over the world. There's a lot it's an amazing amount of stuff that they were able to glean from just finding some teeth and some sentra here. And one of the things that they figured out from the teeth is that, wow, we found teeth all over the world. In Europe, in India in Japan in North America. South America, africa. Australia. Basically, they've been found around every continent except for Antarctica. And I would guess that if you could dig down through the ice sheets around Antarctica, you would probably find some megalodon teeth because it was, like, very different a million years ago down there, as far as I know. Yeah. You like living in South Carolina? Nice coastal beach scene there. Imagine the megalodon swimming around megalodon. That's exactly what happened in 2009. Some paleontologists from a university in Florida I'll just say that I'm very generous of you. They discovered some fossils, and these specifically were interesting because they were all little baby megalodons. It was a nursery. Yeah. And they discovered the same thing off the coast of South Carolina, which, if you know how big something is when it dies and you know how big it is when it's born, just add them together and divide by two, and you have a pretty good idea of what its life was like. And when they were little babies, they were just 20ft long. Yeah. Isn't that cute? They figured out did you say that nursery was found in Panama for those researchers? Yeah. And then I think the other one is off South Carolina. Right. So they figured out from these teeth that the megalodon infant was as big as a normal size great white shark adult. Like a pretty big great white yeah. That's, like, on the larger side. Yeah. That's amazing. 20ft long are the babies. Yeah. That's like Baby Huey, basically, but as a shark. So this means, clearly, this is the apex predator of its time. And it probably went everywhere because it could because nothing threatened. It could eat whatever it wanted to. And all things suggest that they ate a lot of whales, baleen whales. They found teeth marks on whale bones. They even found teeth stuck in whale fossils. Yeah. Pretty exciting. Know what happened there? They were in the middle of a meal yeah. When they got wiped out or they lost a tooth and it went down with the whale. Well, it said teeth, though, like, oh, maybe they just lost it, but maybe it was like me and it bit into a chicken bone and just trying to drop a deep was that what happened, a chicken bone? The second one broke off at a Falcon's game. It didn't hurt, right? You told us about that. It was so weird. I was like, well, my tooth just broke in half. Okay, as long as it didn't hurt. And I went and sat back down to my seat and watched passed out from the pain that suddenly swarmed. No, there was no pain. The only pain was watching the Falcons this season. Yeah. Seriously. So they weighed between one five and 100 tons and they could eat up to \u00a32500 of food a day. Isn't that amazing? I love the comparison. I wasn't going to do it. Okay, we won't. No, go ahead. The author said that's 500 more pounds than the average American eats in a year. It's a dumb comparison, but it's also hilarious in every way. I think good comparisons are one where it really hits home. So the author should have been like, that's 50,000 big max. Maybe that would have satisfied me. Yeah, times $50,000. That's terrible. Did we say, Chuck, how big the mouth is based on these reconstructions? No, they put how you see the big giant shark mouth, right. Sometimes it's from a real shark and sometimes they just put it together. In this case, they put it together. Yeah. But the mouth will feature like real megalodon teeth. But the bone jaws or cartilage jaws are obviously resin, right? Sure. But you'll frequently see somebody standing in one of these and they're just dwarfed by it. And this is pretty accurate. Apparently it was reasonable for a megalodon to have a seven foot diameter, which is who knows how many meters to at least in diameter the mouth. I saw this one. I think shark facts or some shark insider, some site was basically like, actually, if megalodon were alive today, you wouldn't have to worry about it because it would be like you eating a cheese and calling them a meal. They wouldn't even bother with you. That's good. I would not gamble that and swim around it because even if it just opened its mouth, you just go right in. Well, we like cheese. It's exactly. There's a whole box of humans that make a lot of probably eat the whole thing. It is a box of humans is called the school bus. That's right. Full circle. Oh, my gosh. Chuck, so you talked a little earlier about the bite force. This is a good comparison, I think, because it does hit home. Specialist. Specialist. It's a weird thing to say. Experts. Sure. Experts. She means cardiologists. Yeah. Experts and researchers say that a megalodon's bite force was akin to us eating a grape, them eating a whale skull so it could chomp through a whale skull the same as we could mush through a grape, even those of us with fewer teeth. Yeah, and again, it's not just the bite wasn't so bad just because the teeth are so big and the mouth had such a wide diameter. It was designed basically to crush the crush to disabled, to disfigure and name and pillage, that kind of stuff. That's right. So, yeah, it would be able to crush the skull very easily. And it did. As a matter of fact, the podcast art for this episode has a megalodon eating a whale. Like it's nothing, man. Awesome. Obviously, it's an artist's rendering. Oh, it's not an underwater photograph, but it's pretty cool nonetheless. You know what's also cool is us taking a break. Oh, yeah. So let's do that, and we'll come back and we'll finish up on the mighty megalodon. Megalodon. So how old are these dudes? Old. Remember, one and a half to 2 million years. To 20 million years is when they lived. Okay. I'm not sure how long they lived, and I'm not sure that Ichthyologists or Paleoechthyologists know yet. Well, it said they guess they became extinct about 2 million years ago. No, I mean how long they lived in their lifespan. Right, yeah, it was pretty big. I don't know. Well, I mean, most large, like whale, sharks and whales, they have long lives, right? Unless someone hunts them. But they think they went extinct a couple of million years ago during the playo Pleistocene period. And we actually featured an article just a few days ago about a new study on what they think caused the extinction, because they used to think it had more to do with climate changes that they couldn't keep up with. Yeah, but I believe the same researchers who figured out who found that Panamanian nursery also were the ones who conducted this study. Maybe not, but they showed that the global ocean temperatures rose and declined during this 18 million year period where the megalodon was around. And there's still megalodon. Yeah, their populations apparently didn't change, so they basically said, no, we don't think it was temperature or climate change that did it. We think it was a lack of diversity in the prey. Oh, yeah. And I guess what you were talking about, like, eating a human, let's say a human is 6ft tall. That's still pretty large. Right. And if that's not achieve it, then you need to eat super large things, and a lot of them. You better hope those large things are successful at reproducing as well, because they go away, you're in big trouble. And they basically think that's what happened. The food sources became less diverse, and then smaller predators evolved and started competing, and we should probably faster and better at hunting and price. What happened? By smaller, they mean orcas yeah, sure. That was their smaller competition for the same prey. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. And who was it? The Zurich paleontological. Paleontological institute and museum. They examined 200 megalodon records and came up with this new information, and they flat out said changing climactic conditions do not appear to have had any influence. Yeah, they're like, ocean hot, ocean cold. We love it either way. Yeah. And I mean, if you're competing with an organism or a species that is going after the same prey but doesn't need as much as you to eat per day, you're going to lose. Evolutionarily speaking, for sure, it could very easily be what it is. And because megalodon, the recreations of them, look a lot like great whites, a lot of people are like, well, they're obviously great white ancestors. Apparently not. Apparently they are more closely related to mako sharks. Right? Oh, really? Yeah, mako sharks and poor beagle sharks. Although they would share some sort of relation to great whites because they would both be lambda forms. The lambda form is a shark with two dorsal fins, five gill slits, and a mouth that extends back beyond the eyes so they can smile real wide after they eat a whole boat full of people. Oh, I was about to do the jawline. Smile, you son of a we should shout out Gordon Hubble. He's a megalodon expert. He had his theory. I think it's cool. He had his theory about the food source before it officially came out, when everyone else was going it no, it was the climate. He actually theorized this beforehand, so good on you, sir. He's the same guy who says, no, there's no such thing as this megalodon still. Right? Yeah. Because we should do one on cryptozoology as a whole. Sure. There are people out there that want to believe that somewhere in the depths of the ocean, in the deepest, darkest corners that we haven't explored, that there are these giant beasts still living. Right. And actually, they make great points. I mean, look at the silicon. We thought the silicone went extinct, and then it was caught off the coast of Africa in the think South Africa, and we realized, wow, this thing hasn't been extinct for a couple of hundred million years. And then in the 70s, they found the megamount shark, which is a two to four unknown shark species that fed on plankton deep, deep, deep in the ocean. And they caught one off of Hawaii, and they're like, this is new. So cryptozool just point to these things and they say, how can you say that? There definitely is no megalodons out there still? And I think that same guy who you shouted out to says, well, here's why. Because the mega mouth shark, which is a plant eater, lives in this part of the ocean where we just don't tread. We're just now developing the technology to be able to go down there so our paths wouldn't really cross. Omega Ledon would have the same type of habitat that a regular shark has. Yeah. Coastal region. Right. So we definitely would have noticed the megalodon by now. Even if there was just one left in the whole world, we probably would have encountered it by now because our habitats overlap a little bit. Then a seal camp isn't the size of a school bus, right? In fairness, yeah. So he kind of did a mic drop explanation for sure. And they haven't found any megalodon teeth that are not fossils, even though some people have claimed that it's all BS. Yeah. Can we say that safely? I don't know. I think so. Okay. But that's not to say that some people haven't made great hay out of this stuff, including a guy named what is that name? Steve Alton. He wrote a series of books called Meg about a megalodon that likes to battle people and dinosaurs and stuff, and it's great fun. And then, of course, there's mega shark versus giant octopus. Have you seen that? No. I haven't either, but Debbie Gibson was in it, apparently. Well, signed me up. And then there was a sequel to it called Mega Shark versus Crocosaurus. Yes, Tiffany is in that actually erkel. All right. Julia White. Yeah. Good for him. Well, I guess we got to talk about the elephant in the room. Discovery Channel. A couple of years ago, Discovery Channel, our former bosses, they aired a show to kick off Shark Week about the megalodon that had the look of a documentary. If you didn't know any better, you would think it was real, where they claimed the megalodon was real and that it was killing people off the coast of South Africa. And it was this giant beast, 67 ft long, nickname Submarine, and it's terrorizing humans. And it was called Megalodon the monster shark Lives. They, to put it lightly, came under a little bit of fire from the viewing public. Most notably well, not most notably, but notably, Will Wheaton. I don't know if Will still listen to our show, but at one point he did. Oh, yeah, will, you better still listen. He was a friend of the show. He wrote a blog post, which I'm so glad he did, that he said a lot of things, but one of the things he said was discovery had a chance to get his audience thinking about what the oceans were like when the megalodon roamed and hunted in them. It had a chance to even show what could possibly happen if there was something that large and predatory in the ocean today. But Discovery Channel did not do that. In a cynical point for ratings, the network deliberately lied to its audience and presented fiction as fact. They betrayed its audience during its biggest viewing week of the year. And Discovery Channel isn't run by stupid people. This is not a mistake. Someone made a deliberate choice to present a work of fiction more suited for Sci-fi Channel as truthful and factual. That is disgusting. Whoever made that decision should be ashamed. Well, weeding was mad. He got up on his hobby horse, rightfully so, and called them out. Soapbox. Sure. Not a hobby horse. And here's the deal. After the show airs, they have their what do you call it when you put a disclaimer. Well, sure, they had a party because it was huge in the ratings, but it said none of the institutions or agencies that appear in the film are affiliated with it in any way, nor have approved its contents. Those certain events and characters in this film have been dramatized. Sightings of submarine continue to this day, which is total BS. Well, no, there are a lot of people so crackpots to this day, people who say that they are sightings or whatever. And Megalodon was a real shark. Legends of giant sharks persist all over the world. There's still debate about what they may be. So basically, people are like Twitter lit up on fire. People went crazy and said, shark Week has jumped the shark officially. Like your airing fiction as fact. And they came out a year after that, last year, or I guess two years later. Yeah. And the brand new chief, rich Ross. Rick Ross. No, Rich Ross. Okay. And said, you know what? We're not going to do things like eating alive. Remember when they were going to have the snake eat the guy? Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. It was just a huge stain on their brand. We're not going to do things like the mermaids documentary and the Megalodon documentary. What are they going to do? He said they were going to try and get back to educational programming. So have they done that yet? When did he say that? This is in 2015. And I think he wanted to make a push to sort of be the leader once again in smart educational programming and not good for Richard ratings. So we'll see. Nice. Last thing I've got is if you love Megalodons and you have a lot of money, you can buy a Megalodon tooth for about one $500. I wondered about that. 1500 Simoleon. Boy, I would be worried. That thing is fake. Yeah, although if you look online, it'd be tough to fake one. All right. I mean, maybe to the discerning eye, but someone can make a fake one and show me right now. And it looks real to me. Look at this. Maybe the artist shouldn't assign the bottom. Right? Yeah, right. That's it. I got nothing else. Megalodon. If you want to know more about those, you can type that word in the search bar houseupforce.com. And since I said that, it's time for listener me. I'm going to call this another one for the equal pay day episode because we got something a little wrong that we want to clear up. Whenever you guys touch on hey, guys, big fan. Whenever you guys touch on sensitive topics, I'm always a little worried. Is this going to be the time they say something that makes me have to stop listening. No, but you never do. And this is from Ellen, and she says, you guys mentioned that in the US. Women are guaranteed twelve weeks of paid leave. I have to take that one. I said, that okay. I'm assuming you're talking about the family medical leave act. I wanted to point out a few strict qualifications, though, that don't apply to everyone. You must work for a public agency, including state, local and federal employers and local education agencies like schools or a private sector employer, to employ 50 or more employees for at least 20 work weeks in the current preceding calendar year, including joint employers and successors covered employees. And I had a nice exchange with some lady, this woman who had to quit her job when she got pregnant because it was under 50 employees. And she and I both conceded, like, we kind of get it. If you have a really small business and you have eight employees and four of them get pregnant, you're kind of screwed you're down 50% of your employees. Yeah. And she was like, yes, I get that. It's tough. And she said, people should sort of think about these things when they're going to get a job. A woman, if they want to have a baby, maybe go to a place that does have the FMLA qualification. She got both sides of the issue right. So that was nice. Also, an employee must work for a covered employer and have worked for that employer for at least twelve months and have worked for at least 1250 hours during that twelve months, and work at a location where at least 50 employees are employed at the location or within 75 miles. So just more specificity there. Thank you for that. Yeah. She said, I'm not trying to call you guys out. I know a lot of people listen to your show, though. I think it's important that everyone understands how little support parents do have in terms of leave. We're way behind the rest of the world, and it's not something we should be proud of. She said, we're one of only seven countries in the world that doesn't have paid parental leaves because it's also unpaid. I know. So come on us get together. Yeah. And I'm sorry for misspeaking. Also, my eyes are open. I definitely didn't know all that for sure. Yeah. And I feel super lucky now because our company gave us paid leads, paternal and maternal leads, which I now realize is super generous. Yeah, it's pretty cool. How about that? And you took it too, like a chance. Yeah. And that is from Ellen. Thanks a lot, Ellen. If you want to get in touch with us for any reason, we would love that. Just go ahead and tweet to us at syskpodcast or join the fun on Facebook. Comstyshow. You can send us an email to stuff podcast athousettworks.com. And as always, join us at our. Home on the web. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com." | ||
2f8b5c62-3e5e-11e8-b11b-e37b31620fff | The Unabomber: Misguided to say the least | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-unabomber-misguided-to-say-the-least | The Unabomber was one of the most notorious and longest lasting cases in the history of the FBI. Just because the manifesto reads like he was a fortune teller doesn't make his actions any less deplorable. | The Unabomber was one of the most notorious and longest lasting cases in the history of the FBI. Just because the manifesto reads like he was a fortune teller doesn't make his actions any less deplorable. | Tue, 17 Apr 2018 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=107, tm_isdst=0) | 44317559 | 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. Wow. 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. 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. Booboo. We're coming to a Landown under oh, I get it, Chuck. We're going to Australia. And New Zealand. And New Zealand. That's right. Oh, man, we are really excited. This has been years in the making. We're finally pulling the trigger in September. We are doing shows on September 1 at the Astor Theater in Perth, sunday, September 2 at ICC in Brisbane, which heads up down there to you guys. That's spring for you, not fall. All right. Well, september 3, Monday, at Goldfield Theater in Melbourne. Sure. We're really getting around thursday the 6 September at the Inmore Theater in Sydney. And then, man, we are going to wrap it up friday, September 7, at the Bruce Mason Theater in Auckland, New Zealand. I cannot wait for that one. Yeah, you can go to Sysklive.com to get info and to buy tickets, which are on sale April 17. We will see you in September. Australia and New Zealand. Welcome to stuff you should know from howstuffworkscom? Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant with Jerry Rowland. Three of us put together, put us in some Ray Ban aviators, put a gray hoodie sweatshirt on us. You got stuff you should Know. I know. I like your costume today. I thought I would dress up to really kind of drive home the idea that I know what we're going to be talking about. Yeah. You know what's funny is that today, all of these years later, when you see someone in aviators in a hoodie with the hood up, you say, Jeez, what's up? Uni bomber. It's part of the social fabric these days. It really is. I ran across, I guess, an article from the late 90s or whatever that was, talking about that famous sketch and how it made its way under coffee mugs and keychains and T shirts, and it became like a pop culture icon. Yeah, I'm sure it was on some T shirt design at Terrible Store. Spencer's Hot Topic. That one's great. No, Urban Outfitters. Wait, so you're a Spencer's fan? Huh? Sure. Okay. Spencer's over Urban Outfitters. I guess that's the great divide. Well, Michigan, Ohio State. Spencer's Urban Outfitters. Urban Outfitters is just trendy like stuff that they think is clever, but not Spencer. You could go in and get a poster of a bikini lady on a Ferrari, some incense and a giant rubber penis. Right. That's a great store. I guess it is. Everything you need under one roof. I can't remember what I was in there for the other day, but they have the most extensive selection of tasteless shot glasses I've ever seen in my life. That's Spencer. Yeah. Which is like there's people collecting these. You can tell. I want to know who Spencer is. Spencer doesn't want you to know who he is. Okay. That's why he called his store Spencer. Yeah. His real name is Jackson McLean. Oh, wow. Nice work, Jackson. You sniff me off a case. Nice. That was a good save, Chuck. Thanks. Speaking of good saves, I'm going to bail us out of this intro. Let's do it. Take us back, way back to a little seven year old chick. Sorry, Chuck, we're going to go back one more year. Yeah, I was seven. Oh, so you knew I got it wrong. Okay, well, in the Chicago land area, there's a university called Northwestern University. Go Wildcats. I didn't look this one up. I think it is the Wildcats. That's what we're going with. And there is a security officer named Terry Maker who opened a suspicious looking package. I couldn't find why Terry maker opened it, so I should say, everybody, I'm making the assumption here that it was deemed suspicious, and they were like, go get the security guard. But Terry Maker opened this package and it exploded. He got some minor cuts and burns. I don't see too many people counting him as a victim of the uni bomber, although I think Terry Maker would probably take issue with that. Sure. But he was, by all accounts the first person to come into contact with the uni bomber or one of the uni bombers bombs. Yeah. He was number one in 1978. That would go on to be 15 more bombs over 17 year killing a he killed three people in the end wounded many more. And we won't go through all of the targets, but they ranged from American Airlines flight 444 to the president of United Airlines, Percy Wood, to Vanderbilt University secretary, to a timber industry lobbyist, to an advertising executive. Part of the reason why it was so maddening for so many years was because there was no rhyme or reason seemingly, to the victims of the uni bomber's wrath. No. The one thing that they all shared in common, and the uni bomber also wrote letters to newspapers during this whole time. The thing that they had in common was that they had something to do with technology or the advancement of technology or the destruction of nature. One of those two. Right. And so these people like, that was it. That was all you had to be doing to be a target of the Uni Bomber. He was extremely indiscriminate in picking who lived or died by his hand. And you have to understand, all of these bombs, none of these bombs were sent to scare people. Every single one of these bombs, whether they killed somebody or not, were intended to kill somebody who they killed. The unit bomber didn't much care. And you can tell by the kind of insufficient attitude he had toward who was targeted. Like, he would get names wrong. Yeah. His last victim, a guy named Gilbert Brent Murray, he was a timber industry lobbyist. He opened the package because he was the president of the timber industry lobby. Even though the package was addressed to his predecessor, the reason it was addressed to his predecessor was because the Uni Bomber had picked the name out of a directory, and it was an out of date directory. So this guy died as a result of the bomb. That's a very uni Bommer thing to do. It really was. And I think the Uni Bomber, if you talked to the Uni Bomber today, which you could apparently, he's very easy to get in touch with us and become a pen pal of, he would tell you, totally fine, I don't care who died. Like the head of this timber lobby died. That was ultimately what I was going for. So he was killing people who are associated with an idea, a cause. And the cause that he was opposed to was the destruction of nature and the advancement of technology. Right. So we're talking, obviously, about Ted Kaczynski. It was the man's real name. And early on in 1979, right after these attacks started happening, the postal Service, the ATF, and the FBI got together, formed a task force, and that's where they came up with the name Unibomb. U-N-A-B-O-M stood for university Airline bombings because those were the first bombs that were sent. And I guess the name of the case was by the FBI, but the name Uni Bomber was made up by the media covering it. Right. Yeah, that's usually the case. Yeah. In the end, it would become the longest running at the time. I don't know if it's been outdone yet, but longest running and most expensive FBI investigation in history. Wow. Eventually had 150 full time employees on the case, which is amazing. And he was tough, tough to get. And, you know, he had no forensic evidence left behind. He was very careful. He used bombs that were made out of materials that were easy to find. He couldn't track them. He made all of them by hand. Painstakingly. Yeah. Made them all by hand. Like we said, the victims were chosen seemingly at random, and had it not been for his manifesto, they may still be on the lookout for this guy. Yeah. And even still, the way that they were able to connect these things is because during the 17 year campaign, he would write letters to the editors of newspapers around the country claiming responsibility for these crimes. And then I think half of the bombs had the inscription FC on parts that were recovered. And FC stood for Freedom Club because the uni bomber didn't call himself the Unabomber. Again, that was the media. All of these things, including the manifesto, was signed. The Freedom Club. A club of one. Right. But he always wrote about we whenever he was referring to himself. Yes. So the whole thing came to a head in 1996 when Ted Kaczynski was arrested in his cabin in Lincoln, Montana. He was known to his neighbors as the Hermit on the Hill. And he'd lived there for years and years and years, I think since the early seventy s, I believe. Yeah. I mean, it was a little primitive cabin off grid. Inside they found about 40,000 pages worth of journals describing all his crimes. They found bomb parts. They found a bomb ready to be mailed. And they knew they had their guy, thanks to his brother David turning him in. Essentially, after reading this manifesto, he was eventually arraigned in Sacramento, which is where the final murder took place. And he was sent to jail, initially said, no, I don't want to plead insanity. That's a big point. Yeah. Because I don't think he would have admitted something like that. But he tried to kill himself in early 1998, and his jail cell, that triggered a psychiatric evaluation, and he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, which triggered a plea bargain. They basically said, you can avoid the death penalty now if you take this plea bargain. He did. And in January of 1998, he pleaded guilty, accepted the eight life sentences with no parole, and is now living with quite a few other famous bombers at the Florence, Colorado, Alcatraz of the Rockies. The ADX there. Right. Which that place in and of itself is crazy. I looked into it. Yeah. I feel like it's come up in plenty of other episodes before because it certainly sounds familiar. Yeah. So I was looking into there's this fascinating article called Harvard in the Making of the Uni Bomber by a guy named Alston Chase, who I think wrote a book on it. But in this article, it was so good. You read it, too? Oh, yeah. So he really kind of lays out a pretty great case based on evidence that he compiled from interview and things like that. It's definitely not a slam dunk diagnosis that the Unabomber has schizophrenia. And also, I don't know if he says it outright, but he at the very least intimates that it was Ted Kaczynski's brother David and his legal team that created the public persona of the Uni Bomber as a person with schizophrenia to keep him from getting the death penalty. This is much to the chagrin of the unabomber Ted Kaczynski, who eventually did cop to this plea bargain, because it became clear to him that if he went to trial, his defense team was going to put in an insanity defense whether he liked it or not. And he was denied the ability to represent himself. So he was presented with the choice either go to trial, plead insanity, maybe get a lesser defense, but in the meantime, his manifesto would be painted as the ramblings of a madman because he would be deemed insane or plead guilty and not insane, defend insanity, and then in his hopes, also by extension, defend his manifesto and the ideas in it. Yeah. So he is still in prison in Colorado. Apparently, like you said, he's got a lot of pin pals because he lived in a tiny little primitive cabin for so many years. By all accounts, he has adapted pretty well to prison life. Being in a small room is no big deal to him. Apparently not. And you can actually go to the and I'm going to totally check this out. I don't know if I can do it on this upcoming tour, but you can go see that original cabin at the museum in Washington DC. And I've looked up pictures and it's kind of all right there, which is pretty interesting. Yeah. The whole thing is just right there in the museum. Yeah. So he was a brilliant guy, like you said. He went to Harvard, he's a National Merit Finalist, he was a math prodigy, started Harvard at 16, had an IQ or has an IQ of 167, and was just a brilliant, brilliant guy. And I think we should take a break. Alright. Getting a tingle. And we'll come back and we'll talk. Well, I guess we should talk about the manifesto. All right. Ready for 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 in demand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice and more. 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And we're back, and we kind of left it off on well, we promise we're about to talk manifesto, so let's talk manifesto. Yeah. And after reading the Cliffs Notes of this thing in a few different places, one thing is clear. Is it's not the ram links of a madman, a b he has and I hate saying this, but he has a lot of very salient points about where society is headed due to technology or where it was headed back in the 90s where it fully is now. Yeah. Very much ahead of his time, thinking wise. The way he went about correcting this was abhorrent, obviously. But when you read parts of this thing, the Industrial Revolution and its Consequences let me pull this one, for instance. Okay, here's one full quote. Once a technical innovation has been introduced, people usually become dependent on it so that they can never again do without it unless it is replaced by some still more advanced innovation. Not only do people become dependent as individuals on a new item of technology, but even more, the system as a whole becomes dependent on it. Does that sound like anything that everyone carries in their pocket every day? Exactly. And he also points out that the way that this happens, this dependence on technology, it comes about because new technologies seem good and helpful and useful, and then we eventually adapt ourselves to fit them better. We change our behavior, we change the way we see things, we change the way we think and interact with stuff to fit the technology. And his whole idea was that that is the inevitable outcome from the Industrial Revolution, that ever since the Industrial Revolution, our society has been in a stranglehold at the service of technology. And the people who serve technology and society has been restructured and reshuffled to the detriment of the individual human to local communities as a whole. And that the only way that this is so ingrained now in our world. The only way to stop this is to violently overthrow the current system. And he has a very lazy, fair attitude about what comes after he said that we have no illusions about the feasibility of creating a new, ideal form of society. Our goal only is to destroy the existing form of society. That was it. That was the whole reason for his campaign was to be one of the provocateurs of this revolution that upended technological society. Yeah. Here's another summation of another part of the manifesto about the social infrastructure that he says is dedicated to modifying our own behaviors. This infrastructure includes an array of government agencies with ever expanding police powers and out of control regulatory system that encourages the limitless multiplication of laws and education, establishment that stresses conformism, ubiquitous television networks whose fare is essentially an electronic form of value and a medical and psychological establishment that promotes the indiscriminate use of mind altering drugs. So again, I don't want this to come across that I, like, look up to this guy in any way. Right. But when you read some of the stuff, you think, man, if this guy had only reined it in, he could have done good. Yes, I can't remember what the turning point was, but there was some potential path that he was on where he could have done this peacefully and he pulled back and went a violent way. And I think, quite rightly, that if he were not locked up for the rest of his life, he would keep sending bombs out. He would not stop. No, because he's not a moral agent. He is a rational agent. And he sees this as a rational end to the means to his means, which is taking out people who may or may not be in a position to advance technological society. Oh, yeah. And that's where the line, the delineation occurs, where he's such a smart person, but that's such a dumb. Like blowing someone up is not going to halt any innovations or change the course of where we're headed as a society. Right. I mean, to call it misguided is the understatement of the year. And forgive me for armchair psychologist, but now you start to get into the idea of whether or not he was fulfilling or indulging his own desire to kill. Well, you never know because if he is thinking about things like this and he is such a rational person, surely there would have been other ways to do this that were either more productive or, on the other hand, more destructive, right. Sending a bomb that might take out one or two or three people and by making these bombs painstakingly by hand over the course of months and probably years sometimes that's not a very productive way of achieving this goal. So it makes you wonder, did this guy just want to kill people? And that, coupled with this view of technological society to form what we know as the uni bomber. Well, I think that was probably the case, is he was angry at where things were headed and he wanted to take it out on somebody. Yeah, but again, I want to go back to this idea that he is schizophrenic, right. That is not necessarily the case. He was given a temporary or provisional or conditional schizophrenic or diagnosis of schizophrenia by a court ordered psychiatrist, forensic psychiatrist, and that was it. I don't believe she ever went back and made an official diagnosis. Other people in the media, other psychiatrists were basically diagnosing them from afar. Some psychiatrists met with him, but they didn't officially examine him. So basically, just based on his actions in his manifesto and what was contained within, he was largely given this diagnosis of schizophrenia, and I couldn't find anything that said that he's being treated for schizophrenia now, which is kind of a big deal because it's a twofold big deal. One, it dismisses them as just a complete madman who is delusional, but it also does a tremendous disservice to people with schizophrenia because it says this is what people with schizophrenia do. They send bombs to people. They go and live in, like, Montana alone for 30 years and send bombs to people the whole time. Yeah. So it's doing the same armchair psychologicalizing that I was doing. It's worse if you're an actual psychiatrist. Yeah. All right. I think we should talk a little bit about how this manifesto came to be in public view because it's a super interesting substory in itself, a great article from The Washington Post where I got most of this part, but they make the point in this article. It's super interesting to me that the time that this happened, in the mid to late 90s, it was a transitionary time in technology in and of itself, and that the Internet was around, but it wasn't ubiquitous, and it's not where everyone went for everything, including news. So the fact that this publishing of the manifesto in The Washington Post, which we'll talk about in a second, it says here it was perhaps the last newsworthy document to appear only in print. Right. And it's very ironic considering what he was railing against was that it was before everyone was getting their news from the Internet. So the fact that it was an era that was being forgotten, the newspaper print in print, and that's how he got his message out, finally by sending packages containing this manifesto to The New York Times and The Washington Post in June of 1995. Yeah. So each one got a package one day after the other, and the one to the Post had a return name and address. Boonho Court, San Jose, California, 95136. And it turns out that that address and that person, he was a CFO of a Thai circuit board maker whose headquarters were in San Jose. That was the address for that. You can imagine that Boondo was pretty nervous because rather than being, like, the recipient of a bomb, he was supposedly the sender of this manifesto to The Washington Post. But the FBI investigated and quickly cleared Boon Longho, the Post and The Times suddenly had a decision to make because in this package, with this manifesto is a letter that said, if you publish this, I will stop killing people. If you don't, I'm going to start, and we will start making our next bomb. Yeah. So they obviously got in touch with the FBI. The FBI took one look at the letter and said, I think this is from the uni bomber. They went, Duh. Of course it is. There is no well, actually, they didn't know at the time how many people were sending these bombs, but they met with they had three meetings, I think, with the FBI's director at the time, Lewis Free and the task force. And then two out of those three meetings, attorney General Janet Reno came. That is like, such a 90s meeting. Lewis Free and Janet Reno. Oh, yeah, for sure. So they said, Listen, we're not in the safety business. We're not experts on this. You tell us what you think we should do, and then we'll make our mind up what we should do. Basically, everyone said, you should probably publish this because A, we can maybe tag and track newspapers in Northern California where we think he might be, b, maybe someone will recognize this guy and come forward. Was there a C? No, this is A and B. Okay, so this is a note to all potential manifesto writers. If you are trying to keep your identity a secret, probably refrain from publishing your 35,000 word manifesto because you're going to out yourself. And that's exactly what happened with Ted Kaczynski. The Washington Post and the New York Times agreed to do this. Actually, the New York Times is like, why don't you do it? We'll just half the cost of printing and distribution. Yeah, I thought that was pretty interesting. I'm surprised they didn't both want to. Yeah, but The Post said, we'll do it if you go haze, which is adorable. And they did. And then they said, here's what we'll do, that we're not going to just put it in the newspaper. We're going to print it in a special section with its own typeface. And it became a sensation. Like, people wanted copies of this thing, like extra copies for themselves, wrote the newspaper, and they're like, we don't have any other copies. And as we said, this is the last time that this was sort of a viable like, now anyone can throw anything on the Internet. Right. So it was a really interesting time in the course of humanity that this thing came out. As far as, like, mad bombers go, having The Washington Post print your 35,000 word manifesto is pretty prestigious, especially at that time. I can't decide whether it be more prestigious today because anybody can just put it out on the Internet. Probably so, but yeah, but I think at the time, newspapers were still at the height of their influence. Yeah, who knows? But you can imagine Ted Kaczynski's surprise and delight when The Times published this thing. And like you said, it was a sensation, but it made its way into the hands of Linda Patrick, who was actually a childhood friend of David Kaczynski and now his wife, and she noticed this, or she read this manifesto and said, this sounds an awful lot like your brother Teddy to David, and he read it and he said, oh, no. Should we take a break? Yeah. All right, man. What a cliffhanger. Nice work. Thanks. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future by combining real world skills training and traditional academics. Students can earn college credits while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for indemand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience, network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K. Twelvecom podcast. That's K twelve.com podcast and start taking charge of your future. Today, 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. All right. Good, Cliffhanger. Thank you. I feel like we're dangling by our fingernails. So where we left off was Linda Patrick, or sisterinlaw of the unabomber wife of David, who was the younger brother. Said, Take a look at this. David read it and said, this sounds very much like my brother. In fact, there was a term what was the term that he used that was sort of a dead giveaway? Cool headed logicians. Yeah. That's not something you hear every day. I don't use that very frequently. Yeah. So he saw that, and I think I can imagine just the stomach churning, sinking feeling that he got when he saw those three words, especially. Yeah, like you said, that was the dead giveaway. I think if you put the whole thing together, though, he and his family had been receiving actually, he hadn't leading up to, I think, 1989, he had been receiving letters from his brother about the same stuff. So I think even without that term, he probably would have been pretty convinced. But he was convinced enough to go. His wife Linda contacted a friend who was an investigator for a lawyer, and this woman kind of took charge of this and hired, like, a criminal profiler who looked at the letters from Ted and then the Unabomber manifesto and said, I'm pretty sure this is the same guy. They hired another lawyer who represented the family, and they went to the FBI and said, we think we know who the uni bomber is. Yeah, I thought that was interesting and that he didn't go right to. The FBI. It seems like I don't know how much time, but it said weeks. Yeah. I went through a lot of effort privately to suss out whether or not they thought it was legit. By all accounts, he didn't want to do this, and he was even worried what his mother would think. And finally, the mother did say she took his head in her hands and kissed him and basically was like, I know you love Ted, and you had to do this. Basically, she said, I knew it was you, Fredo. So now we should jump back in time and sort of explain the relationship with David and Ted and how they got here, because they were estranged for 20 years before this. Interestingly. We talked about, had he not decided to start sending bombs, he could have led a more productive life. Oh, easily. But David was sort of cut from the same cloth. Like, they bought this land together in Montana. Hold on. I want to say something here. Chuck, you just said that he could have led a more productive life. I said that he could have been more productive earlier, too. Do you realize what we're talking about is we're saying that he could have better fit into the technological system that he was railing or not, or maybe been an outspoken advocate in a productive way on Facebook. There you go. Sorry for interrupting. I just had to point that no, that's all right. So they had originally had bought this land in Montana together. They both had these sort of similar ideals about removing themselves from society. For David, though, it was like back to nature, getting out of the hustle and bustle of the world to find himself. To find himself like a spiritual journey. For Ted, it seems very much like I don't like people. Yeah, he was a bit of a misanthropic. And they even have stories dating back to when he was, like, seven years old, when David asked mom, like, what's wrong with Teddy? Like, when people come over to visit, he runs to the attic and hides something's wrong. And his mom said, you know what? When he was a baby, he was hospitalized for a few days with a rash, and being separated from us for those few days is what has caused this. And then she says, don't ever abandon Teddy. That's what he fears the most, right? Yeah, not quite true, actually. So she lays that on this kid, and this is like his older brother that she's talking to him about. But he said that as they grew up, he was kind of like Ted's entree into socialization. David would go to parties, and I get the impression that Ted would kind of tag along even though he was the older brother. But that's not to say that David he says that he looked up to Ted, and Ted was just this whiz kid wonder boy genius when it came to math. Yeah. You said he went to Harvard at 16. Say that again, man. He went to Harvard at age 16. Yes. I think he got a master's and his PhD. In math by the time he was, like, 20 or 21 or something. Okay. Yeah. So this guy was a mathematical genius who, from what the Atlantic article by Austin Chase says, kind of lays a lot of this at his dad's feet for pushing him yeah. At a very early age to go to Harvard to jump a couple of grades in school, that kind of stuff. So he was already, you could say, misanthropic, potentially socially maladjusted. Who knows? He wasn't, like, the most easy going kid on the block. But supposedly, once you get to him, especially if you were grown up and not one of his peers, he was very easy to be around, actually. Yeah. So little brother David, he looks up to Ted, he tries to go to Harvard, is rejected. And then, like I said, they bought this land together. Ted builds this cabin. David later on, says, well, can I build a cabin? I want to build a cabin on this land too. Ted was like, no way, dude. This is my cabin and my land. So, David, I'm sure, was very disappointed. He goes, finds his own land in West Texas, builds his cabin. And they corresponded for many years, 1000 miles apart about their journeys toward living off grid and getting back to nature. Yeah, I think he lived just like Ted did for at least eight years, I believe. And then he said his brother disowned him when he sent a letter saying that he was moving out of the forbidden zone into upstate New York to go marry Linda Patrick. Right. Yeah. I think he thought he was a sellout, basically. That's what I get too. He sent him, like, I think, a Blistering 20 page letter saying, I'm done with you. We're done. And that was it. That was the last contact that he had. Aside from one letter. After their dad was diagnosed with lung cancer, that was the only contact he had. So he hasn't spoken to his brother, corresponded, really, with his brother since 1989. Yeah. They had this system worked out where if there was a family emergency, then David was to put a line, draw a line under the stamp of the letter. And that's the only thing that he would open. If you send me any other letters, I'll burn them. And if you take advantage of this system and fool me by putting a line under it and it's not an emergency, then I'm never going to open a letter again. So he did send that one letter with a line under the stamp about his father. Ted didn't even reply except to say, thank you for sticking to our system. And he didn't even mention the fact that their father was dying. Right. So that was the last time they corresponded. That was in 1994. But that was it for the correspondence. From basically from 89 onward, david and Ted were estranged. And so come 1995, david's already not spoken with his brother for six years. And now he's suddenly is faced with this idea of turning his brother in, knowing that he's probably going to get the death penalty. So when they finally did go to the FBI, and the FBI had their own linguistic analysis done on these letters, and they said, yeah, this is the guy. David started this campaign to paint his brother as mentally ill in order to thwart the federal prosecutors from seeking the death penalty because apparently they told him that they wouldn't, and then they reneged on that, and he felt extremely betrayed. So much so that he's apparently a crusader for an anti death penalty activist now based on that betrayal from the federal prosecutors. Yeah. This is amazing. He works he's the head of the New Yorkers against the Death Penalty group. And get this. I know you know this. Talking to everyone else. Okay. His closest friend, his bestie, is Gary Wright, who is one of the computer store owners in Utah who was a victim of Ted. Yeah. They became good friends. Yeah, good friends. 200 pieces of shrapnel lodge in his body from one of Ted's bombs, and now he and David Kazinski are best buds also from that same bomb. That was it. Gary Wright. Gary US. Bonds? No. Gary Wright. Yeah. Okay. Gary Wright's employee is the woman who saw the uni bomber and gave that description to the sketch artist. I know. There's a turning point in a bunch of people's lives right there. Yeah. That sketch didn't even look like it. Really, though, I've seen people be like, gosh, it's the spinning image of it. It's like, no, once you have oversized aviators on, it doesn't look like anybody. So David turns in his brother. Ted Kaczynski is arrested on April 3, 1996. He pleads guilty in 1998, and he's been serving his eight consecutive life sentences ever since. And recently, there was a big fur, I think in 2012 or 13 when the 2012, I guess, because it would have been his 50th class reunion, harvard, the people running his class and publishing the class directory reached out to him like they did everybody else in the class. That's crazy. And sent him a form to fill out. And he filled it out and sent it back in. And they published it. Yeah. He said his job was prisoner, and he listed his eight life sentences as awards yeah. And gave his address at the Florence, Colorado supermax facility. And it was a huge obviously it was a huge embarrassment for Harvard because they were not paying attention. And a bit of a scandal, too, I think Ted Kaczynski probably thought it was hilarious. Yeah. Should we finish with a little Daniel Ma about this weird Harvard experiment? Only if you say denu ma again. All right, so going back in time once again to fall 59 through spring 1962, there was an experiment at Harvard University led by psychologist Henry Murray. And how they describe it here in this article is a disturbing and what would now be seen as ethically indefensible experiment on 22 undergrads. Each undergrad that took part. Ted Kaczynski was one of them, had a code name for the purposes of anonymity. And ironically, Ted Kaczynski's was lawful was his code name. So basically what would happen is it was interrogation is what they would go through. So they would go into a room, they would go downstairs to the basement room, and then a voice would say, enter the room. They would enter the room. They would sit down and be faced with a spotlight that would blind them in an otherwise dark room. And then they would sit in front of a board of inquisitors that would order them to do things, kind of start slow, and then eventually build up to where they're screaming and yelling at these kids. In Ted's case, I guess, like 1617 years old and berating them, basically. This is not just like you dressed like a slob or your mother's meatloaf is terrible. Step one of all of this was that you were supposed to talk about some of your most deeply held beliefs, your most treasured beliefs and values and views on things. And then these inquisitors who are actually, like, law student, graduate students would harangue you over your beliefs and explain to you why they were so stupid and why you are such a useless human being for holding these beliefs. And the whole point of this, the entire point was to find out the psychological limits for humiliation and stress brought on by humiliation and when people would crack. And this is not a one time thing that he went and did for extra credit. This was carried out over three years. Again, the kid is 16 at the time. He's already socially awkward. He's already isolated from his peers just by the virtue of his intelligence, let alone his personal choices of being isolated from everybody. And he's being harangued by these people about his most deeply held beliefs. His brother David said in another article, he doesn't believe that that had anything to do with creating the UN Bomber. Plenty of other people are like, no, I'm not so sure about that. Well, here's what I think. And what was the name of the article from The Atlantic did Harvard Create the Unibommer? Harvard in the making of the Uni bomber. Yeah, it certainly didn't help, especially when he had this core belief system that was so firmly entrenched to sit in a room for three years, off and on and be criticized and screamed at and called a liar and denigrated like that, I'm sure it did not help. Yes, supposedly it wasn't a very relativistic person. Things were black and white. And if you believe something was right, it was right. So to have it as sailed like that, surely it had some effect somewhere. It just couldn't. Well, I mean, Ted Kaczynski later said that Harvard were the worst years of his life. Yeah. So in some small way, I guess he got him back by getting that published in the directory and embarrassing the class. Yeah. Revenge is a meal best served cold through a tiny slot and a metal door doing eight life sentences. Yeah. If you got anything else I got nothing else. Man, that was a good one. It really was. And again, I think it bears repeating. Nothing about what we said that agreed with the Unabomber and his theories has anything to do with agreeing with violence of any kind, especially indiscriminate random killing of people with bombs through the mail. It's probably the most cowardly way you could injure or hurt anybody. So we don't agree with that at all. It's funny to say it one more time. Yeah, for sure. If you want to know more about the Unabomber, it's all over the place. You can go type that word, U-N-A-B-O-M-B-E-R in your favorite search bar and it will bring up lots of stuff. In the meantime, it's time for listener. Now, I'm going to call this Subway episode. Remember we released our selects on Saturdays and I believe this. I don't know if it was this one of your picks. No, I guess it was mine then. Yeah, on the subways. So it's an old episode, but a recent re release. Ola Josh and Chuck. I'm in Andrea from Mexico. I've been listening to your podcast for a bit over a year now. It's the first time I'm riding in. I listen to Subways even though it's a rerun. I really want to comment because I have some fun facts. As you mentioned in the episode, sometimes digging for subways has led to curious discoveries in case of Mexico City. The digging of the metro led to the discovery of a lot of the remains of the Aztec City, even though it was common knowledge that the Spanish city had been built over the ruins of here we go. Tina Teitzlan. That was pretty much it. Close. It was only when excavation started in the 60s that they could uncover a whole underground world. Since then, they have uncovered more than 200 archeological objects and continue to find new things to this day. If you have a chance to walk around the city center, you may find the Templo mayor right beside the Spanish cathedral. Who else can say their everyday commute includes walking by the altar of Ehekatal nice god of wind? Anyway, I think there's very interesting, fun facts that I wanted to share with you and the fellow listeners. Maybe one day you can do how Mexico City Works episode. The history of the city is super interesting. I think it's amazing. You can literally see the layers of time in the city today. And she attaches some pictures. And this is Andrea Gonzalez. And man, we should do a show in Mexico City. Sure, man. I bet you we could get 1000 people we'll find out into a room. I know we haven't delved outside of English speaking countries before, but I bet you of all the cities, we could probably do so in Mexico City. Yeah, if Morris does good in Mexico City, I'm sure we could, too. We try to model our career after Mars. Did you see that picture she sent of the altar of the wind? God, I'm like, humans were sacrificed on that. That's insane that you just walk past that on your way to the subway every day. I know. It's pretty interesting. Well, if you want to tell us about your interesting commute, we always want to hear stuff like that. You can tweet to us at Sisk podcast or at Joshmclark. You can hang out with Chuck on Facebook, at Charles W Chuck Bryant or at Stuff You Should Know. The Facebook page. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housestepworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web STUFFYou know.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means schools out, the sun's shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music My Favorite Murder from exactly right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarra and Georgia Hardstarkk, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen. Today. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that, we mean your dogs. 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420a4d26-53a3-11e8-bdec-4bfbca05b40e | How Eyewitness Testimony Works(?) | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-eyewitness-testimony-works | Few things are more compelling than a witness pointing out a defendant in the courtroom as the perpetrator. But few things are also more unreliable than eyewitness testimony. Our memories can be pretty terrible, which matters when you’re facing death row.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Few things are more compelling than a witness pointing out a defendant in the courtroom as the perpetrator. But few things are also more unreliable than eyewitness testimony. Our memories can be pretty terrible, which matters when you’re facing death row.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Thu, 25 Jul 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=206, tm_isdst=0) | 53620068 | audio/mpeg | "Hey everybody, it's Josh and Chuck and we're coming to see you guys. Some of you, some cities just listen up. That's right, because, you know, we just did Chicago and Toronto and it went great. And I think our topic of went really well. Sure did. Everyone loved hearing about me. That's right. So if you're in Boston, you can come see us on August 29 at the Wilbur Portland, maine. Maine. At the State Theater on August 30. I can't wait. I'm going to Labor Day weekend. I'm going to stay the whole weekend. I'll be all over Maine. That's great, man. Where else? We're going to be in Orlando on October 9, and then on October 10, we're going to be in New Orleans, man. And then later on that month we're doing a three night stand, the 23rd, 24th and 25th at the Bellhouse in Brooklyn. That's right, 25th is sold out, but you can still get tickets for the 23rd and 24th and we will see you then. Check it out@sysklive.com. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry over there. And this is stuff you should know. The continuing courtroom drama edition. Yeah, this one. I think if you take our podcast on memory and our podcast on police lineups and they made love yeah. Then they would have this baby. I just came a little aroused, Chuck. Can you tell? Yeah, I guess 2011 was the memory one. So that's been a while. Yeah. Also you could sprinkle in a little photographic memory. Maybe that one was just watching. Sure, okay. Yeah, I know. Hey, Jerry. How are you? That's right. Good answer. So, Chuck yes. Have you ever been wrongfully convicted of a crime based on eyewitness testimony? Not convicted, but you have been indicted on it not a crime. Not indicted. You have been accused of a crime. I've been accused of crimes. Really? Sure. I think you should dish about that. Crimes against humanity. Okay, I'm going to take all that as a no, you never have. That's great. But it turns out there are plenty of people, hundreds so far in the US alone, who have been found to have been wrongfully convicted of crimes, big crimes, I mean, crimes that have put them on death row based on eyewitness testimony. And in the last few decades, it's become really apparent that eyewitness testimony is really not great. I mean, we've known it for a long time, but thanks to DNA evidence coming along, we can now go back and say, yeah, this person is innocent. Actually, yeah. You want to hear something? Little story? Yes, please. So we worked with a location person, actually two people. It's a couple on some of the stuff you should know. Stuff back in the day, I think some of the shorts. Sure. I remember them. And locations and I'm not going to say their names or anything to protect them, but they were riding their bikes and were hit and run last week. Oh, no. And she's fine now, but she was in the hospital. It was not great. I've been following this on social media. They have video from everyone has cameras now, businesses and homes and stuff. They have video of the incident. The car's license plate is clear as day. The car is clear as day. The police have all the stuff, and the police are like, nothing we can do about it unless you have an eyewitness that can say who the driver was. What the same thing that happened to me in La. When, you know, I told that story back in one of our shows when I got hit and run and I couldn't identify this young woman in a lineup card. And they're like, Sorry, she said she didn't do it. I'm like, that's all you got to do is they didn't do it. But the same thing is happening to them. You wouldn't believe the clarity of the videos that show this car hitting them and leaving, and there's nothing we can do about it. Man, that is crazy. So that's like a pretty good example of the law being slow to catch up to the current state of, I guess the world. Basically, yeah. They're working the case and they're trying to find out who did it, but they can't simply go to the person's house who owns that car and arrest somebody. I guess in a way, though, I mean, it sounds stupid and dumb, but at the same time it is kind of reassuring, especially with the rise of deep fakes, which we've talked about, too. You can't just fabricate a video, especially convincing one, and be like, go arrest this person. I guess so. My thought, though, is, like, go bring in the person who owns the car, and you will probably very likely find out who was driving it. Sure. If it wasn't them. Yeah. Especially if you are really generous with the rubber hose, you know what I mean? And the dealership I've met, more of the beating with the rubber hose. No, I know what you mean. Okay, well, you took it a different direction, surrounding Rainbow and First Blood. What did they delouse? Rambo yeah, they delused them and then hit them with the fire hose. Okay, but all this to say, eyewitness testimony is what's needed in many cases to prove guilt. But it's so unreliable. Right. It's like a joke almost. It's the gold standard in the American justice system, and I would suspect just about every justice system that if somebody comes into a court and points at the suspect or the defendant and says, I saw them kill that person, I saw them hit that couple with their car and drive off, I saw them. Other people who make up juries will be like, wow, how are you going to argue with that. You can't. This person swearing under oath that they saw them do it. They don't strike me as a liar. They don't seem to have anything to gain from lying about this, so I'm going to go ahead and believe this person and convict. But, like, we've kind of been toying with a little bit and saying, like, eyewitness testimony isn't great. You don't have to have some sort of vested interest in sending someone to prison. You don't have to be outright lying to basically send someone to jail who's actually innocent based on your own testimony. And while you're doing this, while you're testifying in court, you might actually fully believe what you're saying, even though what you're saying is fabricated and actually you don't really recognize the person that you're saying you saw commit this crime. Yeah. And a jury is way more likely to convict if you're, like, super sure, and you're like, oh, no, that was the person. I am 100% positive. But as we will learn as we unpack this topic, that confidence in court is not there from the beginning, necessarily. Yeah, that's true. But if you think that confidence sells, it, if you have a cocky witness, they'll just kill the defendant on the spot. So, like, are you 100% sure? And they go, what did I just say? Exactly. That kind of witness will send you to the electric chair or the lethal injection needle every day of the week. They're called. Do I stutter witnesses? All right, let's get into this. We've been dancing around it quite a bit. It's been a beautiful dance, but let's get into it. Okay. Yeah. I guess this 1959 paper kind of says it all. Just I'm sorry. A psychologist, an attorney named Robert Redmouth said, it has been suggested that the presumption is probably warranted to the effect that a random person give an accurate, original perception. Well, in the ordinary course of events, reflect the memory competent to serve most of the purposes for which it is demanded, which that's sort of a long way of saying memory is good enough, right? Yeah. Basically, that the average person walking around can serve as a reliable eyewitness to a crime. Basically, what this 1959 brief is basically saying is that this is the state of affairs in the American justice system, that if you say you saw something and you say you're pretty sure that what you're saying or what you think you saw is accurate, the court system can rely on you enough to convict somebody. Yeah, but almost to the point where it's like, can we all just get on the same page here and agree that we'll just believe someone when they say they're really sure? Yeah, I mean, it's smacks of that too, for sure. It definitely does. I guess the guy was just trying to shore up any opposition to it. And I mean, that was but long before that, there were chinks in the armor of eyewitness testimony and just how reliable it was. People have been using eyewitness testimony for basically ever. It's probably the oldest type of testimony that there is in any kind of court or proceedings or anything like that. But starting in the early 20th century, as psychology kind of developed, one of the first things that psychology took on was the reliability of memory and eyewitness testimony. And one of the first people to take it on was a psychologist named Hugo moonsterberg. It got the oom lounge correct. Thanks, man. My job, he wrote a book called on the witness stand in, and he's known still today as the father of applied psychology. He was a psychologist who said, hey, here's how psychology can help you in your day to day life, especially if your day to day life is that you're being convicted of a crime based on eyewitness testimony. And he basically showed through a lot of experiments and exercises when he was a lecturer at Harvard, that memory was definitely not essentially just like a film strip or a videotape or, for today's kids, an MP4 file. We don't just sit there and record the events going on around us in the world at all times and can go back and replay those events in our lives. And it's an accurate rendering of what we experienced that's just not the case. Well, yeah. And this is with students where they knew that they were doing memory tests and quizzes, and they knew that they were there to do that and had to focus on this stuff. And you really need to concentrate and remember what I'm about to show you. Yeah. Maybe have a sandwich beforehand. Yeah. And they were still inaccurate and really demonstrated. What we all now know is the fact that human memory is very fallible. Like, forget about just happening down the street. You got a million things on your mind. You're right in the middle of texting someone, and you look up and you see a crime happened. After reading this stuff, it seems like very little probability of you getting that stuff. Right, right. Yeah. I saw somewhere that smartphones in general, they're good in that they can help capture video of a crime or a photo of a crime, but at the same time, they really make a lot of witnesses unreliable because everyone is so distracted by their smartphones that they don't really see what's going on. They might have otherwise been a really good witness, but they were kind of glued to their phone at the time. That's true without even I mean, that's true about everything when it comes to smartphones. Yes. I wasn't paying attention. I was looking at the phone or the people that if I can complain about concerts again for a moment go ahead, man. The people that videotape entire songs are usually looking at it through their phone, and that's the worst possible way to experience a live musical moment. It really is. Especially when you consider that they will probably never go back and watch that video. Yeah. You know, Justin, my buddy, my tall British friend, he yells from behind them so you can hear it on the video. You're never going to watch it. Yeah, as loud as you can, which is great. He's probably right, like 80% of the time, I would say yes. But I would like to see the next day where some of those people watch it and they hear Justin in the background screaming, they're never going to watch it. They're probably like, what is that guy talking about? Or he's like, the person watching is like, I showed that guy. Right. So Hugo Munster Berge wrote this thing on the witness stand, basically saying we should not just take everyone's word for it. When an eyewitness comes forward in a criminal proceeding, like, there's problems with memory, and I've just demonstrated it. But his writings were largely overlooked because during World War I, he was from Germany, but he became a German American. He wandered around vocally supporting Germany during the First World War, which is not something you want to do back then. Now it's not a good way to get your book out there. No. So he was basically just ignored for many years, even though he was one of the first psychologists to take up this mantle. And it wasn't until about the mid 70s that psychology again took this up. And there were two psychologists in particular, a guy named Robert Buckout, who basically was the first to be like, memory is not a video tape is one way to put his research. And then another psychologist, a very famous psychologist named Elizabeth Loftus in the late seventies, a few years after Buck out, was really the one whose work kind of captured the popular imagination and made us all realize that we're just total frauds when we're recalling a memory. Well, yeah. And with the advent of DNA evidence, all it took was a building up of cases being overturned because of DNA evidence where eyewitness testimony that was 100% positive directly overturned. You get enough of those mounting up and then all of a sudden the United States has a problem on their hands and they have to say, well, maybe we really need to look into this whole thing about memory and eyewitness testimony not being super reliable. Right. Let's take the next 30 years to mull it over, basically. Sure, yeah. That was the Innocence Project in particular. There have been people working to exonerate people based on faulty evidence which really got a punch in the arm or shot in the arm after DNA evidence, like you were saying. But the Innocence Project in particular was started in 1992 and they've got like, I think, 365 exonerations under their belt. One for each day of the year. Exactly. They do it on the Daily. We did a show on that too. Yeah. You remember the world is closing in. We talked to Paula on that's. Right. So I can tell by that sigh. I think you're ready for a message break. You want to take one? Yeah, I'm just going to Google some Paula's on trying to remember who she was. All right, we'll be back right up to this. All right. So, Chuck, we've been talking a lot of smack about the human memory. Let's back it up with some facts and figures and stuff. Okay. Yeah. Like you said, the past 30 years is when the United States started doing I just said United started doing more and more studies on the human memory and how accurate it is. And it has really exposed the flaws and biases, and it's really not even I mean, it is memory, but it's also perception and what we perceive is going on. And there are a lot of like, we don't all agree on what perception even means. And there are a lot of different theories about how visual perception works. Yeah, there's like a two fold issue with memory. There's the formation of memory and then there's the recall. Right. So with the formation of memory, it's like yeah. If you can't agree on what constitutes reality, it makes it really tough to perceive reality in, like, a standard, uniform, objective way. But you can form a wrong memory that's, like, stop everyone cold in their tracks. Right, exactly. And there's basically two ways of looking at how we perceive reality. And it is either reality exists in some way that we don't perceive, and we kind of paint this picture that we think of as reality, but it's not actually really reality, or reality is reality, but we just kind of perceive it piecemeal in order to save energy, save time, save storage space, whatever. But the upshot of both of these and I really want to do an entire episode on the nature of reality someday. Okay, sure. But the upshot of these theories on what reality is and how we perceive them is that we basically take what we need from the environment, from whatever seen, we're observing, whatever, and then we kind of fill in the blanks to create this complete picture. And in doing so, if we're just kind of walking through a meadow or something like that, enjoying the day, that doesn't really matter. Right. We can kind of recall what that butterfly that flew by looked like, what its colors were, what the trees looked like. But if we really dig in, did we actually look at the trees that kind of provided the backdrop of the scene? Or is it just kind of a conception of what trees in general look like in that situation that our minds filled in? And when people started thinking about this stuff, not just psychologists, but neurologists, philosophers, a lot of different people trying to figure out how we go through the life and reality and perceive the world. It became really apparent that we do a lot of shorthand construction as we're kind of moving through life. And when we're walking through a meadow not that important. When we're convicting a person of robbery and murder, then it does become important. And it is an issue that we just kind of fill in the blanks to create a whole picture that didn't necessarily happen. Yeah. I don't know if anyone listening has ever seen the hollow mask illusion. That has to do with Gestalt theory, basically, that our perceptions are based on perceptual hypotheses. So that's us making these educated yeah, educated guesses about this sensory information that our eyeballs and our ear holes. And we should point out that eyewitness testimony can mean audio, like something you overheard as well. Right. I don't know how well other senses have performed in court. I was thinking about that. Like, I guess did you smell a chemical smell or something like that? That would be one, but I don't know what else you would like. Did you feel the murderer's touch, taste? I don't know. Did you lick the guy who was robbing the gas station? But if you look at the great example of Gestalt theory, and that perceptual hypotheses is the hollow mask. So if you go online, there's one very famous one of Albert Einstein, and it's basically someone will show you what looks like a mask of Albert Einstein's face. And then they start to turn it around, and about halfway through, you realize that you were looking at the inside of that mask and not the outside of that mask. Right. And it's painted, of course, but it's still concave, so it shouldn't look convex, but yet it does. And it's a mind trick, and it's really freaky. It is, but it also just kind of goes to show that our brains leap to conclusions, basically. Yeah, absolutely. Another thing is that the whole Darwinian approach is basically, if you're in a dangerous situation, your brain is going to quickly decide what's most important to pay attention to in that scene. And that will, of course, skew reality depending on what's going on. Plus, also that's point one, our brains fill in the blanks probably more than we realized to create our idea of reality and memory. Right? Yes. And even when we're actually actively taking in information, just how good, say, like, our eyesight is or our hearing is, really the lighting is on the street. Exactly. And that's one thing that defense attorneys in particular will try to attack or things like that. Like, do you wear glasses or contacts? Have you ever had lace? Was it raining out? Was at nighttime? How far away were you? That street light was under repair. We have records exactly in the whole courtroom. Go, yeah, it's a big moment. And Perry Mason shoots a duck. Perry Mason farts in court. I didn't say that. I said he shoots a duck. Okay. All right. It was his thing, at least at first in the early episodes, and then the producers were like, this isn't going anywhere. We're going to drop this as this thing. Your Honor, I object. Right. That's right. That was from episode three. Yep. Oh, boy. So there has to be a standard here, though, when it comes to court, and, like, how well people see it is case by case in that every case is its own unique thing in court. But there has to be some sort of standard as far as, like, how well does somebody with 2020 Vision see, for instance right. And there's a guy named Jeffrey Loftus, a researcher from, I believe is it UW? Yeah, UW. And he kind of developed this formula on 2020 Vision Over Distance, which basically says, at 10ft, you might not be able to see eyelashes on a person's face. Right. 200ft, you may not be able to see eyes, and at 500ft, you could see a person's head, but it's just a big blur. Is this the standard that they use in court? I think he's trying to make it a standard, and I'm sure he gets called on as a professional witness and says all this, but I don't believe it's an actual like, it's been judged to be, like, the standard. Like, they don't whip out a chart in court. No, but I think if you really wanted to get the point across, you could do worse than hiring Joffrey Loftus. Yeah. And I imagine do they test, these people? I don't know. I think if you have a really good defense attorney, you could probably ask that a witness. If not, go to an optometrist, at least have their optometrist records subpoenaed or in the dramatic TV or film version. You see. Your Honor, if I may step to the rear of the courtroom. And you do that move, and then you hold up two fingers and you say, how many fingers am I holding up? And then Mr. Brady crosses a briefcase, and the guy with the neck brace on turns his head. What a chump that guy was. He's not committed. No. That's so great that you said that, because it was between that or a Perry Mason joke for me if I was going to swoop in. Okay. I don't know much. Perry Mason. Did he part in court? No, I just totally made that up. I don't know anything about him, either. I just got you know, it was Raymond Burr. Oh, sure. No way. He was ironsides or was he? He was both, buddy. But, I mean, if there was ever somebody that looked like he was hard in court, it's Raymond Burr. Sure. Even, like, put together clean shaven Raymond Burr from Perry Mason. Yeah, he does. He doesn't he a little bit. Okay, moving on. Chuck, there's also the problem that researchers have found that we humans have a finite amount of attention, and if there's a bunch of stuff going on at once, or we have to pay attention to multiple things in quick secession. It's been found that there are a lot of problems with that, that we don't really do real well with fast paced stuff coming at us, especially when we're stressed out or in a high stress situation. Yeah, it's like this stuff is really neat. There's something called attentional blank, not intentional attentional. And that's when you're just looking around at things, anywhere you are, it feels like one big fluid thing where you're taking in everything, but that's not really happening. If I'm looking at this coffee cup and then I look up at your face, there's something called attentional blink, which is a little blip less than a second, where there is, I guess, just an interruption and input yeah. In your attention. You're shifting from one thing to the other. And it's not a fluid motion. It's kind of like a hiccup. But you don't notice this. No, you don't. It all blends seamlessly because your brain is filling in these little gaps. But during that period, if something really vital happened in that, say, half of a second span, you might not notice it. And because we've already seen that, our brains tend to fill in information to create a smooth picture of reality, that could be problematic for the person who you're saying you saw do something or didn't see. That's right. The other thing about attentional blink, too, is that it really kind of points out that if we are really focused on one thing, we might miss another, that our attention is very selective. Like a smartphone, basically. Yeah. If you're, like, into your smartphone, you're not paying attention to stuff going on around you, even if you're driving. Like, if you're driven up next to somebody and they're driving, like, 30 miles an hour under the speed limit, which supposedly is safe, but they're on their phone, and you honk at them and flip them off and throw a rock at their windshield, that kind of thing, and they don't even look up. Yes. They don't know you're there. No, they have no idea. That's kind of the same thing. But there's this really amazing video that I hadn't heard of, but these two magicians I know, Jared and John, who I hope are working on a podcast about this kind of stuff, they pointed it out. Did you go see that video that was linked in this article? Which one? The one that was created in 1999 by Daniel Simmons and Christopher Chevri. It's the ball passing video. Oh, yeah. Okay. So I don't want to give anything else out about it. Totally. Everybody just go look up 1999 Daniel Simmons ball passing video and prepare to be amazed. But it really drives home, like, just how focused we can become at the expense of other information. That's right. What else, Chuck? Well, there's something called the psychological refractory period. For the PRP and that's when if two cognitive tasks and this can include you seeing things if they arrive really closely together, there's a bit of a lag time between when we process these two things, that first thing and then that second thing. So if these things are coming in quick succession or they are very intense or there are a lot of different stimuli, there is a little bottleneck, a processing bottleneck that can occur and especially in a scary experience like if someone sticks a gun in your face or something, the big example that you always hear is like, what was the weapon? Was it a gun or a knife? And it's been kind of shown time again, if someone comes and sticks a gun in your face, you are going to have your attention on the gun, more so than the face. So you might not be able to recall what your perpetrator looked like. You may have more information about the gun, which is a little helpful, but not as much as their face. Yeah. I think I told you before, that time that Yuumi got mugged, she was not focused on the gun and did not know that the guy had had a gun on her and her friends. When she was asked if there was a gun at the cop station, she's like, I actually don't know. She didn't process the gun. Right. And her friends were like, yeah, there was a gun, the guy had a gun. Which is I haven't realized. I get that not processing something because of the stressful situation, but it's funny that's like the opposite apparently of how it usually is. Yeah. And I think you can sort of train yourself. I mean, hopefully this kind of thing doesn't happen over and over again, like to you, me or anyone else. But I've sort of told myself if anything ever happens, try and keep your wits about you and take in as much detail as you can and repeat it in your brain over and over. That's just good advice for daily living. Sure. That's mindfulness, I think. Yeah, that's good. I told you before, I think it was the police lineups one that she was able to pick the guy out in the line up. So maybe she was focused on the guy's face and was missing the gun rather than the opposite. Exactly. Was that a finger in your pocket? Right. Don't say the second part. So I'm not going to I'm just going to leave it up to the listeners, dirty listeners minds. So there's also another one for forming memories that has kind of confounded researchers for a while and it's called the own race bias or cross race effect. Yeah. We talked about this in police line ups, didn't we? I feel like we did, but I think it's worth going over one more time. Sure. So basically it says that if you are a witness and you witness a. Crime that's carried out by somebody from another race or ethnic group other than yours, you're going to have a harder time recognizing that person than you would if they were a member of your own race or ethnic group. And it seems easy peasy. Well, that you're just a racist and everybody of another race looks alike to you. That's not the case. They found that people who score low on questionnaires about being prejudiced also are subject to the cross race effect, and that it's across the board for everybody of any race. They're all equally subjected or they're equally what's the word? Victims of it, I guess mistaken. Yeah, it's in there somewhere. Misidentified? No, they're equally susceptible. Susceptible. We got their chuck. Yeah, that's true. And that's really interesting. Like, you could test out as the least prejudiced person on the planet and still misidentify someone from another race. Yeah. And they think that different races have different defining characteristics and that you as a child, and probably well into adulthood, are kind of trained to pick out the identifying characteristics of people of your own race, which doesn't necessarily apply to people of other races. Sure. So people really are bad at distinguishing different members of different races, not because they're racist and everybody looks alike, but because they're looking for the wrong queues, distinguishing cues. Yeah. And sometimes people can look like other people. Sure. In the famous cases section, I'm going to go ahead and pick one out of there. Another very famous case of Ronald Cotton. In 1984, he was identified as the perpetrator of a rape sentence to life in prison. And I went back and I looked at the person who eventually was found out to be he was exonerated Cottonwood. But the real guy, Bobby Pool, that saw side by side images. These guys look a lot alike. They look a lot alike. Like, their noses are different, but if you block out their nose, the lower half of their face and their eyes and forehead are really similar. And I think that's just a case of really bad luck. It was really bad luck. It ultimately turned out to be really good luck. But the victim, the eyewitness was the victim, a woman named Jennifer Thompson. And during the rape, she took your advice and kept her wits about her as much as possible and took the opportunity to study the guy's face. But because Pool and Cotton look so much alike, it was a case of mistaken identity, of a witness who actually, as we'll see, was kind of unsure at first, but became more and more confident, which is the problem. But when Cotton was exonerated Jennifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton went on to write a book about the whole thing together. Yeah, they're friends. They got to be friends because she experienced a tremendous amount of guilt for identifying this man and him serving time for something he didn't do. And yeah, they were to book together, which is now. I was like, tell me that's going to be a movie soon. And as of, like, a couple of months ago, it was optioned. Oh, you filmed. Nice. The book is called Picking Cotton. Oh, my. Yeah, I know. Picking Cotton are memoir of injustice and redemption. Semicolon. Oh, God. Yeah. The good luck he had, though, was that Bobby Pool and Ronald Cotton were in the same jail together and they were frequently mistaken for one another. That's how much they really looked alike. And I guess Bobby Pool blabbed to another inmate that he was the one who had really raped Jennifer Thompson and that Cotton was in there wrongfully. And that word got around. And then finally, thanks to DNA evidence, ronald Cotton was excluded from the crime. Yeah. Nice ending to that story. It is. That's the only one on the list. That does have a nice ending, though. That's true. So here's the other thing with eyewitness testimony, or should we take a break? Up to you, pal. All right, let's take a break, and I'll tell you about that other thing right after this. So here's the other thing about eyewitness testimony, all right? You have to do this a bunch of times. It's not like you identify someone in a police line up and then you're in court the next day. Right. You identify someone in a line up, and then you're going to get grilled by cops after that. And then you're going to get talked to by your attorney beforehand, and you're going to be recalling this and describing the scene and who you think is a perpetrator a lot of times. And every time this happens, something can go wrong with your recall. Basically. Yeah, we've talked about this so many times, but every time you recall a memory, you are adding to it. You're adding more information to it. Right. And that information can be incorrect or flawed. And if our brains kind of strive to create as complete a picture as possible, if the memory originally is incomplete, the more we recall it, the more we're going to round it out to create this picture. And since part of the process, like you're saying, of going through the criminal justice system as an eyewitness is to recall over and over and over again, by definition, that process leads to contaminated evidence. In this case, the evidence of an eyewitness testimony. Yeah. And not to mention when cops get in there and they ask leading questions a lot of times, and even this one example is really great, even swapping out one word, one that you might not think matters if you hear the questions, did you see the broken headlight? As opposed to did you see a broken headlight? That takes on a whole different meaning because in that first one, the cop is basically saying there was a broken headlight and did you see it? Not was there one? Yeah, that's called the misinformation effect. And it can be as innocuous as that. It can be purposeful. Like if a cop believes that the suspect is the one. Cops have been known to ask leading questions. And when you have an eyewitness who is kind of so so on something, after a few leading questions and they're answering, they can become more and more confident in their memory, their recall of the event. And then that coupled with the fact that, well, this is the right person, obviously, because the cops wouldn't be prosecuting or arresting somebody if it wasn't the right person, that just gives the whole thing even more confidence. And studies have found over time, the more confidence or the longer and more often a memory is recalled, the more confidence grows associated with it and the less accurate it may be, right? So there's like a negative correlation over time between confidence and accuracy of a memory over time. That's a big distinction that we'll get into later. But the longer it goes on so. Say. Like. From the time a crime occurs to the time the court date comes or the trial starts. It could be a year. And you. The eyewitness might have had to recall this for half a dozen people at least. Not to mention all the friends and family that you've shared the story with. And so what a lot of people say is by the time maybe the second, 3rd, fourth time you're recalling this, you're not recalling your original memory any longer. You're recalling the story that was helped to be fabricated by the cops and the prosecutors and in some part by yourself, just from telling this, you're recalling the story. You're not recalling the actual memory. And that's a real problem because that's how people get wrongly convicted by eyewitnesses who go into court and say, I'm certain that that was the person that I saw commit that crime. Yeah. And if you just think about in your own lives, forget crimes and forget courtrooms, just think about stories that you like, great stories from your life that you've told a bunch of different times, about this one time when these become so burned in your brain as these great stories that I'm always curious. I wish I had video of these stories as they happened because it would be kind of fun to go back and see this funny story about when my friend and I got shaken down by the Texas Highway Patrol. I've told the story all the time, but it turns out I wonder what really happened that day, though, right? By the end of the story, by the time the story is told, it's like Chuck Norris himself is Walker, Texas Rangers doing the search or my ghost story in Athens. To me, I tell that story exactly as it happened, but who knows? Oh, yeah, it's kind of like you're playing a game of telephone with yourself over time, stuff just gets kind of muddled. And again, normally this doesn't matter unless you happen to be telling a bit of a fishtail to somebody who can't stand fishtails and calls you out on it, it doesn't really matter. Right. It does matter in a court of law. And the fact that the courts have continued to pretend like this isn't an actual implication of the human memory, the human memory is actually infallible and just continued on with eyewitness testimony has been a problem in the past. I'm not sure if we've gotten that across or not. And consider this, too, that juries, I mean, we talked about that confidence building over time. By the time you get to that jury and you are super confident, that's going to have a huge impact. Juries are going to be far more influenced by a confident witness than someone's like, hey, I'm pretty sure. But if I'm really being honest because I'm on the witness stand, I can't be 100% sure. Yeah, that is a rare eye witness from what I can tell, that by the time the trial comes along, they have been so prepped and guided and have become so confident that from what I can tell, it would be really rare to hear an eye witness be like, I'm not so sure. Maybe they probably wouldn't make it to the witness stand because the prosecutor doesn't want somebody like that on the stand. So what you're going to hear in court is, yes, I'm absolutely sure. And juries are just normal people. They're not doing the research on the possible infallibility or the possible fallibility of eyewitness testimony. So it's up to the defense attorneys to kind of poke holes in this stuff. And so they will. But for a long time, this is really surprising to me. I had no idea courts wouldn't allow expert testimony. That basically taught jurors how many problems there are with human memory and that eyewitness testimony is not all it's cracked up to be. And that not only should you not be wowed by the confidence of somebody who comes into court a year after the crimes, I'm 100% certain you should probably discount that testimony altogether. Yeah. And the reason that they weren't allowed is that they claimed that was common sense. Like, everybody knows that our memories aren't great and eyewitness testimony probably isn't great. Whereas it seems to me, obviously, that you would want to get an expert in there to at least explain this stuff, especially in like a capital case. Yeah. I mean, you can still make up your own mind, but at least know the facts and the science behind eyewitness identification. So you can take that into consideration as a juror. Right. That's just not the case. That wasn't it. But then apparently they started overturning convictions because the expert witness on eyewitness testimony was disallowed. Right. And once that started happening, they started allowing them in the actual trials. But that's kind of like if you have a defense attorney, and you're being tried for a really important crime that you could get some serious time for, do you want that attorney to bring in an expert witness on eyewitness testimony? For sure. Yeah. The Supreme Court themselves in 1977 ruled 72 that eyewitness testimony is constitutional. It does not violate the 14th Amendment, even if it's suggestive. But they said it was subject to five factors. That just depends. It's a case by case thing, but the witnesses degree of attention. Right. So you have to determine that the opportunity of the witness to view the criminal at the time of the crime. Right. So I guess just literally, physically, were you able to see this happen right. Or smell or hear or lick the criminal? The accuracy of the prior description of the criminal, that's a big one. And that still holds up today. Yeah. Like, if you told the cops initially that the guy had a mustache and didn't have a mustache, you're going to hear about that from the defense during the trial, and we'll get into that later on. But that sort of virgin description, is that the right word to use? I love it. It's the one that really should count. Sure. All right. And then what were the last two factors of the five? The level of certainty demonstrated at the confrontation. And by confrontation, I mean, that's the thing that you always see, unlike courtroom dramas, where the witness, they say, do you see the perpetrator here today? And the witness says, yes, that man there. And then they say, let the record show that the witness is pointing at the defendant. And then Perry Mason farts right. That's the particular one that's under attack today, because they're saying, like, how certain does that witness seem when they confront the defendant in court? Right. And then the last one is the time between the crime and the lineup. If the witness saw the crime and then the cops don't catch the person for three months, is that too long? Does the witness become unusable at that point? And those were the tests for constitutionality of an eyewitness's testimony. Yeah, I think those are five pretty decent factors to consider. Yeah. Except for the one about the certainty demonstrated a confrontation. And that's the big battle today, because some people are like, look, man, if human memory is that fallible, maybe we should just get rid of eyewitness testimony altogether. Right. But now, I think is the approach, like, hey, why don't we just treat it like anything that can be contaminated from physical evidence? Why don't we just treat this like physical evidence and say again that virgin identification is the one that counts and everything after that is tainted? Yeah. And so everybody on this, there's kind of a battle over just how much confidence relates to accuracy and memory. Yeah, that's the crux. Right. But both sides say everything after that first recall, whether it's telling the cop on the scene of the crime. What you saw, or whether it's the line up, wherever it is, the first memory test is what it's called. The first time you do that, that is the only evidence that should be admissible. And everybody can talk about that evidence and you can come to court and describe that evidence, but every other time you recall it after that, it should be considered contaminated evidence just as much as you would consider somebody dropping a blood sample as contaminated or smearing a fingerprint is contaminated. Same thing. That's the big crux. Everybody says disregard everything after that. Where they disagree, though, Chuck, is just how much during that first memory test, how much confidence is correlated to accuracy. Right. And some people say it's very highly correlated. Like, one guy said that in, I think, 15 different experiments, they found that the accuracy was 97% accurate. Confidence indicated a 97% accuracy. And other people are like, that's flim, flam, don't listen to that guy. But that's the battle that's going on right now. But everybody agrees that whole courtroom, that's the man right there that shouldn't hold any water whatsoever. The problem is that holds the most water because that's what's done in front of a jury. These are human beings. Someone might carry that kind of confidence in every area of their life, whereas someone else might be very unsure about everything in their life. And that wouldn't be a time for them to be like someone who's not very competent. Probably going to have a hard time being super competent about something this important. Sure. But you also could imagine that that person would maybe be more easily coached than somebody who does have a lot of self confidence. Coach them up. Yeah, the phrase the T shirts say Coach them up. So you want to go over any of these other ones? I guess we can. I mean, this is all sort of Innocence Project stuff. There's certainly been plenty of examples over the years. I think of the 329 you said there's 352. Now 365 that I saw 365 convictions at this time. Let's just say it was 349 that they had overturned. 70% of them were based on the testimony of an eyewitness. And this is just death row. Like forget muggings. Yeah. I don't know if it's all just death row or not, but some of these two were not just single witnesses, multiple eyewitnesses. Which if there's one thing that basically says there was a copper prosecutor who coached everybody to basically share the same story, it's an overturned conviction with multiple eyewitnesses. That DNA evidence shows we're all incorrect. Yeah. This one right here was especially maddening. Jerome White, in 1979 was convicted of rape and robbery and he was exonerated twelve years later. But the real guy who did the crime was in the actual same lineup where White was identified. Yes. So that one is especially tough pill to swallow. The one that gets me. Do you remember Troy Davis? Yeah. Like, back in 2011, georgia executed Troy Davis for the murder of cop Mark McFail in Savannah, right? Yeah. Down in Savannah. Yeah. And there was no physical evidence and no weapon. Nothing tied Troy Davis to the crime except for nine eyewitnesses, seven of which recanted their testimony. And it was a big deal because a lot of people are like, it looks like George is going to execute an innocent man. We need to get this commuted to a life sentence so we can try to figure this out. And there was a petition that went around. I remember signing it. There was 660,000 signatures on this petition, and it still didn't get his sentence commuted. And Georgia executed what was almost certainly an innocent man for the murder of Mark McPhail. And that was tough. Which also means that the murderer of Mark McFail is still out there somewhere. Yeah, I think that's not mentioned enough in these cases. Obviously, we should think about the victim and the second victim, which is the person falsely accused. And then there's also a murderer out there. Yup. Maybe. Yeah. That's another episode I want to do. Almost certainly innocent people were executed. Okay. That'll be a fun one. That's a good title for the other. You got to put the in there, too. Yeah. Well, that's it for eyewitness testimony, unless you have something else. I got nothing else. Check says nothing else. I got nothing else. So that means, everybody, it's time for listener mail. This is a very sweet email. Hey, guys. On Father's Day in 2015, our son Aaron died from cancer at the age of 41. Of his last wishes was for his beloved Australian shepherd dog Scully to live on a family farm with some wonderful friends he knew from Pennsylvania. Scully was with us in Southern California at the time, so I began looking at options to send her back, and it became obvious that driving Scully to Gettysburg is the only true way to say goodbye and carry out Aaron's wish. I announced the family. I was taking her back, and our daughter, who had come home to be by side while he was in hospice, quickly said she wanted to come with me. Without any further delay, the three of us took off across the country. After a few hours of listening to the radio, our daughter Brandy said, do you want to listen to some podcasts? Sure, was my response. What's a podcast? She plugged in her phone and started an episode of Stuff You should Know. And from that moment on, for the next four days, we listened to an endless stream of you guys. I wanted to thank you for helping us cope with the pain and heartache we were dealing with. Your banter and fun were very therapeutic, as my daughter and I traveled across the country with our thoughts and Scully being with my daughter and sharing all this time together with you by our sides was one of the best experiences of my life, given the circumstances. I now listen to you guys often, and my daughter even bought me a Jerry quote blank t shirt. That's a good one. As a reminder of our time together. And that is from Doug and Brandy Bell. Thanks a lot, Doug. And thanks a lot. Brandy. I like the cut of your jib for suggesting stuff you should know. Yeah, terrible circumstance, but I'm glad Scully is on that farm in Pennsylvania. Thanks, Doug. Thank you, Brandy. And on behalf of all of us, our deepest condolences. We're glad that we could have some small part in making it a little better for you. Absolutely. If you want to get in touch with us, like Doug did, you can go on to stuffyshanon.com and check out our social links. You can also send us an email to stuff podcasts@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
Can quicksand kill you? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/can-quicksand-kill-you | In many films, hapless characters meet their untimely demise in a lethal pit of quicksand. It's a gruesome, undignified end -- but is it realistic? Josh and Chuck tackle the properties of quicksand -- and how to escape it -- in this episode. | In many films, hapless characters meet their untimely demise in a lethal pit of quicksand. It's a gruesome, undignified end -- but is it realistic? Josh and Chuck tackle the properties of quicksand -- and how to escape it -- in this episode. | Thu, 24 Jun 2010 14:45:49 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=14, tm_min=45, tm_sec=49, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=175, tm_isdst=0) | 24927730 | 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 sharks. The most famous and majestic apex predators on earth. Introducing Shark Week. The podcast. I'm Luke Tipple, the marine biologist and shark expert with over 20 years experience in the field. I'm going to take you on a dive with me. You are going to learn a lot about sharks, and you'll also hear exclusive interviews with the stars of Shark Week. To get a behind the scenes look, listen to Shark Week, the podcast on Apple Podcasts spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Bryant. Chuck Bryant. You pointed at me as if I was supposed to say, hey, and welcome to the podcast. I almost did. I was like, the trick is to point and start talking at almost the same time. There needs to be, like, maybe eight or ten millisecond delay. All right, all you journalism school students broadcasting tips from Josh, everybody off of their game. Like, you know what I just did? I just assumed domination of this podcast, the whole thing. Well, you did that every time. It's not true. So, Chuck, have you ever seen Gilligan's Island? Yeah, a bunch of times. Did you know that by my estimate, gilligan's island holds the record for most number of episodes used by a television show featuring quicksand as a device? I've got five. Five? Yeah, me too. Gilligan got caught. Skipper got caught. Mr. Howell faked his death. Remember that one? No. What did he do? Just put the hat on top of some quicksand? Yeah, exactly what he did. I do remember that he changed his will to include the castaways, and he thought they were trying to kill him, so he ran away and faked his death. But they were really just planning a party for him. I'll bet. And then botanist Lord Beasley, who was one of their random guests that they had, I don't remember him. I don't either. And Ginger and Marianne apparently got caught one night and some sexy quicksand. I'll bet it is. Yeah. So I don't think there's anybody out there who is unfamiliar with quicksand. No, it's just such a great little throw to any time there's a jungle scene or something. And things are getting boring. And you're a writer and it's 1955. You say quicksand. Yeah. You don't see it a lot lately in films and TV, though, we've gotten slightly more sophisticated, I think people realize. Not really a big thing, I don't think. It's just with quicksand, I think we have gotten generally more sophisticated in the 80s, who were pretty much throughout the whole decade, the biggest box office draws. Arnold Schwarzenegger, maybe. Yeah. Salon. Sure. Yeah. John Claude Van Dam. Not a very thinking decade. Right. Yeah, good point. Then you move into the you have more guys like Edward Norton, RDJ, whoever that is. Robert Downey Jr. Right. Yeah. Who I am very heartened to see is making quite a comeback. He's gotten off of the black tar and into life and into box office gold. Yes. Have you seen Sherlock Holmes? No. I have seen that movie, like, eight times. Are we ever going to talk about quicksand? So quicksand, Chuck. Can it kill you? I saw a thing that said, theoretically, if you were stuck over your head and you couldn't get out, obviously you could drown in it. But I believe you have a scientific study to refute that. There was a study, and we found, from researching, reading an article on the site and just kind of looking around, there's a very finite amount of information out there on quicksand because there's just a finite amount to know about quicksand. It's not as exciting as it is in the movie. So say that. Which explains my Robert Downey Jr. Tirade. Right. There was a 2005 study that pretty much put the period on the sentence about quicksand. It said, it's physically impossible for a human being to sink into a pit of quicksand and die. Okay, sure. I think what I suppose was if you were, like, dropped on your head into the quicksand, but it's usually not even so deep as to be taller than a human. No. If you're just a guy, if it's just you and I that's me. And you fall into a pit of quicksand that is, say, 7ft deep okay. Which is exceedingly rare. Sure. Right. Most of the time, it's much shallower than that. So you just stand up. Right. We are less dense than quicksand. The density of the human body is about 1 gram per cubic centimeter, or about 1 gram/ML of water. Okay. All right. Quicksand is about twice that. So if you just sit there, you become buoyant. Yeah. You float on water. And quicksand is denser than water, so you'll definitely float on quicksand. Exactly. Are we done? We could be, but let's talk about sand and the properties of quicksand, which, by the way, falls under the purview of a field of science called rheology. Really? It's the study of the flow and deformation of unusual things like mayonnaise or Silly Putty or quicksand. Seriously? Right. So rheology studies quicksand, foam, things like that, like mayonnaise. When you carve some mayonnaise out with a knife. It doesn't go back to a flat surface. It should, but it's still liquid. Technically. It should have flow, doesn't rheology I love mayo. Mayo, man. Josh quicksand is if we wanted to find it. It's solid ground, actually. It's not like the oatmeal. I tried to find out what they used in movies, and the closest I could find was fuller's earth, like, mixed with water. You ever heard of fuller's earth? It's this really powdery dirt, light brown, and use it a lot on film sets for all sorts of stuff. Got you. But that's what I think it is anyway. It looks like Oatmeal to me, but in reality, it's solid ground, and it's just liquefied solid earth because it's been super saturated. Yeah. And there's generally two ways that it can occur, right? Yeah. There is the upward movement of water, say, from a spring or an earthquake can kind of loosen it. And then you couple that with the introduction of water. Bam. Quicksand. Not too far from a sinkhole in some ways. No, not too far at all, frankly. We've been on a geology kick lately. I was thinking that we're kind of completing an earth sciences module here. This is our elementary school science project. Exactly. Yeah. So that's pretty much the two ways that quicksand can form, and especially with one, say, where you have an upward movement. Right. All right. Let's talk about sand in general. Okay. Dry sand. Yes. You're walking along the beach. You're getting friction from the ground, which is why you're not falling down. Sand has something that's called a friction chain, I believe. Right. And that means that the force that you're putting on it is distributed across the particles, so it forms a solid layer. There's solid resistance. Right. With Quicksand, water molecules have been introduced. They're agitated. Right. Well, you don't even need to agitate it. You can get water in there, say, through a spring. Right. Floating upward, the water molecules are forming basically little pockets around the same particles. They're not connected by friction any longer. Right. So they're not solid, they're not stable. Then if you add some sort of movement, say an earthquake or the force of somebody's foot going on it, then whatever friction there is that keeps it stable is lost. Right. So you've been to the beach, right. Remember when you were a kid and you've never been to the beach? I've been to the beach with you, my friend. San Diego. That's right. Although we didn't frolic or anything. No, it's kind of cold. There's no time. December no time for frolicking, unfortunately. But you remember, like, when you were a kid, let's say you would walk into where the water is coming up and then receding, and you would start to sink a little bit, and then your feet would kind of if you let yourself go, your feet would become stuck. Right. And I remember being a kid and thinking, wow, that's kind of frightening, because they would really become locked in if you get up to, let's say, your ankle. And that's kind of just the same principle, right? Right. That's the exact same principle. It's the same thing with, like, wet concrete, too, when your foot or your leg goes in there and is occupying space or creating this density right. Which I guess creates some sort of suction force, like a vacuum. Vacuum. Which makes it very difficult to pull out. That 2005 study in Nature concluded that to pull your foot out of quicksand at a rate of 1, which is fairly moderate I think I can do that. That looks like 1, doesn't it? Yeah, sure. To do that when it's stuck in quicksand requires the equivalent amount of force that it would take to lift a medium sized car. So, like, only Chuck Norris could probably do that. Chuck Norris and only Chuck Norris. Definitely not. Jean Claude Vanilla. It's crazy, right? So you don't want to try to move your feet at a centimeter a second. You want to slowly move them and you want to wriggle them, from what I understand. Wriggle. You want to wriggle, actually, because what you're doing is you're very slowly creating space pockets around your legs which are stuck. That allows the water to come in, which allows it to break up the sand sediment. Right. So are you talking about how to actually get out of quicksand? It feels like that's what we just moved into. Yeah. That's the one part that I found is similar to the movies. Everything else is kind of really just a movie type of thing. But it is true. They say the more you move and struggle, the more you will sink. Right. Just like regular water, though, if you were drowning, they say the same thing. If you were drowning and you actually calm down, you would float. But your constant thrashing about will pull you under. Right. And it creates a stronger vacuum, basically, the more you move. Right. Have you seen that man versus wild segment? No. Where he's in quicksand? The guy gets into a thing of quicksand, real life quicksand, and shows you how to get out. Really? And have your cameraman hands you a rope. That was another thing, too, from that study in Nature. Again, this thing is like, it's been done. No other study needs to be done on quicksand. Sure, but one of the authors said, don't ask your friends to pull you out, say, with the vine. Well, that's what they always do in the movies. I know. It could conceivably pull you in half. Yeah. Really? Yeah. One of the authors of that study, that Rheology study, said, you don't want to do that. What did Bear Grylls do? He slowly wriggled his way out. Right, okay. And the weird thing is, it's just the oddest thing. I would recommend everybody. Like. I'm sure Discovery has it. We probably have it. I'm sure you can find it on YouTube. But Bear and Quicksand or something like that. Right. It looks like a beach. You know how the beach looks at like kind of medium tide or something? So it's like there's the sand, but then there's a thin layer of water over it just kind of floating on the top. He's in that, and he's up to about his waist in quicksand, and he's pulling himself out. So he's got his elbow up on the very quicksand that the rest of his body is in, but it's resting on top of it now. It looks really odd. I might have seen that, actually. It's pretty cool. But he slowly pulls out, and what you want to do is get into a supine position on your back, because you're just going to float because, again, you're less dense than quicksand. Good point. Obviously, you're going to find quicksand. You can find it anywhere if the conditions are right, but generally you're going to find it more around, like marshes and rivers, oceans where there's groundwater, that kind of thing. And if you are hapless enough to get caught in quicksand along a beach on the shore, you're going to want to get out of there very slowly but surely, because eventually the tide is going to come in. You're in big trouble. Especially if you seen Creep Show. Oh, yeah. You know what happens to Ted Danson? Yeah. Buried up to his head by Leslie Nielsen. That's right. And that was no naked gun joke. That was the real deal. It really was. What else we got? Well dry quicksand. You send that article to me. Yeah. That article was written by our buddy Alan Bellows, who we've actually never met and don't know, but I have a tremendous amount of respect for. He's over at damn interesting. I think he's the founder. Oh, really? Yeah, and he wrote an article on quicksand and was talking about, like you said, drive quicksand. Right. Yes. And this is not anything that they've observed in nature, but they have created this in a lab right. Where I think the sand is sort of like a house of cards. It's so loose that it barely can hold its own weight. Right. I think you had sand kicked up by a dust storm right. And then when it's deposited again, if it's deposited theoretically right. Because, as you said, it's never been proven to exist outside the lab. Right. But theoretically, if it was deep enough, it could look like it was solid. Right. And for all intensive purposes, it was stable until you walk on it. Right. The problem is, if it's deeper than you are tall, there's no water to make you buoyant. You're gone. It will kill you. It will swallow you whole. So when you go down, it puffs up some sand, right? Yeah, I think so. Like the movie Dune or something. Like you would be swallowed into the very sand. Frank Herbert. Quite a visionary. Yeah. But that's folklore, as far as you know. Although it has been, like you said, done in the lap. And there's a cool series of photos. It looks like an apple on top of some dry quicksander. I saw that. And if you look at the time, it's like 700th of a second. Wow. Or maybe seven 10th of the second. Almost like a sinkhole. Yes. Again, geology special. Yes. What should we do next? Like crystals? Yeah. Okay. What are crystal skulls? Caves and crystal skulls. Should we talk a little bit more about the movies and TV? I think we should. Again. You got anything else? Not a lot about quicksand. Sounds conciliatory. Like, I'm sorry we did this one, Josh. Blazing Saddles, of course. I always mentioned one of my favorite films. Had a quicksand scene early on. Very funny. There was a movie in 1967, actually, we should point out we got all these from Quicksandmovies Net and they, I think, literally have every reference of quicksand ever in film and TV history. It's your one stop shop for quicksand movie reference. I just plucked a few interesting ones that were relevant to us. Well, actually, this one isn't relevant to us, but the rest are. There was one movie called The Acid Eaters, aka the Acid People from 1967. Four average middle class couples become weekend hippies, riding motorcycles, frolicking nude and having a climactic, I can't say that word, adult party on a large white pyramid of LSD during a topless cat fight, a woman is thrown into the quicksand up to her bare chest as several bad actors stand around and watch. The next shot is just her arm above the surface, giving everyone the finger. You got to check that out. Sounds like a classic. Yes. We talked a little bit about TV. It's been in one episode of MacGyver. Yes. Three episodes of Benny Hill. Yes, I saw that, too. Three GI. Joe cartoons. Three episodes of Dynasty. Four episodes of Fantasy Island. Of course, I knew that would have been a little higher. I love this one. Four episodes of General Hospital. Has it really? Yeah. So she said in a hospital had four quicksand incidents, right? No, I think I saw one back in, like, 81 or 82 and Luke and Laura were trapped on some island or something. Yeah. There's always, like, an island scenario in a soap opera and there's always kicks in when there's an island. Of course. Magnum Pi. You want to talk about this one? I want you to. The show is called Operation Silent Night from 1980. The guys were stranded on a barren island at Christmas because the helicopter broke. Not just a barren island. A barren island that's being used for naval bombing exercises. That's right. It's very tense and while gathering palm fronds, rick walks into a mud bog, thinks it's quicksand, and he sinks up to his chin before the guys tell him to stand up and get out. Yeah. And if you ever do fall into quicksand, keep calm. If you're with your friends, make sure that you've hit the bottom. I've actually done this before, and what you're just describing happened to Rick happened to me. And it's terrifying. I'm not kidding. It's terrifying. I was screeching like hell. Give me out. Right? And I realized that my feet were on solid ground. Right. I'm not kidding. This really happened. I believe it. Okay. Thank you. And it's very scary, but once you realize you have your footing, it's very relieving. But if you can kind of keep the fane going, afterwards, you just stop holding your hands and go, TADA. And hippy Rob will say, oh, man, that was a close one. Actually, it wasn't Hippie Rob. It was another hippie friend, Justin, who is Justin. Yeah, he can attest to it, I guess. We'll close out with three episodes of The Simpsons. What? Mullman was in quicksand at one point. The cat of the Simpsons. I think there was a water leak or something, and then the litter acted as quicksand and sucked the cat into it. I don't remember that. And then, of course, the scene where the episode where Marge and Homer went to a spa, homer is getting a massage by the woman, and she's walking on his back, and she starts sinking into his backpack. He tells her not to struggle. Yeah. He'll only sink faster. So there you go. That's it. That is quick and done and done. If you want to see a pretty cool, flash animation of some guy in a sleeveless t shirt sinking in quicksand. And if you want to read the only article on how stuff works that explicitly cites the worst case scenario handbook, just type quicksand one word into the handy search bar houseworks.com. Again, check out damn. Interestings article. It's very cool. And if you can find anything about Rheology, check it out. It's pretty interesting stuff, right? You know, I knew a guy in La. That knew the dude that wrote those books. Oh, really? The worst case scenario books? We have a fan who loaded, I'm sure, who wrote a zombie survival handbook. Did you ever read that? I did. It is excellent. It is way excellent. I love that book. I read it from cover to cover. Chuck, really? First time ever. So go ahead. Yeah. Which means it's time for listener mail. Acted like I couldn't go forward. Actually, Josh and Lou listener mail this week. This is going to be fun. Today on Facebook, with your permission, I said, you know what? Listener mail is getting a little dry, so why don't we just take some questions from the Facebook fans, and we'll answer, like, ten quick ones on the air, okay? And I'll highlight some for you. And we got 180 questions inside an hour. Are we just doing what's it that many? 180 in an hour and climbing. I had to cut it off. Are we just reading their first names or first and last? I would say just first. But what about the privacy settings on Facebook? Renee says, do you discuss what points you'll cover ahead of time, or does it happen more organically? And as most people know, we kind of don't prep that much with each other at all. We just do our research and then we come in and we have our first conversation. Right here. That's right. Today we broke protocol with me sending check. That damn interesting article. That's about as close as we come to really sharing information. Yeah, we jealously guard our own research, don't we? If it feels spontaneous and conversational, it's because it is. Okay, you ready? Yeah. I got one. This is from Nick. If one of you couldn't make a recording and the oat hair had to choose a replacement dash, who would be your fantasy recording partner? Yeah. I can never record it to anyone else but you. That was very sweet. I'll say the same thing then. Yeah. Nicholas says, how does Josh get prepared when he writes an article? And how do you manage to remember all the names when you're recording that's for you? All the names when we're recording? What do you mean? How do you get prepared when you write an article? And how do you remember all this junk that we say? I have found that my brain is a lot more sponge like than I ever realized before. Sometimes you've seen it. I'll just be sitting there spouting stuff off, and I'll give you this look like can you believe that I'm not looking at a piece of paper right now? Yeah, it's awesome. To get prepared, I drink two raw eggs out of a glass, Rocky style, and then I find that I podcast best. I'm at my most relaxed when I'm pamphlet, as I am right now. Tony to Jerry. If Josh and Chuck were trapped in a burning building and you only had time to save one of them before it collapsed and killed the other, who would you save? And here's Jerry's response to that. Oh, Jerry, that was so nice. Thank you for saying that. I have one. This one's from Anna. Where did you each go to college and what were your majors? Chuck, I know where you went to college. We went to the same college. We did? UGA. University of Georgia. Yes. Go Dogs. How are we looking this year? Are we going to have a decent football team? You can never tell. Fingers crossed. English major here. I think you were too. Right. No history. And I minor in anthropology. I knew that. Why did you say that? There you have it. Jessica Crouch. Facebook fan and a looker. She says, what's our biggest pet peeve? I think mine is the loud cell phone talkers in public. I'm not into that. Biggest pet peeve I would say, Jeez, I have so many of them. I'll just grab one out of thin air. People who misspell there, depending on the context. Good one. That's just so dumb. But I guess all pet peeves are dumb, aren't they? Yeah. A couple of more. Sure. Nikki says, any podcast that you're both itching to do but haven't plucked up the courage to do yet. Yes. Furries and paraphilia. Chuck? Scientology. Nice. I don't want to get rubbed out. Where did Josh go to high school from? Bob the Toledo dude. I actually went to Spraybury High School in beautiful Marietta, Georgia. But I went to junior high school in Toledo at Burndale Junior High. Again, the Bulldogs. I have a Bulldog theme going through my educational history. Becca says, Think of someone close to you who has passed away. If you had a chance to spend one more hour with them, but it would cost you a year of your life, would you? And who and I would absolutely shave a year off of my old life to hang out with my granddad as an adult. Wow. He's a cool dude. And he died when I was, like, 14, so I didn't get a chance to talk to him about good adult stuff. That is very neat. Very neat. Chuck, I have one for you. Matt Ramsay has a question for you, Chuck. I imagine it's not for me because you don't want to be in my basement or too many horrible accidents committed down there. Can my band come open up for your band in your basement, Chuck? Sure, man. Yeah, that'd be awesome. Matt, you send an email to stuff podcast@housetofworks.com. I'll give you directions to Chuck. My dog will be very excited to have someone else down there playing. I've got another one. All right. Noel says, what is the difference between a cream soup and a chowder? Can I answer this one? Yeah. So, Chuck, it's really actually all geography. That's what I hear. The French word for pot evolved into chauderon or cauldron. Maybe later. Yeah. And that's the only difference. There's no cooking difference. There's no ingredient difference. That's what I've heard. It's all just if you're New England, it's a chowder. If you're elsewhere, it's cream soup. Yeah. All right, that's it for those. But we got another batch coming on the next podcast. The next one? Yeah, the one we record right after this one. Oh, really? Do we? Okay. All right. Well, thank you, everybody, for asking your questions. If you want to pose us a question or say hi or whatever you want to do, join us on Facebook. You can find us at facebook. Comstuffychannow. I believe you can search for us, stuff You Should know and then website in parentheses. We're also on Twitter. Follow us there s YSK podcast, and you can email us, as always, at stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. 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 Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this charttopping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes 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." | ||
c3329788-5460-11e8-b38c-6f5707ada84d | SYSK Selects: How Marijuana Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-marijuana-works | For millennia people used marijuana for fun and medicine. Not until the 20th century that was it vilified, unfairly say many. Weed has done lots of good things, from alleviating cancer symptoms to unlocking secrets of the brain. Learn all about pot here. | For millennia people used marijuana for fun and medicine. Not until the 20th century that was it vilified, unfairly say many. Weed has done lots of good things, from alleviating cancer symptoms to unlocking secrets of the brain. Learn all about pot here. | Sat, 20 Apr 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=110, tm_isdst=0) | 59699284 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. Happy Saturday. This is Chuck, here to introduce you to this week's Saturday Select. And we are going with a classic from the archives, how Marijuana Works. Why are we releasing this today on April? Oh, because we're juveniles, that's why. Everybody, hope you enjoy it. It's a very insightful episode. And here we go with how marijuana works. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W. Tuck Bryant getting his demons out, man. How about this music? Yeah, this is thanks to our guest producer Noel, who Jerry's actually producing, but he's got the musical touch. He's our dub producer. Yeah. If you want to regify your podcast, Noel is the man. Yes. Big thanks to Noel. Yeah. And great idea by you. I and I yeah, I NI I love that. How are you doing, man? I'm great. You got some good feelings going on. Yeah. We've covered grow houses and we have medical marijuana, right? I don't think so. No. Because a lot of it didn't seem familiar when I was looking into it in this article. So we've definitely done grow houses, which is kind of backwards. Well, not really. Got to grow up. That's first. True. So, Chuck, here we are, we're talking about pot, and as is our thing, we're going to talk about pot in a very above the boards, mature way. Are we? I think we can, sure. We've talked about some other stuff before. Poop. We've talked about poop plenty of times. Yeah. Well, booze. Every time we cover drugs, we like to cover the scientific aspects to social ramifications. Right. How it's impacted culture. Why would this one be any different? Well, and this is probably the biggest it's the most ubiquitous, I would say. Yeah. Maybe the gateway to all the other episodes. Very funny. I guess we should start at the beginning. How about that? Okay. Let's talk about pot and its history. It's very long, long history. And actually, for most of that history, it has been widely beloved and appreciated. Apparently, pot has been cultivated. Or marijuana. We're going to use all that interchangeably. Weed. Pot, marijuana. Yeah, but cannabis, that's probably where it will stop. Like, if either one of us says ganja or sticky icky. Sticky icky. Like it's in this article, we should just shut it down right then. All right, we'll do the hey, take that back. Yeah. One of us will say that okay. Yeah, but like you said, this is going to be an overview because we could do, honestly, four shows on the history of pot. There's quite a rabbit hole we could go down here. We got to avoid it. Yeah, but we'll give you a historical overview. How about that? Sure. So, like I said, pots have been cultivated for 8500 years. And I also said that it's mostly been appreciated most of that time for two reasons. One, it is an industrial or it was until the rise of the synthetics, a major industrial fiber hemp. Sure. And then, secondly, it was, or it still is, a medicinal herb that kind of spills over into recreational use as well. So in the 28th century in China, it looks like it was probably used medicinally and not recreationally. But they're definitely records written records of the cultivation of cannabis. Well, yeah. A guy named Shen Nung, who was an emperor but was also China's first physician, wrote about how ma, that's what they call pot back then in China, was good for the yin and the yang, both of them. Right. Which is actually, as we'll see, that's a pretty astute observation early on, because what he's talking about is balance or homeostasis, which pot definitely affects. Yeah, for sure. They have found a mummy, a 3000 year old Egyptian mummy, and looked into this, and it contained quite a few drugs, but it definitely contained THC. So the Egyptians were getting down. Yeah. Maybe medicinally. Who knows? In 1001 Arabian nights, it makes an appearance called bang, B-H-A-N-G. Sambad apparently loves the stuff, but supposedly his was hash mixed with opium, which is way more hardcore than what we're talking about. Yeah, probably. So they think it originated perhaps in India and north of the Himalayas is their best guess. Yeah, they really have no idea. And actually, there's, like, a lot of debate still over whether there's more than one type of plant. What do you mean? So there's cannabis indica, cannabis sativa. Yeah. They're different. There's another one called cannabis root or Alice. And there's an ongoing debate among botanists over whether they're all actually just different, like, varieties of the same plant right. Or if they really are different species of plants in the same family. Interesting. Yeah. But I think the current common wisdom is that there are at least two cannabis sativa and cannabis indica. Yeah. We may as well get into that a little bit. The plant itself is shorter and fatter and better suited for indoor growing. And the sativa is taller. It can get really tall, like 25ft and spinlier. Yeah. And thinner. Although I think for cultivation, even though it's grown outdoors, I don't think they're growing the 25 foot plants. No. I would imagine the helicopters can see them a lot more easily. Yeah. And the indica is known for more of a body high, quote unquote, couch locked mellow. And the sativa is more known for more energetic and cerebral and creative. More of a brain high. Right. And then, conversely, one can make you more paranoid. One can make you more drooly. Yeah. And typically these days, if you are a recreational or medicinal user, you're probably getting some sort of a hybrid strain. Good point. And actually, some of the strains, those hybrid strains have some of the best names, like green crack. It's a pretty good name. AK 47, white Widow. White Widow is actually pure strain, isn't it? Of indica? I'm not sure. I think it is. Yeah. Maui WOWY. The pot names are pretty funny. They've definitely gotten better from the 70s. Like Maui Wowey. Yeah, that sounds very helpful. Laughing so should we talk about should we talk a little bit about its history in this country? In the United States? Yeah so I think we should get to that because as I said, Chuck when you look back on pot all of these years and it's how it was used it was generally like appreciated used, medicinally used recreationally, not vilified. It wasn't until it hit North America that it really started to become vilified. Yes. Well I had a good run here too in the States for a couple of hundred years hemp was grown and cultivated and widely used. Some people say it's the most versatile plant on earth as far as different uses you can get out of it and it was in the 1619 Virginia Assembly they even said you have to grow hemp if you're a farmer in Virginia. So not only was it encouraged it was actually law in Virginia at least. Wow. So it had a good run until the early nineteen hundred s and nineteen twenty s. Well what's interesting is back in this time you remember that part in Days to Get Confused where the biggest owner of the whole group is talking about George Washington like planting hemp all day and then comes home and smokes a big bowl of it. Yeah. Martha had it ready. It's not clear whether or not any of them were smoking pot. It's entirely possible that they weren't sure because the idea of smoking pot was lost to the ages for a very long time. And the Greeks actually grew marijuana but they didn't smoke it, they just used it for its fibers. Right. And it almost appears like they had no idea you could smoke it and it was psychoactive. So it's possible that our forefathers didn't smoke pot and they were just growing it for industrial uses. And meanwhile Native Americans were like you guys are crazy. Rope is nice, but it can be both. That's right. In the early nineteen hundred s the Mexican Revolution in 1910 this is one of the big turning points because a lot of Mexican immigrants came to the US and they were like hey, you can smoke this stuff. Right, it's pretty nice. And because Mexican immigrants were sort of looked down upon all of a sudden pot was looked down upon. Really? Mexican immigrants were looked down upon somewhere in the US. History. Yeah. The whole thing about pop being vilified or I guess there was a moral panic basically is what they call it that erupted around it. Yeah. And a lot of it was based in racism toward Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants. Yeah. In the 1930s, especially in the depression they sort of had a bad name because they're immigrants in this country, and we're Americans and we're in a depression and we want the work. And kind of a lot of the same arguments here these days. Right. But the association with pot was definitely part of it. It definitely was. But also, I read this NPR blog, Code Switch, about this very topic, and they were saying that, yes, there's a lot of racism that led to the criminalization of pot, but Mexico was 20 years ahead of the US in criminalizing pot as well. So you can't just say, well, it was just Americans disdain or dislike or distrust of Mexicans. Right. It's more complex than that. And this guy was saying that really you can conclude there was a fear of what this drug did. Right. And the reason why there was a fear of what the drug did was because the newspaper reports at the time had people killing entire families and wandering around the streets, like, with somebody's head covered in blood because they just smoked a joint and they were really trying to unpack this. Like, why would that happen? Did it happen? Were all of them just overblown reports? The fact was when you picked up the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, there were front page stories about this, and they were like, brown skin Mexican kills white family of eight on marijuana cigarettes. And that's why and actually the word marijuana was kind of used as a derogatory term to kind of Mexican if I cannabis, which is what it had been called prior to that. Oh, is that where it came from? Yeah. Did not know that. I'm off my soapbox. Look at you teaching me. Well, movies like Reefer Madness definitely didn't help in 1936, the famous propaganda movie from French director Louis Gaznier, it's required viewing for any college student. It's really yeah, it's not very good and it's not very enjoyable, but it is kind of funny showing the refrain driven to insanity by the marijuana cigarettes and somebody gets murdered. Right. I think someone murdered somebody else because they smoked pot. And then in 1937, a year after reformatness, congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act. And this is basically where the tide turn. And it was essentially criminalized because it called for restricting possession just to individuals who paid a tax, which is like $1,000 for medical or industrial use. Right. So in other words, if you're just Sammy pothead, you can't live that way anymore in this country? No, you would basically have to set up a shell organization, pay the $1,000 tax, and then you'd be able to import marijuana. But if you were caught with smoking it, you'd still get busted. Yeah, it was a big deal when that happened. And you can kind of lay all of this at the feet of one guy, a moral crusader who ran the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in the 30s. Well, the 30s until the 60s. His name was Harry Anslinger and he was the one who really kind of started this crusade against pot and got the government to turn against it, got the press to turn against it, and got the Marijuana Tax Act passed. But even while this guy's, like, sitting there shouting, like, marijuana is going to kill us all, it's a horrible drug, and it's as bad as it gets. There were studies, independent studies, that were funded by the government that were showing, like, you guys are kind of overstating this a little bit. Yeah. In 1944, Mayor LaGuardia of New York issued a report that basically said that it doesn't induce violence, insanity, or sex crimes. Yes. And he was a moral reformer himself. Remember doing after the Minsky Brothers in the burlesque episode? So it's not like he was just some big pothead. Like, he was a moral reformer himself, and he still found this report. Yeah, that's a good point. That led to the settings laws over time have kind of waffled back and forth. In the 50s, they were pretty strict because of the Bogs Act and the Narcotics Control Act, and that's when they started setting mandatory minimums for basically any drug. But including marijuana, of course. Yeah. Like, you would go to prison for a long time if you got caught with pot. Yet two to ten years for a first time offender in the 1950s, getting caught with pot. Yeah, that's it. Any amount. Right. And in the 60s, things relaxed a little bit in every way you can imagine in this country. And President Kennedy and LBJ issued reports that found kind of the same thing as they found out in the 40s, it doesn't induce violence. And in these reports, it said it wasn't a gateway drug either. Yeah. In the 1960s, which is still up for debate. Really? Yeah. No, because you read every other report you read is going to say something a little different about what the gateway drug is. And plus, I think defining what makes a gateway drug, too, has never been fully established. How can you test something scientifically if you don't have it defined? Yeah. And the 1960s led to a repeal of a lot of the mandatory minimums in the 70s. But then, of course, Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, a lot of that stuff back. And Nixon, too, he fought that tooth and nail. Like, even though the tide in the country was turning one way, nixon was like, no, we're going to keep as illegal as possible, and as a matter of fact, we're going to put it on the same level as heroin and cocaine. Yeah. And during the Nixon administration, the Schaefer Commission, it was a bipartisan commission found again, that it should be decriminalized. And Nixon was just like, Well, I don't want to hear that. Sorry, I'm going to make up my own mind about that. I'm the president. Exactly. Yeah. So like you said, the Reagan era brought it back, not brought pot back. No brought back any kind of anti government sentiment toward pot itself was redoubled in the 80s under the Reagan administration. Just say no. Mandatory minimums or mandatory sentences were re enacted in 1986, thanks to the Anti Drug Abuse Act. If you got caught with 100 marijuana plants, you got the same jail time as if you were caught with 100 grams of heroin. Yeah, that's interesting. Plants versus grams. It's sort of an apples to oranges comparison. Yeah. Plants versus heroin. Like plants versus zombies. I know at one point this is sort of off topic topic, but I don't know if they've changed it. But at one point, they were sentencing LSD users by the weight. Right. And wasn't that the deal, is if you were an LSD dealer and you had 20 sheets of acid, they would weigh it and they were like, well, wait a minute, you can't weigh the paper. That's like weighing the suitcase. Cocaine comes in. Right. Yeah. And I think that's still the same, though, isn't it? I don't know. But I do know what you're talking about. And apparently if you had it mixed in with liquid or something like diluted into liquid form, they take the weight of all the liquid rather than the proportion of it. I don't know, we could be, like, showing our availability for urban legend or not, but no, I know that's the case. I don't know if it still is, but I know it definitely was. Definitely was, yeah, because I saw, like, an HBO special on these LSD dealers who are basically serving, like, life sentences for dealing acid. Right. Alongside murderers and rapists. I'll have to check into that. And people who are caught with pot in the 30s. That's right. So pop these days, cost wise, varies a lot, depending on the quality. Obviously, it ranges I love that in this article, it says the dollar $77 to $17.66 per gram. I'd like, 1 gram of marijuana, please. Yeah, that's interesting. But these days you can expect to pay for what people consider good marijuana. About $120 for a quarterback, which is a quarter of an ounce. Right. Which is 7 grams. Right. Because there's 28 grams in an ounce. Yes. I think between seven and 8 grams. It depends on if the dealer likes you. Exactly. Yeah. But that's generally how it breaks down, is you have it by the pound, which is the pot dealer, I guess, and then they break it down into ounces and then to quarter bags and dime bags and whatever people can afford, I guess. Well, it's funny, because in the state of the country right now, you can take dealer and dispensary and basically flip them and interchange them, and no matter what you're talking about, virtually, the sentence is going to remain unchanged, basically, because the marijuana dispensaries are following, like, basically the same format that marijuana dealers in this country have for decades. What do you mean, like pricing? Yeah, the pricing, the way it's sold by weight, sure. By quarters and half ounces and ounces and stuff, which makes sense. But they're also getting a lot of stuff from people who are growing it indoors in their basement. And it's like, now they have licenses for all this, but it's basically like all the people who are doing it illegally before, or some of the people who are doing it illegally before went and applied for licenses, and now they're doing the same thing, but they just have a license to do it in a frame on their wall. Yeah. And dispensaries, you're going to find a lot of other things, like edibles. And they even have now cannabis strips, like the little Listerine Breath strips. Oh, yeah. They have little cannabis strips. It's just a little edible strip of concentrated cannabis. And I guess you put it under your tongue and that's better for your lungs, I would imagine, if you're a cancer patient or something. Yeah. And we'll talk about that in a little bit. Let's talk about the plant itself, Chuck. Okay. Maybe the most recognizable plant, that leaf, you know? Yeah. Which is fact for you. The botanical description of the way that marijuana leads are arranged. It's groovy called palmately, like the palm of a hand with five fingers outstretched. Yeah. That's the pot leaf that you can find on lighters and baseball caps, gas stations. Exactly. And like you said, the plan itself, depending on which variety it is, either very tall or kind of tall, depending on whether it's trimmed or not. Right. And the buds or whatever that are smoked are actually the flowers of the plants. Yeah. The flowers of the female, which apparently that's sensame. So the definition of the word sensome are female flowers that have reached maturity without being pollinated. I can't hear that word without thinking of Catty Shack. I don't remember that part. Bill Murray. Little California. Cinci mia. Yeah. So that's what that means. Yes. Interested? The term sensibility. So basically, unless you're, like, 14, if you're smoking pot, you're smoking centimeter. Okay. So, yes, the term sensania means pot. Okay. The pot that smoked. Although the male flowers do have some THC, it's just far, far less of female than female. Yeah. As a cultivator, males are not what you want. In fact, males can disturb the cycle of the female plants. So the goal of the cultivator is to get the male out of there as quickly as it can be identified, basically. Yeah. And weed is actually a good moniker for pop because it spreads very easily. Pollen is like 24 microns, which apparently is very easily windborne and goes very great distances. There's very few obstacles to pollenization. So if you have female plants and you have what you suspect to be a mail plan anywhere nearby, you want to get rid of the mail plan. Right. And then tell the officer, they must have just blown over here and taken root, sir, this 100 plants in my backyard came from my neighbor. Right. They're pollen. 24 microns. Come on. Yeah. He says, tell your story to the judge, my friend. Right. There are about we should also say there are hermaphroditic plants. Hermaphroditic plants? Yeah. That feature both male and female flowers. Those are probably a mess. Yeah, I think maybe that's a good thing. I think it's like a lot of hybrid ones are hermaphroditic. Okay. Yeah. Well, there are hundreds of chemicals in the marijuana plant, 109 of which are cannabinoids. About 33 are cancer causing. And we'll get to that stuff later, too. But ironically, they also are cancer killing some of them. It is an on plant. Yeah, but we're going to get to all that stuff too. Right? Okay. And your THC is really the main psychoactive ingredient. What's the long name for it? Delta nine tetrahydrocannabinol. That is THC. That is what the high that you're seeking. It lies within that chemical. Yeah. And actually you can point to the part of the plant where it is if you've ever seen a marijuana plant and it has kind of this hazy appearance from far away, and you get up close and you realize that haze is actually made up of a bunch of little clear, sticky protrusions coming off of the leaves, those are called trichomes. And that is where the THC is stored. That's right. And depending on the plant and the variety and how it's grown and when it's harvested and the genetics and how you process it, that's all going to affect the THC level. And as a cultivator, your goal is to have the THC level as high as you can get it. Yeah, that is up for debate as well. From what I've seen, apparently they're just going higher and higher and higher as far as THC content goes. And there's a lot of recreational pot users and medicinal pot users. We're seeing too much. Dude has a bit about how when he was in the 70s, he could smoke, like, a whole joint and be like, totally mellor. Cool. Now he's saying it takes, like, one hit and you go totally insane. And apparently there is, like, a point where it's just, like, too much. Well, Louis C. Cake can afford better pot these days, too. No, but you're right. It all depends on the end user, what they're into. Sure. But generally speaking, the cultivator wants to deliver the most bang for the buck. You would think so. Sure. So, Chuck, let's figuratively smoke some pot and follow it through the body. Okay. You know what? We probably shouldn't do this ourselves. No, we like our jobs. Exactly. Yeah. And we might be fired for even figuratively smoking pot. Well, yeah. And who wants to? How about that scruffy looking guy, farmer Ted? Yeah, look at him. He's game. So a lot of people don't know this, but we have a friend named Farmer Ted who has the very strange characteristic of having entirely translucent skin. He's kind of like the Invisible Man or something like that. Yeah. And what better person than to follow the trail of THC in the human body than when you can actually see? Yeah. Because the rest of his organs or anything aren't translucent. It's just a skin. Yeah. And thank you for coming in, Ted. So Ted is going to smoke a joint, a marijuana cigarette. Yes. And he's going to smoke what is a typical marijuana cigarette, approximately 500 milligrams of marijuana, which translates to roughly, I don't know, maybe ten milligrams of THC. Okay. So he's going to take a lighter and take it to the end of this joint. I'm making air quotes here because that's vernacular. And the THC is going to be burned and carried into his lungs. So Farmer Ted is kind of high already. Yeah. The THC in the smoke is carried to the Avioli in the lungs. And the Avioli is where gas exchange occurs. It's where your oxygen deprived blood comes to get a refill of oxygen to be replenished. And since there's THC smoke present in that oxygen in the lungs, the THC is going to hit you ride into the bloodstream and travel through the body. Yeah. It just takes seconds. Yeah. One of the places it's going to go is the brain. And when it hits the brain, it starts doing some pretty funky stuff. That's right. We could ask Farmer Ted how he's feeling right now, and he'll probably say, yeah, he can't talk. He might say that my eyes are dilating and the colors are a lot more vivid. Yes. I'll be hungry soon. I'll be hungry soon. My other senses are enhanced as well. But hold on. I'm starting to feel paranoid. Yes. Let's get into this. Let's get into how pot affects the brain, because it is pretty gosh darn interesting, if you ask me. Yes. And this is how the physiological effects, the end user might have different reactions to them. It doesn't make everyone paranoid, necessarily. No. And I've really looked into it hard to find out why some people are paranoid and some people don't. Part of it is, well, there's two things. One, and I didn't find anything definitive, which I'm sad about. But the two things I came up with, one, it depends on the pot. Sure. If there is a difference between indica and sativa, the prevailing wisdom is that if you smoke indica, you're going to be less likely to be paranoid. Okay. The other reason is it would depend probably on the existing brain chemistry of the user. My brain chemistry is not the same as yours. Right. Neither one of ours is the same as Jerry. So, of course, when we introduce a psychoactive chemical into that chemistry, it's going to affect it differently. So that's what I came up with, basically. I wonder if one of the reasons indica is less likely is because that's the couch bound one. And you're less likely to be paranoid sitting on your couch rather than the more active one. Like smoking and going to the Renaissance Festival, where you'd be freaked out, stone sober, where you'd meet John Strickland and he would mess with you if you found out you were stoned. Anyway, I'm curious. Yeah, it makes sense. I've also found there's recent research that shows the cannabinols, there's a precursor chemical to them that's called cannabidiolic acid. CBD. Right. And CBD has been found that to actually counteract the schizoid effects of pot, like the stuff that makes you paranoid, that symptom. If you smoke a pot that has a higher CBD to THC ratio, maybe it's even or something like that, the CBD is going to cut down on the schizophrenic symptoms while leaving the rest of the stuff intact. Interesting. Isn't that weird? So I wonder if indicated just by nature, has a higher CBD content. Yeah, maybe so there are people that know this. Okay, so back in the 60s, there was a researcher his name escapes me, who started looking into what the heck made pot make you loco? And he found THC. So THC was isolated in the from that they reverse engineered how THC affected the brain and effectively discovered an entire system that we didn't know existed, thanks to pot research. It's called the endocannabinoid system, and it's a very ancient system that's found in everything from sea squirts to every vertebrate on the planet, including sea squirts. Sea squirts. Very primitive animals all the way up to us. Well, I know that I didn't quite get the endocannabinoid part, so take it away. Okay. I know it worked backwards. Yes, that's a very important point. So, you know, when we do anything from our brain says, grab coffee mug right. To us thinking about how we're feeling at any given point, all of that is based on the transmission among neurons, right? Yeah, we've covered that a lot. The neurotransmitters kind of cover that gap between the neurons and deliver the message. Right. And then depending on where the neurotransmitter is and what chemicals come across and different things happen. Right. Well, the endocannabinoid system is this kind of dimmer switch that is around all neurons that work backward to kind of say, whoa, let's not pump those neurochemicals out as frequently or in as much abundance. Right. And the whole point of the endocannabinoid system is to maintain homeostasis or good for your yin. Good for your yang. That's right. Isn't that weird? Yeah. Okay. So when you smoke pot, your endocannabinoid system, which has receptors all throughout the body, there's CB two receptors, which are mainly associated with your immune system, and then CB one receptors are throughout the brain. And when you smoke pot, the cannabinoids, the phytocannabinoids, which is THC in this case, go into these regions of your brain and stick to your brain. To your endocannabinoid receptors. Yeah. They basically. Just kind of hijack the system. So the systems that the endocannabinoid receptors are meant to regulate are no longer being regulated by our body's endocannabinoids. They're being hijacked by THC, which is not subject to our body's whims and all that. We just basically have to ride that snake out until it's over. So you end up with all these different weirdo symptoms that you normally wouldn't have, which is basically the result of your endocannabinoid system going haywire because it's been hijacked by THC. Right. So, like your hippocampus. Yes, we've talked about that. That's good for learning. Yeah, it is. And when the endocannabinoid receptors are full of THC, you're not learning or making memories as well as normal. Yeah. We're talking short term memory. It definitely impairs that. And that's why if you've ever hung out with a bunch of potheads, you'll hear the phrase, what are we just talking about? Quite a lot, because it's going to affect the hippocampus in that way. Yeah. You're not forming memories. It's also going to affect your coordination, which is the cerebellum. So you may be a little clumsier, and then you have the basal ganglia, and that directs your unconscious muscle movements. Yeah. So the reason Farmer Ted is paranoid, he doesn't like that plant looking at them the way it is. Right. He's paranoid because his basomedial amygdala has been affected. Endocannabinoid receptors have been hijacked by THC. And it's this region of the brain where we learn to fear dangerous situations. Farmer Ted is learning to fear things he normally wouldn't fear because the endocannabinoids that the body normally makes are not operating the way that they're supposed to be. So he's not afraid of that plant. Now, aren't the endocannabinoids the same system that they have finally pinpointed the munchies or activates the munchies? Yeah. And your hypothalamus, your ghrelin production. Remember, ghelin? It's that chemical that makes you feel hungry, so you go eat your ghrelin production and absorption is mediated by endocannabinoids in the hypothalamus, which gets hijacked by THC, which suddenly all food looks irresistible. Yeah. And which is why it is prescribed for people going through chemotherapy and other things, because they lose their appetite and lose a lot of weight. And aside from helping to stem nausea, it also will stimulate the appetite. Yeah. So that's the endocannabinoid system, and that is how pot affects it, I feel like. Yes. We left out the biggest part. It also causes a release in dopamine, which is what makes you feel high. Sure. Any euphoric feeling comes from that release of dopamine. But it's also possible that any paranoia or those schizoid symptoms that come along with it are from too much dopamine. Right. Too high a release of dopamine can lead to feelings of paranoia and anxiety. Yeah. And these feelings, the effect of THC period, is going to last a couple of hours, depending on, obviously how good the pot is and how much you smoked. Right. But the chemicals are going to be in your body a lot longer than that, with a terminal halflife of 20 hours to ten days after you've smoked it. So if you're one of the how many percentage of companies drug test? 57%. Yeah. 50 something. 53, maybe. Yeah. Depending on your weight and how much you smoked and how long you smoked. 57. You're right. You're going to either pass that drug test here or not. It can stay in your body for weeks, though. Yeah. There's no way to tell because it depends on you, your metabolism and the pot. Potency of the pot, too, but yeah, your body breaks it down into five metabolites, and they test for all five just using a basic immunosa where they introduce an antibody to your urine and it reacts or doesn't react and turns. It a pretty color. A pretty bad color. All right, stand back up. Let's abuse you some more. Although he seems like he's enjoying it, he's a little cooler now. He was petting that plant, and the guy made up. Yeah. Good. So if you can see his liver right here. Right there. So Farmer Ted is going to eat some pot this time. Okay. So what's going to happen? He's ingested pot orally one way or another, whether cooked in a brownie or just eating the pot. Sure. And the body is going to take this and break it down, metabolize it and send it to the liver. And when this happens, the THC is going to hit the bloodstream in his stomach anyway. So it's going to get some sort of buzz or whatever. But in the liver, he's going to metabolize it into another psychoactive chemical that isn't really present when you smoke it. So the effects aren't quite as pronounced, but they last longer. And there's an additional weirdo thing to it. Well, it's going to take longer, but last longer the effects of it. Yeah, exactly. But there's also the extra psychoactive chemical that's produced in the liver that's not really produced when you smoke it. Yeah. Isn't that weird? It is weird. And it's also the reason why young travelers to Amsterdam want to try their first pot brownie and they don't think it's working. Then they try another one. And this is the ones you see sitting alongside the canal rocking themselves. Yes. Because it takes a little while. It does. When you ingest it via smoke, it's almost instantaneous. When you ingest it by eating it, it's going to take a lot longer. That's right. So I guess we should talk a little bit about whether or not it's addictive, because that's another raging debate for years and years. How addictive is pot? There are all kinds of studies that contradict one another, and I think it's one of these things that probably comes down to the person somewhat, if you have that addictive personality. But they do see effects of pot cessation, irritability, anxiety, depression, maybe sleeplessness and insomnia restlessness, and that's if you quit the pot after having been a user, and it's psychologically addictive, like any drug, you're going to crave it if you want it. Sure. Apparently it can have an impact on your levels of anxiety. Like, you might not feel anxious when you're stoned, but you could feel anxious when you're not stoned. So you get stone more often. Which, while not necessarily a classic addiction, because the addiction model follows strictly the limbic system. And pot, I think, activates it somewhat, but it's not really acting specifically on that. It's acting more on the endocannabinoid system. So indirectly it might be hitting the limbic system, but it's not following that classic addiction route. Yes, but at the very least, that's habitual. If you need to smoke something to get back to normal, that's a habit and a bad one because you have a crutch there. Yes. Unless you're willing nelson and then you're just like, what's the problem? You just keep smoking it. I love my crutches. Willie Nelson. Well, I guess we can talk about some of the medicinal uses. We did talk about cancer and AIDS patients to stimulate appetite. The old glaucoma card is a big one to play if you're applying for your medical marijuana card. It relieves eye pressure. I couldn't find how it does that. Yeah, but that's one of the earliest uses of it. I remember. You remember? I remember when all this first started to hit. Yeah. California passed legal medicinal marijuana in. It was almost all glaucoma at the time, in which it seemed like everybody was like, you are so faking. Right. Glaucoma. You need pop for glaucoma. And then it just became more and more established as fact, became associated with helping more and more maladies. And of course, if you go to get your card and you go to the dispensary, they have a long list of things that it can help. Right. Basically anything you can think of. Yes. They will put on their list. As long as you have a prescription card. I think they're cool with that. Well, no, that's to get the card. Got. You like the doctor. Yeah, the doctor wears birkenstocks. Yeah. You can probably get a medicinal marijuana card from them, but don't see him for anything else. It can help with epileptic seizures. In fact, here in Georgia, that's been on the table due to a famous story of a boy here in Georgia whose seizures were massively cut down by taking marijuana oil, which has no THC, like the kids not getting high, basically. It doesn't have psychoactive properties. No. And Georgia is, believe it or not, trying to speed through. I know it didn't go through initially a few weeks ago, just because I think they didn't have time to get it through. Right. But there seems to be support for it. Yeah, very surprising. Yeah. Just for the marijuana oil, though, not like dispensaries or anything like that. Yeah. Well, I mean, it could be the beginning of it, or it could be a seat change in how in Georgia, some states legalized marijuana. I'd be surprised, but I'm wondering if it's a change like, okay, if this medicinal marijuana oil works, we can legalize that and that's it. That'll be like the model for other states. Oh, I see what you mean. And then Ms multiple sclerosis decreases muscle spasms. And I've seen this first hand with a good friend. It really helps him out. And Montel Williams has famously come out as an Ms sufferer who is a longtime advocate for using marijuana. Well, it makes sense again. I mean, if you're having muscle spasms, perhaps your endocannabinoid system is not functioning correctly and the THC goes in and actually supplements it. And also, I remember I said that it fights cancer. Yeah. If you go into cancer dot gov and type cannabis and medicinal cannabis, I think it brings up basically a laundry list of all of the ways that marijuana helps. And it's been found to fight to destroy cancer cells. Oh, wow. Like THC goes in and destroys cancer cells in the liver. Apparently it's been shown to destroy breast cancer cells. Like not helps you feel better when you have cancer. Can actually cure cancer. Wow. In some cases, it was a carcinoma in the liver that it was shown to be able to cure. So it's definitely worth checking out too. That's awesome. And it also alleviates pain and inflammation associated with injury or disease. The way it does that is with the other cannabinoid receptors, the CB, two receptors in the body are related to the immune system. So it goes in and messes with those and says, hey, everybody calm down without being so inflamed. Well, I guess that's why it's prescribed a lot for arthritic conditions these days. Yeah, that would make sense. Yeah. Rheumatoid arthritis, that was called. Yeah, I don't know what's the differences between rheumatoid and regular arthritis? We should do one on arthritis. All right, let's do it. How about that? Despite all the medical research, it is still scheduled or classified as a schedule one substance, which is the most dangerous drugs that currently have no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. And there have been many pushes over the years to get it reclassified. And not in the same group as heroin and cocaine and ecstasy. No, but that has not been successful as of yet. But I think that will probably happen at some point soon. It seems like it's going that way, but supposedly around the time Normal was founded, the National Organization for the Re Legalization of Marijuana legislation. Is that right? I'm pretty sure. Okay. It's quite a mouthful. I went to Why everybody saw the Normal festivals. East seven, Piedmont Park. In the normal rally hash bash. Yeah, I saw the black crows there once. It was great. But yeah, normal was found in the seventies at a time when it looked like I mean, Carter was president, willie Nelson had smoked a joint on the White House roof, it was the time for pot to be decriminalized. And everybody thought, like, it's going to happen, it's happening, it's happening. And apparently, no, it didn't happen. They pulled back from the brink. So it's entirely possible that what looks right now to be the wind of change that is very much sweeping through the country could be stopped. Baffled, I guess. So the fat lady has not sung yet. Well, I think the first step toward the federal and the difference here is federal laws versus state laws. It's still federally not accepted. But in states like Colorado and Washington and then how many states have medical like 1120 or 20? Yeah. Okay. If anything's going to happen federally, it's got to be reclassified away from schedule one first. Right. So until that happens, you're probably not going to see any federal laws enacted. No. Or repealed. And we should say the mood of the country right now is about split a little bit in favor toward pro pot. So, like, in Washington and Colorado, both votes were like 554-4554 three, something like that. And a CBS poll from 2014, I think in January found about the same 55% of Americans favor legalizing pot opposed to, like, I think 44%. 43%. Yeah. So it's clearly moved out of just the hippie sonors at the normal rally into people supporting that kind of legislation that don't even use marijuana because there is a groundswell of support that, hey, it's not a schedule one drug. It's not a schedule one drug. Alcohol is more destructive to your life and your body. And why are you going to outlaw this plant and put people in prison with a war on pot that isn't working right. It's like wasting money, whereas we could tax it and raise money. So there's been a big tidal shift in the past decade, really? In the past 20 years, but in the past ten years, if you had asked me ten years ago if there would be recreational use allowed in any state, I would have said probably not. Right. But here we are with Washington and Colorado. Here we are, like where you can grow it, you can buy it. I don't know how much, but I think you're allowed to have a certain small amount, right? Yeah. Like, you can't drive around with \u00a310 in your trunk or anything. I don't know how much you can it's definitely more than just like a small amount, and you can just literally go to the store and buy pot. There's actually an awesome New Yorker article called Buzzkill from late last year, and it's about this economist that Washington state hired to basically create the framework for their legal pot industry. Like the economic model. Yeah. And on a macroeconomic level, on a microeconomic level, it's like whether you like it or not, you're going to be competing with dealers still. And so you want to make your tax money, but you don't want to make so much that you price yourself out of the market and the black market stays open. You want to get rid of the black market by basically competing against them, competing them out of business. Right. And there's all these different factors that this guy was kind of laying out, and it was really interesting. Buzzkill. I have to check that out. Yeah. All right. There's a debate that I don't quite understand about the potency of marijuana in, like, the versus today. The debate is that pod is much more potent than it was in the all. They didn't test a wide variety of marijuana strains in the right. It was like stems and seeds. Mexican rag. Rag. Yeah. So that's the only way you can tell a true test of potency is to study a wide variety. They never did that. They didn't test the Maui Waui. They never did that in the can't go back in a time machine. So what's the point in debating it? The pot today is how it is. It is. And basically the best you could hope to do is have Dennis Hopper smoke some pot and be like, huh? And he can be like, Are you dead? Hopper is dead, dude. It's when I just saw him on, like, an insurance commercial. He died years ago. I didn't know that. Yes. That's sad. It is sad. Sorry. A state of Dennis Hopper. Get Willie Nelson, though. Peter Fonda. Yeah, he's alive. Okay, so you just have Peter Fonda tell you. He can tell you. There's plenty of people who could say the point is that is largely irrelevant because we're not dealing with creating pop policy based on the 1960s. Right. We're dealing with pot policy today. And we know very clearly that pot is more potent today than it was even a couple of decades ago. And we know that in part because of something called the University of Mississippi Potency Monitoring Project. Basically, they get their hands on seized pot that the cops get their hands on. They send some of it to Mississippi, and Mississippi tests it for potency. And they said that between 1993 and 2008, the average amount of THC across all samples rose from 3.4% to 8.8%, from 93 to 2008. And it's going up apparently now with the rise of dispensaries and the openly shared knowledge of how to cultivate and do what you want to genetically select for it's up to, like, 25%, supposedly, and I didn't see that figure disputed. 25% THC content. That's insane. That will drive you and say, I can't imagine that if the average is 8.8 or was 3.419 93 and is now up to 25%, that's potent. Yeah. And that's, I guess, for the top of the line, most expensive pot you can buy. Yeah. But I predict that there's going to be, like, kind of a retro vintage pushback, a return to swag. Not necessarily that, but something that's, like, way more toned down. Or it'll be, like, marketed to people who, like, don't want, like, that level of high, I guess. Yeah. Like seventies weed. Yeah, like all they have to do to market it. Green leisure suit or something like that. Yeah. Boom. Success. Although I don't know if anybody would want to go back to the seventies, because I think it really was very low potency, comparatively speaking. Yeah. All right, so we cover some of the ways that it's smoked. Well, I already covered the joint. Right. Yes. That's what Slim had. Slim had the joint. I do know that Slim happens to prefer the blunt. Oh, yeah. And that is a cigar that is sliced open and tobacco is taken out and generally mixed back in with some of the pot. Oh, is that right? Yeah, it's called a blunt. I didn't know that the tobacco was ever mixed back in. It depends on you don't have to like, a split is popular in Europe, and that's with regular tobacco. Like drum? Yeah, whatever. Just any kind of loose leaf tobacco mixed in with the pot. Yeah, I think the blunts usually they take most of the cigar tobacco out. I think you're probably right. And then you don't even need to buy a cigar. Now they have blunt wrappers, like, basically cigar rolling papers. Oh, really? Yeah, and flavored ones, too. Yeah, I've heard of those. Interesting. Man. You can have your just traditional pipe. If you go into any head shop, you're going to find a big variety of all sorts of handmade glass pipes. Remember the brass ones with the little kind of tiedye plastic thing in the middle for holding because the brass would get so hot? Apparently. I don't remember that. You don't remember that from the 90s? Like, did you go to Lapalooza? Yeah, I went to Lapalusa. Well, then you saw those things. Okay. I remember the first time I smelled pot. It was at a concert. Yeah. And he was, like, 13, and it was such a foreign I think I've talked about this on the show. I was just like, what in the world is that? I've never smelled anything like that in my life. Like someone burning a spare tire or something. Yeah, and then you've got the bong or water pipes, and that uses water to cool down the smoke. Right. And I remember that from the Scott Bayo after school special. Stone, did you ever see that one? No. I saw Zapped. That was a regular movie. But he was growing pot in that one. He was growing it at school. Yeah. And Stoned was one of the classic after school specials where he was a pothead that ended up accidentally killing his brother or something. Like he went swimming and knocked him on the head with the ore of a boat by he may not have died, though he may have rescued them. The after school special that I remember most vividly is the one where Helen Hunt took PCP oh, yeah. And jumped out the window like the story of her school. I mean, they scared the pants off of it. Yeah, which is the point. And Nancy Reagan was, like, off on the set like mor. But I remember hearing the bong. He smoked out of the bong. Scott Bayo did, and I heard that, the bubbling sound. And I was like, well, that's a weird sound. And then you heard it on the Cypress Hill album years later, and yeah. Hey, that's Scott Bayo. And then, of course, we talked about the edibles and vaporizing, which is, like, all the rage these days. Yeah. And I imagine it just hit me the other day, I'll bet everyone who smokes pot uses ecigarettes as, like, little vaporizer one hitters, don't they? Some do. I would imagine so. Yeah. In fact, you can buy, like, pre made cartridges of hash oil and things to stick in your little e cigarette. I know they sell those in Colorado, stick that in your e cigarettes. But we should point out we say kids these days, and teenagers. Although marijuana use in teenagers has escalated over the years, you can't pin it down to one demographic. I think you'd be surprised if everybody who smoked pot on a semi regular basis was outed about who you would see. I've heard stories from friends whose fathers were, like, CEO executives, and they had cannabis clubs where all the other CEOs that they were friends with grew their own specialty, pot and traded it among each other. So a wide range of people use it, although the vast majority supposedly I don't know. The vast majority is right. Although according to polls or surveys, the vast majority are teenagers followed by post teens. Yes. But between marijuana use among teenagers doubled. And you know what? I lay that almost exclusively, at least at first, at the feet of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. You think so? I put it out there yes. With The Chronic. Absolutely. Yeah. That was a great album. 1992. Yes. When I hear that album, I think of Street Fighter Two. Did you play a lot of that then? We would sit around in college, listen to the chronic and play Street Fighter Two. Yeah, it was a good album. It was a great game. I never really played Street Fighter. Yes, they were really good. So I found a study here. I have to interject one other thing. Okay. Have you seen the YouTube of Mike Tyson clips set to Street Fighter sound effects? It's pretty awesome. From his one man show or no, from his boxing career. And it fits, like, perfectly. He's, like, shy. You're getting at one point. I'll have to see that. So if you're smoking pot, it's obviously not going to be great for your lungs and your body, because you're inhaling smoke. And like we said earlier, there are 33 cancer causing chemicals in marijuana and it's going to deposit tar into your lungs just like cigarettes. And in fact, if you smoke equal amounts of marijuana and regular tobacco, it's going to deposit about four times as much tar as regular tobacco. What's called the tar burden. Is it? However, there was a large scale long term study released recently by the University of Alabama at Birmingham and they collected data from 5000 adults for more than 20 years, which these are always my favorite studies because you can tell stuff long term. And they found that low to moderate use of pot is less harmful to your lungs than exposure to tobacco. And I think they measured air flow rate, which is the speed which you can blow out air, and then lung volume, which is the amount of air you can hold in your lungs. And they found that with tobacco, there's a one to one relationship. The more you lose, the more loss you have lungwise. And with marijuana up to a certain rate, it actually increased the airflow rate. And their rationale was that a cigarette smoker, like a moderate to heavy smoker, smoking 20 cigarettes a day. Sure. Whereas no one is going out there and smoking. Well, that's not true. 20 joints a day, yes. But it would be probably less than that because it's more concentrated. But you don't see people smoking five joints a day either, unless they have their Willie Nelson. Snoop Dogg. I'm sorry? Snoop lion. Is he still on Snoop Lion? I think so. I could see how pot would have an effect on your lungs, though, as well, especially compared to cigarettes, because no one uses a filter on their joints. Well, yeah, and you inhale deeper with marijuana than you do with tobacco. So those are both factors. Yeah, but if you're smoking a pack a day and you're smoking a lot of weed, you're not doing yourself any favors in the long department. Yes. Even though it might help you fight that cancer. It may give you cancer to begin with. Yeah, just use non psychoactive marijuana oil like they give that little kid, or Marinol. Although that's psychoactive. It's a THC pill. I remember they use it for like, wasting disease and to increase appetite and that kind of stuff, just to mess with the endocannabinoid system of people who need it. That's right. You got anything else? No. I mean, this could have been a two parter, but this is a good overview. I think it is. I hope everybody enjoyed it. Yeah, you learned a little something. Anything else? No. If you want to learn more about marijuana, aka cannabis, type either of those words into the search bar@housetofworks.com. And let's see, since we said search bar, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Australian smokejumper. Hey guys, just thought I'd like to let you know how you've influenced a major change in my life a couple of years ago now. You did a podcast on Wildfires. I already had a strong interest in firefighting but never heard of the things like smoke jumpers or some of the science involved since I joined the Rural Fire Service last year as a volunteer and last week I completed my first full Bushfire fighter accreditation. Wow. It's been a great change and it's inspired me to get fitter and more active with my community. I'm now working towards getting fit and fast enough to be a smoke jumper, which we call raft units in Australia Remote Area Fire Task Force. So thanks guys for giving me the inspiration and drive to get out there and challenge myself. Could imagine doing anything else in my spare time now. As always, love the show. You keep me mildly distracted through my slow days at work. And that is Andrew from Australia. Nice. Thanks a lot, Andrew. Congratulations. Yes. Keep it up buddy. Pretty cool work. Agreed. Be safe out there. If you want to let us know about any life achievements or successes that you'd like to celebrate by sharing them with us, we want to hear about them. We are all over social media. You can find us on Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook just search stuff you should know S-Y-S-K Josh and Chuck in your favorite browser and it should bring one or all of them up, right? Yeah. And go hang out at the coolest place on the entire web. That is stuffyousthetoe.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com. Hey everybody. I don't know about you but I am excited that it's summer school's out, the sun is shining and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. 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d64aaaa4-3b0d-11eb-aa42-bfce60420736 | How Bruce Lee Worked | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-bruce-lee-worked | Bruce Lee may have introduced more Westerners to Asian culture than any person in history. And, because he died young just as he became an international superstar, he’s become a legend. Josh and Chuck try to uncover the man underneath. | Bruce Lee may have introduced more Westerners to Asian culture than any person in history. And, because he died young just as he became an international superstar, he’s become a legend. Josh and Chuck try to uncover the man underneath. | Thu, 25 Feb 2021 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=56, tm_isdst=0) | 49005368 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of. iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry Rowland. And and this is stuff you should know. Couldn't think of any non problematic nicknames for us to use? Well, you could probably just go, that's what I'm talking about. Is that probably figured that I'm sure. Yes, we would probably hear about that. No, man, you watch any great kung fu movie and they all make that great, great sound after a good death punch. Did you ever take kung fu when you were young or any kind of martial arts? No. I'm notoriously have zero interest in martial arts. And my biggest fear is that my daughter's going to want to do it. Oh, really? Well, you tell her to sweep the leg at a tournament if she ever does. Yeah, sure. I mean, I want her to be able to protect herself. So that sounds like a very selfish thing. But as far as going to martial arts tournaments, I kind of like just kill me now. You should get her interested in like, wielding a knife or something. That would be really cool or just being a good person. So people don't pick fights with her. Yeah. Is that how things work? No, not at all. So I'll tell you, somebody who like to pick fights not just would get into fights and accept the challenge, would actually pick fights. And it turns out that person also happens to be the person we're talking about today, one Mr. Bruce Lee. Yeah, Bruce Lee. I mean, I'm sure like me, you spent the past couple of days watching a lot of Bruce Lee stuff. But my question is, were you into this? Did you watch kung fu movies and Bruce Lee movies? Only insofar is like the whole 90s throwback thing. I would have them on every once in a while and watch them, but I was never super into them. I had friends that were super into them. Remember, of course, I underwent extensive ninja training under Tommy Roper as a much younger person. This is in the 80s. But I was never really into kung fu or martial arts movies outside of that. I will say, though, watching Fist of Fury last night, I was just absolutely blown away. Did you have the whole thing? Yeah, the whole thing. I think Black Belt karate.com pirated the movie and put it on YouTube, the whole thing. And it is just really good. Like the fighting in there is astounding and it gives you a really good appreciation. It's hard not to appreciate what you're seeing with Bruce Lee when you watch it. Yeah. I have still not seen many of those movies. But for a movie crush episode, one of my guest, Stewart Wellington of the Flophouse podcast, one of my favorite other podcasts on movies, he had me watch his favorite movie, which is Ricky O the story of Ricky. And, dude, you have to see this movie, okay? It is the gory over the top, crazy martial arts movie to beat all over the top, gory, crazy martial arts movies. When was it made? Well, 91, but it seems like 78. It's amazing. Is there a shot where some guy jams his fingers into his opponent's testicles and then they cut to a view from inside his scrotum and you see the fingers wiggling? Did that happen? Because I saw a martial arts movie that had that, and I was like, well, there it is. No, but that is the worst thing I've ever seen. It's got a lot of stuff like that, but I don't think that was from Ricky. Oh, but you're on the right track there as far as it's not for everybody. I got to check it out, man. It's pretty fun. You have me. You're on the right track there. Yeah. So Bruce Lee movies were not nearly as violent, but for the time, they were exceedingly violent. It seems like Bruce Lee laid the foundation that people said, Well, I want to top that. I want to top that. And while maybe Gore, there was plenty of blood in Fists of Fury, at least in other movies that he made, but it wasn't anything like what we just talked about. But I think the larger point for Bruce Lee is that he laid this foundation like. He introduced the United States and the west to the idea of not just kung fu movies. But of. Like. Asians being heroes. Like protagonists. Like tough. You know. Because up to that point not necessarily exactly up to that point. But awfully close to it. Especially in the west. The people from China. Japan seemed very docile. Cerebral. I saw not at all like Bruce Lee. And Bruce Lee changed all of that basically single handedly, especially as far as America is concerned. Yes. With a single one inch punch, basically. So let's talk a little bit about his early life because he had a pretty interesting background, pretty interesting genetic family tree, because we all think of him as Chinese, and he certainly was Chinese. But if you poke around his lineage and you will learn that his maternal great grandfather was Dutch Jewish, which is really interesting. He was a merchant. His name was Moses with a Z hotdog Boseman. And he went to Hong Kong. In the 1850s, as part of the Dutch East India Company, became the Dutch ambassador to Hong Kong. Had six kids with his concubine, and then one of those kids, one of his sons, Ho Komtong, he became a very rich man. He had a wife, 13 Concubines, and a British mistress. And then he had a daughter with a British mistress, and that was Bruce Lee's mom. Yeah. So Bruce Lee was part Jewish, part British, and lots of Chinese mixed together. His father was 100% percent Chinese, and his father was born poor, but he actually worked his way up to a fairly sizable celebrity in Hong Kong. Or was it China? I don't remember if Bruce Lee's father lived in Hong Kong or China. Well, it was kind of both. He was a Cantonese opera star and an actor. And then I think eventually they did settle in Hong Kong. Okay, all right. But he was very well known. Like, he was in movies, he was on TV. He was a pretty famous guy. I would liken him. He was the Jerry Orbach of his time and place. Jerry Orbach singer? No, but he was, like, everywhere. He was in everything from Dirty Dancing to Murder, She Wrote. Like, he was all over the place. And he was multi talented, too. Okay, don't try to tell me Jerry Orbach is not multi talented, because he is. Sure. But he was no opera star. You don't know that. You're right. I could be a martial arts expert. Jerry Orbit could be an opera star. We can be whatever we want to be in our mind's eye. So Bruce Lee's father was the Jerry Orbach of his time and place? That's right. So he was touring the US. When Bruce was born. He was born in San Francisco in 1940, and his parents named him Lee Jun Fan. And apparently a nurse said you should call him Bruce for his English name. What did she say exactly? Did you hear what we named him originally? Yeah. She's like, yeah, Bruce, please. You can find Bruce. They moved back to Hong Kong when he was a baby, and he grew up there, but he grew up with going to English schools, english language, private schools. Yeah. So he always kind of had this I don't want to say split identity, but his identity, his sense of self was definitely divided between America and, I believe the UK. To an extent, and also, obviously, Hong Kong. And then, of course, his ancestry in China not necessarily felt spread all over the place, but in a different sense, he was more open to influences wherever he found them. I saw somebody say that Bruce Lee learned from everybody, everyone that he came in contact with, including people who he had to fight, who fought of different styles. He was always open to learning something. He was very cocky. He was very arrogant by a lot of people's estimations, but he also was humble enough to want to learn wherever he thought he could learn something new. And I think that according, at least to a guy named Matthew Polly, who's known as one of his better biographers, that really kind of underscored his personality, just kind of being divided among different places around the world and having different influences. Yeah. So we'll take a little break here, and we'll come back and talk about some of the early formative years of young Bruce Lee 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. So little Bruce was born not only in the year of the dragon, but the day of the dragon, and his nickname was little dragon. When he became a child actor. If you only know Bruce Lee from his martial arts work, his kind of short career in martial arts films, he was actually on screen as a baby. But his real first kind of role was, I think, when he was, like, ten years old. Yeah, he was in a movie called the kid. Yes. Which I watched some clips of this. I'm sure you did, too. It's cute. Little Bruce Lee, he does he kind of throws a lot of child abuse in it. Was it really? Yeah, he has some money, so he offers to help his uncle out, and his uncle just basically deafened him in one ear. Well, yeah, I didn't see that clip. I would call that child abuse, Chuck. I would do. I didn't see that clip. You're like? Yeah, well, I guess if that's your definition of child abuse no, not at all. I just didn't see that one. I just saw the one where he kind of did that famous Bruce Lee sort of thumb across the nose and throw his little shirt open. I know. That's crazy. He was that young. Ten years old, and he's already laying the groundwork for the things that were going to make him famous in the future. Yes. And he was a little guy. I think as a full grown adult, he reached 57, about \u00a3130. He was not very big when he was a kid. He was very small. He was fairly weak because of food rations, because Hong Kong was occupied by imperial Japan at the time, and they were rationing food out. There was a cholera epidemic. He had one leg shorter than the other. He had an undecided testicle, which actually ended up keeping him out of Vietnam. I didn't know that. A little bit of a silver lining there. He had glasses. He had acne. I think his biographer said that he and this is the only person I really saw say that, but he said he'd probably be diagnosed with ADHD today. I looked for other places to find that, and no one, I don't think, is on record as saying that, but it did seem like that could be possible because he was very active, had trouble with focus, but could also hyper focus. And like you said, you would kind of pick fights with people because he was a little kid, and a lot of times little kids will do that. If they want to prove that they're strong and have value, they'll pick fights and try and beat people up. Not the way to do it. No kids. No. But, I mean, he was well known in Hong Kong as being, like, this kind of local tough who would start fights and frequently won them, but sometimes we lose them, too. But there was one fight in particular that he lost around the age of 15 or 16 to a kid who had been studying kung fu style called Wing Chun. And that is where his famous one inch punch comes from. That style of fighting. It's really good for closed quarters type fighting where your opponent is right in front of you and coming at you. Wing Chun is very good for that. So that was the kind of dude that Bruce Lee was. Even back when he was a little hotshot 15 year old, he lost a fight to somebody, and he wanted to know how that person had beat him, so he went and learned it. And that actually formed the basis for his formal education in martial arts. Was entering into the Wing Chun school at age 15. Yeah. And I looked a little more into Wing Chung to see what it was kind of all about. And apparently there's two sort of main tenants, which is the center line theory, and then standing guard in the center line theory is basically you draw a line from the center of your body to your opponent's body, and that is the quickest route to strike. So if you've got someone coming at you, like, if you go through the A punch, like American boxing style, like a haymaker, you're going up and around toward the jaw, to the side of the jaw. If you're practicing Wing Chun, you are standing right in front of that person, and as you're throwing your haymaker, you've gotten a very quick straight punch to your solar plexus. Like, what just happened? That is basically the essence of Bruce Lee style. Super lightning fast would take advantage of you while you thought you were about to strike him. He used that against you. Whatever flaw there was and what you were doing to hit or kick him or come at him, he would take advantage of it and hit you within that time. If you watch any of his movies, you can see it quite clearly, but he'd been working on that. I didn't realize that that was necessarily wing chun. I thought that was his own style, but it would make sense because, again, wing chun is the foundation for his style of kung fu that he ended up coming up with. Right. So like we said, his dad was fairly famous. Bruce is in the movie, like Jerry Orbach level famous. Don't forget, Bruce is in this movie when he was ten years old, called The Kid. That was a big success. And then they said, hey, let's sign this kid up to do some sequels. And his dad said, no, my kid is not going to be an actor. He's going to be a doctor or a lawyer or something like that. And he's always in trouble in school, so I'm not going to let him sign this contract. He ended up being in some movies, kind of off and on. I think he ended up being in about 20 different movies before his kung fu movie days, but he never turned into the big kids star that they were trying to get him to be with that first contract, I think. Yeah, apparently he would have been had his father not directly intervened to make sure that didn't happen, which is pretty interesting. But he's ten. He can't sign a contract without Daddy saying so and Mommy saying so. Well, yeah, you definitely need to have your parents support like that, for sure. His father stepped in and said, no, you're going to do something else. And that was at age ten. I don't know, I think at least 18 at the latest. But at some point, he had kind of gotten, like I said, he had a reputation as like a local tough street fighter in Hong Kong. And I guess he fought another kid and beat him quite badly. And the kid turned out to be the son of a local mob boss. I don't know if he was a boss or a connected mob guy, but a member of the triad, it does sound like a movie. And between that and the Hong Kong police basically saying, like, look, your kid is totally on our radar and it's a real problem, and he's going to end up in jail or dead if he keeps this stuff up. And by the way, the local mob now wants to kill him because he beat up one of the boss's sons. His father said, you're out of here. You're going to America. Which, again, this isn't like a complete out of the blue place to send Bruce Lee. This is the land that he was born. He had an American passport. He was American by birth, and he also had family there, too. But this is the first time that he was living on his own. From what I saw, his father gave him $800, which is pretty substantial back then, said, here are the addresses of some family in the Pacific Northwest. Head on out to San Francisco. And he started in San Francisco and ended up in Seattle pretty quickly, I believe. Yeah, Seattle. In college, he went to UW, and that money obviously would run out, so he had to get a job. He worked as a bus boy in a Chinese restaurant, actually lived in the restaurant in kind of a closet type of deal, and everyone started hearing about his martial arts skills and the fact that he was pretty good at this stuff. So he started teaching a little bit on the side in that wing chun style, and he met Linda there, who would go on to be his wife. She was a fellow student of his. Linda got pregnant, and they got married. They were very young. They were still in college, and they had little Brandon Lee. We'll talk about him later on. And then a daughter named Shannon. Yeah. So all of a sudden, Bruce Lee, who is a busboy at a Chinese restaurant and also teaching kung fu on the side, has a family, a wife, kids, and he needs money now more than he ever did before, and he has a pretty good idea. He's going to start opening a franchise of martial arts studios because martial arts was already known in the United States, but typically it was kept within whatever Asian community that practiced it. Right. So if it was kung fu, you would find almost entirely Chinese people learning it. Immigrants to the country, they are the children of immigrants. Taekwondo. It would be like Korean families. And Bruce Lee said, you know what? I want to kind of explode that. There's a lot of talk about whether he was the first person in the United States to come along and open up martial arts to anybody who wanted to learn of any race, any ethnicity, women, men. From what I saw, it's not necessarily true, but that is often credited as evidence of just kind of how cocky and unconventional and disrespectful, I guess, of norms and traditions just for the fact or just for norms and traditions sake. And I don't know if he was the first person to teach just anybody who wanted to learn. But it definitely fell within his persona. His outlook of martial arts. Which is I'll learn whatever I can and put it into my fighting style so that I survive. And that would make sense to kind of flip it on the other way and say. Well. I'm going to teach his fighting style to whoever wants to learn it. Yeah. And it turns out it was just as he ended up learning Wing Chung because of a fight he had early on. He also expanded his fighting style because of another fight, which sounds like it. I think there are a lot of legends and tall tales around Bruce Lee as well. This story sounds a little dubious, but maybe it's true. It's not dubious. It definitely happened, but it was close to the public, and there were only three eyewitnesses there, and one gives a conflicting report from the other two to large degree, but it's been so thoroughly studied and researched by some people, like that Matthew Polly guy spent a year just researching this fight alone. There was another guy named Charles Russo who wrote a book called Striking Distance. He spent a decade on that book, and he interviewed 100 people just for that fight alone because it's one of the most legendary fights that's ever happened in the history of the world, and only three people were there to see it besides the fighters. Yeah, they interviewed 100 people about what they heard. What happened? Basically, yeah. That's as close as they could get. Aside from the people who were there who were, again, saying, this is kind of conflicting. But overall, what seems to be the ultimate upshot of it is that it was at least a draw. It seems like it was a draw, yeah. He fought a man named Wong Jack Man, and apparently it was a pretty brutal fight, like you were saying, very legendary and yeah, conflicting reports. Let's just call it a draw. Let's be magnanimous here. But at the end of this, the sort of upshot is that Bruce was like, I have limits now with wing chun, and I need to be able to best larger opponents because I'm a small guy. I need to really kind of ramp up my study, especially if I'm a teacher, and kind of get better, basically. So he came up with his own jam, and that's called Jeet Kundu the Way of the Intercepting Fist. And this was a little bit he was a really good boxer. I don't think we've mentioned that yet. If he had only boxed and dedicated himself to being a boxer, he probably could have been like a belt holding boxer and like an Olympic champion. So he incorporated elements of boxing. He incorporated all the wing chun that he had learned and then fencing, which his older brother did, which is when you're lunging at your opponent, but instead of a foil, he would use his fist. I mentioned the one inch punch earlier. There was also the six inch punch. There are tons and tons of videos and breakdowns of what that is, but that's what he was really famous for, which is basically and then Tarantino kind of borrowed for the Kill Bill movies. You put your fingers on, like, the sternum of a human, and that's how far you punch from like you don't rear back and swing or anything. You just use your hips and your legs and you focus your energy and all your momentum to just very quickly punch and push somebody. And even from one inch, you can knock somebody backwards, like 7ft and that's super helpful if you can do that. But what that one fight with Wong Jack Man taught him? Wong Jack Man kept moving away from him. And if your fighting style is entirely about fighting in close quarters with your opponent coming at you, if your opponent is getting away from you, you're just kind of up the creek. And that's what really kind of opened his eyes, that he needed to expand it. And so, like you said, he incorporated boxing and incorporated fencing. He also realized that he needed grappling, too. He didn't have any grappling moves. And apparently that came into focus when he was on set for a TV show that he would end up being on for a season called The Green Hornet. She'll talk about in a second. And apparently, on the set of The Green Hornet, he became quickly known for actually beating up the stunt doubles. Rather than pulling his punch and just not making contact or just barely making contact, he was punching these guys and kicking these guys. And they apparently brought in a ringer named Judo Jean Label, who was a very tough stuntman, a two time judoku champion, and brought him in as a stuntman. On the first day on the set, he picked up Bruce Lee out of nowhere, put him in a fireman carry, like, on his shoulder, and Bruce Lee, he couldn't do anything. He was just so mad. But there was nothing he could do to get out of this. And he realized he needed to incorporate grappling, and he ended up training with Gene Labelle for a year and expanded his fighting style even further. And that fireman carry, that meeting, that fight, basically on the set of The Green Hornet is what Quentin Tarantino was recreating in that movie Once upon a Time in Hollywood when Cliff Robertson, Brad Pitt fights Bruce Lee on the sound stage in the parking lot. And a lot of people were very upset because he took tremendous liberties with that fight. But it was based on this kernel of history that had a much better outcome than what Quentin Tarantino showed. Yeah. Cliff Booth, by the way. Cliff Robertson. Cliff Booth was a real actor. Oh, was he? Yeah. I thought he was the basis for Metallica. No, that was Cliff. Somebody else, I think. Okay. Yeah. I mean, Tarantino, we should kind of talk about that for a second because he was taken to task by a lot of people, certainly people from Bruce Lee's own family, for that scene. And they were like, this is not what Bruce Lee was like. His daughter, especially like, this is not what my dad was like. He was not cocky. He was not arrogant. He was confident, and he was a good teacher. But, you know, Tarantino then fired back in some interviews. Like, he was arrogant and cocky. He was known as this guy. And apparently the people closest to him said he wasn't at all this is a misconception by white people. And Tarantino took a lot of grief and sort of argued back. And then she finally, in an interview in Variety magazine, was like, he should just kind of shut up about this and say, I'm making fictionalized movies and not purport to know what my dad was like. Yeah. When it's coming from the daughter, it seems like you should probably just shut up. For sure. Probably so. And we'll probably get an email from her, too, because you said he was cocky and arrogant. Yeah, right. I was thinking back to that flashing back. I guess one thing I saw that gives weight to the idea that he had a certain amount of arrogance or cockiness or I can understand how some people would take him that way or portray him that way, is he was well known for going around publicly insulting established martial arts schools. Like. One of the first things he did where he made a name for himself among the martial arts community. Especially in the Bay Area. That some people say led to that fight between him and Wong Jack Man. Was to insult basically every established martial arts school in America and say that they were taught by old tigers with no teeth. Basically. If they were misguided. And that they were just wrong. And that his way was the right way. And it wasn't that he had it out for the old establishment just because they were the old establishment. But what he had decided with Jeet Kundo is that it didn't make any sense to train and train and train to know exactly where your feet are going to go and exactly where to put your fists or that kind of thing. Because all that stuff dissolves in a real fight. And so to Bruce Lee and his fighting style, the whole point is to survive the fight. And so you use whatever you can get your hands on, whatever technique, whatever style is going to work. And that really doesn't jibe with the idea of an established, rigid school. So we certainly ran afoul of some of the established martial arts groups, and I think that has kind of contributed to this idea that he was cocky in real life. I'm not his daughter, so I certainly can't say, but that's what I was basing my interpretation on. Yes. My read is that he was a business person and that he was trying to make some money because his idea was that he wanted to open up a chain of kung fu schools. He goes back to La. To give a demonstration at a karate tournament to try and make a little headway there with maybe getting investors or getting people interested. And it worked. He met a TV producer there, and that is how he got the role on The Green Hornet, which, like you said, ran for a single season. And he stayed in Hollywood, though, and he really. Got the acting bug. I think he was in a few kind of smaller parts over the next few years. He played Winslow Wong in the movie Marlow in 1969, and then, like you mentioned, kind of at the beginning, he was trying to do something that didn't exist yet, which was become an Asian and at least an Asian American hero, because they just didn't do that. They were like, you can play this kind of role. You're probably going to come in as the bad guy or something. You're going to show off some of your kung fu skills, but you're not going to be the star of the movie. And he said, all right, I'll hang around here. I'll start making a ton of money teaching the Hollywood elite my fighting style, and ended up making some really close friends, notably James Coburn and Steve McQueen. Ended up being two of his closest friends over the years until his death. They were pawl bearers, too. Yeah. Along with Chuck Norris, of course. Yeah, he was a ball bearer. I also saw Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate were two of his students, too. Yeah. Roman Polansky tried to sleep with him. No, he I'm surprised Bruce Lee lost his glasses. Roman Polanski found some glasses like his at the murder scene, and Roman Polanski was very suspicious of that. And apparently he went so far as to take Bruce Lee to get a prescription made to replace the glasses that were broken and then wanted to get his hands on that prescription and compare them, and apparently they didn't match, so he backed off. He suspected Bruce Lee and the Manson family murders. Tate LaBianca murder. I don't want to put any words in Roman Polanski's mouth, but I'm telling you what happened, which is that he found these glasses and had them checked out. Wow. That's a Hollywood nugget, Chuck, that you just put that jewel in your crown right there. Well, I didn't discover it. I mean, I just read it. Yeah, but it's well known. Okay, well, whatever. If you can wear the crown around me and I'll just be, like, totally earned. He got really into health and fitness. This was a time in the kind of before the big exercise and weight lifting boom and stuff that happened. He was eating protein shakes and lifting weights kind of before a lot of people were, and he wanted to get his body in the best shape possible. And if you've ever seen Bruce Lee's body, then he did exactly that. Yeah, mission accomplished, for sure. And, I mean, again, he was a little guy. Like, he weighed \u00a3130, but he was just as lean as they come and totally chiseled. He was very strong for his size and stature and just lightning fast, too. But none of this was amounting to anything as far as his film career was concerned. He was going quite far as a martial arts instructor, for sure, but clearly I don't know if he felt like his calling was always the movies or TV. I think so. Or something like that. Okay, well, then that would explain it. I had the impression that he just knew that that was something he could do, which he apparently was starting to accumulate some debt. And at one point, to keep his chain of martial arts studios open, he decided to go to hong kong and do some acting rather quickly and pick up some fast money. So I didn't know if he considered that like, a step towards stardom or if that was just he knew he could go make some money acting and come back and pour it back into the studios to keep them open. Do you know? I think the studios were making his living, but I think since he was ten years old, he was bitten by the acting bug, which is why he went on to be in 20 more movies over the next eight years. Yeah, true. And I think that was true. I think the kung fu studios, in my reading, was the means to get to where he wanted to be, which was a big hollywood superstar. Well, it actually worked that trip. Like I was saying, he was just going for some money to keep his studios afloat or open, but it turned out to be the greatest move that any actor has ever undertaken, just going to hong kong and trying to pick up some parts in martial arts films. That's exactly what he did, and he blew up as a result. That's right. So let's take our final break here, and then we'll come back and wrap it up and spank it on the bottom 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, so Bruce lee goes to Hong kong to make some movies, make a little dough, and he goes to hong Kong and signs a two picture movie deal with Golden Harvest Studios and signs on for his first movie, a little movie called The Big Boss, which originally in the United States was called Fist of Fury. A little confusing because there was a movie called Fist of Fury that also had an alternate title. What's that? Yes, the Chinese Connection. But The Big Boss, aka in America, at first, the Fista Fury, or Fista Fury, was his first sort of foray into those movies. And it was a big hit. It's hard to explain what happened. That first movie, The Big Boss, came out and basically made Bruce Lee an overnight sensation in Asia as far as martial arts is concerned. Not just Hong Kong. Asia. He just became an absolute superstar. The Big Boss shattered the box office record. The previous Hong Kong box office record was held by The Sound of Music, and it had made something like Hk$800,000. The Big Boss made something like four times that in its box office run. And then as more Bruce Lee movies came out over the next couple of years, each one shattered the record of the previous Bruce Lee movie. So when something like that happens, you know you have something once in a lifetime basically on your hands. And he was right smack dab in the middle of that once in a lifetime thing. Yeah. And not only were these movies making a lot of money, they were really cheap to make, which was like he was like the golden boy. Because I think Fist of Fury, the second movie, cost about $100,000 to make and made 100 million. I think The Way of the Dragon made 130,000,000 and cost about $130,000. So he was making like huge, huge money. I mean, not personally, but the studios were making huge money on very little investment. And the thing with Bruce Lee was he was like you said, he was selling these fights better than anyone ever had. And his speed was really the key to it. If you watch a lot of older kung fu movies and it looks like the action is sped up it's because it is, they would speed up the camera, or actually slow down the camera to make the action appear faster, to make it more exciting. But Bruce Lee was so naturally fast, they had to tell him to slow down just so the camera could record stuff accurately. So there were a few legends that grew up around his speed. One, speed and strength. One that he could steal a dime off of your hand. Like, if you're holding it in the palm of your hand, before you could just close your hand, he could catch a rice grain that you would throw at them with chopsticks. And these are all maybe true or not, but I just love these legends. Well, you would use chopsticks to throw a rice grain at them. No, you would throw a rice grain at him and he would catch it with chopsticks. That's way more impressive. And then the last one was that he could punch a hole through a can of Coke with his finger. Wow. And I hope these are true because they're so great. Well, if they're not true, that's okay. You're not the first person to fall for some of the exaggerations I saw, Matthew Polly was kind of not called out, but somebody made mention of the fact that this is one of the top biographers. Like one of the best biographers of Bruce Lee still said somebody got punched and they flew back 6ft into the air. And it's almost certainly not correct. 6ft is probably an exaggeration, but the fact that things like that get repeated and smart people say this is what he was capable of, at the very least goes to underscore his abilities, that they were so mind boggling that it's possible that that's true. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's not like, oh, that's ridiculous. It's like, no, this is Bruce Lee we're talking about. I think I can explain the 6ft thing. It might be an exaggeration that someone literally didn't touch the ground for 6ft. But if you look at demonstrations of the one finger punch, he can knock someone back six to 8ft very easily until they can regain their composure. People are flying back 6ft, but not necessarily not touching the ground in between. You know what I mean? I think this was, quote, flying through the air. Little riders flourish. Yeah, maybe. But I mean, again, it comes like people are like, oh, that's cool. That's crazy, because we're talking about Bruce Lee. If, like, my biographer said that everyone would be like, stop the presses. You got a biographer, I will eventually assume. But people will be like, I question everything that's in this book now with Bruce Lee, it's like, yeah, totally buy that. So Bruce Lee made a name for himself. Now he is driving around sports cars. He's wearing fur coats. He is a big pothead, which is something oh, yeah, I forgot about that. You don't hear about a lot. But apparently after Paul sagan, right? Yeah. But after Bruce Lee's training sessions, he apparently had this wooden box just full of joints, also smoked hash and got really into the sort of hippy lifestyle. Kind of grew his hair long for a little while. And I think it was wrapped up in this Hollywood hippie thing at the time, understandable. And his career has gone along great. And it all culminates with a movie called Enter the Dragon in 1973. Big movie. Yeah, it was a huge movie. I think he wrote and directed that one. And I think the first one he wrote and directed was Way of the Dragon. But, like, by this time on his third movie, he was now writing and directing it. And certainly by his fourth one, he wrote and directed it. I saw that The Way of the Dragon, a quarter of the script was just a couple of fight scenes. Choreography took up like a quarter of the script. And it was not was the one that put them on the map as an overnight sensation in the United States and the west. Like the other two the first two or three first three had made them an overnight sensation in Asia. This is the one that taught America what a kung fu movie was because we hadn't heard of it before. And now all of a sudden, we couldn't get enough of Bruce Lee. Unfortunately, Bruce Lee had died a month before. And one of the great ironic tragedies, as far as, like, Hollywood stardom goes yeah, only 32 years old. If you look up Bruce Lee death, there's a lot of different stories and theories out there. He had a mistress at the time named Betty Tingpai, and apparently he had been on and this is the way Chuck Norris told it, too. Apparently he had been on back medication for a while because of a back injury. So pain meds for his back. Came home to his apartment in Hong Kong with his mistress, complained of a headache. She gave him, I think, a different kind of pain reliever, although Chuck Norris said it was a I'm blanking. Now, what's the thing you take to fight an infection? Antibiotic. Antibiotic, which I think you just misspoke because that wouldn't make any sense. But that's what Chuck Norris said. So took another pain reliever, went down for a nap and died. Never woke up. There are all kinds of speculation about what happened. It seems like it was just a reaction of these medications. Some people say, including the biographer. It also had to do with heat stroke. Yeah. Because he had 110 weeks before, right? Yeah. And he also a few months before he died, he used to be very embarrassed about his underarm sweat. So he had the sweat glands removed from his underarms. What? And so apparently they said that could have contributed to his body wasn't shedding sweat like it should, and that could have led to a heat stroke. I had not heard that before. That definitely crosses a couple of t's that I hadn't otherwise seen. Maybe, but I think it was like ten weeks before he died, he collapsed when he was dubbing a movie in a room without air conditioning. It was really hot. Got that heat stroke. And some people are saying this all contributed with these medications to a brain edema. Yeah, but again, the fact that he died mysteriously, this guy who's, like, one of the fittest people on the planet, just dies after saying he has a headache and lies down and wakes up. That's just conspiracy theory fodder for Eon. Sure. It's still going on today. Like, apparently he had a break with the director, Low Way, who directed the first two Bruce Lee films. The first two kung fu films he was in, he pulled a knife on him because the director had been taunting him. And Bruce Lee was there is a legend that Low Way had him assassinated by ninja or something like that. But the upshot of it is, however he died, he died like a month before he became world famous, and he's still world famous today. Everyone knows Bruce Lee. He's one of the most famous people to ever live. And he died a month before that happened, which is you say that and you read it and you think it just doesn't quite sink in. And when it does, you're like, that is astounding that that happened. Just the timing of all that. Yeah. And then many years later, his son, Brandon Lee would die very tragically on the set of a film because of an accident with a blank bullet, actually shooting a slug out of a gun on set of the crow. Right. Yeah. I think he was 28, and his father had died when he was 32. So a lot of people are like, well, clearly the Leaf family is cursed. Right? Which is nonsense. Yes. I think Shannon tragedy, you should probably just shut up about that. Probably so. But one of the things that it's hard to overstate, like the cultural legacy that he left, he introduced the west to a completely different concept of Asian people. They can actually stars action heroes. They're not like valets or servants or whatever. It just completely altered Americans understanding of Asian people. It's really hard to understand that. And then the other thing, too, is we were kind of talking about whether he was an actor or a martial artist. And a lot of people are like, is Bruce Lee Woody, actually was he really a good fighter? Or was he like a movie fighter like JeanClaude Van Damme or Steven Segal, who like, in a real life fight? And because Bruce Lee died at such a young age, we don't know, or a lot of people don't know. But if you talk to the people who trained with him, who worked with them, who were there, who actually physically interacted with him, it seems like completely understandable that he was everything you saw in film, he could do for real in real life. And you would never have wanted to fight Bruce Lee. So he wasn't just a fake movie martial artist. He was the real deal. And in a lot of ways, largely selftaught, which makes him all the more impressive. That's right. You got anything else about Mr. Bruce Lee Chuck? I got nothing else. Maybe watch the classic 1982 farcical comedy they call me Bruce. Oh, yeah. Okay. I will check that out. One more thing. His untimely death led to a whole genre of movies called Bruce Floitation, which was basically fake Bruce Lee movies. They're trying to cash in on his fame. Yes. I think he had another movie released after his death, too, didn't he? Did they compile like, footage and stuff for I believe they were filming it when he died and they didn't release it for another five years. Game of Death. That's the one where he fights Kareem. That's fun to watch, actually. And Chuck Norris is in it, too. Game of Death. Yeah, that fight with Kareem was pretty awesome because to see a man that tall be that live and that quick was pretty impressive. And he was one of Bruce Lee's genuine students. He's one of his longtime students, and he credits Bruce Lee with his longevity in the MBA. Yeah. So if you want to know more about Bruce Lee, just go out and start watching movies and videos and demonstrations of Bruce Lee. There's a lot worse things you can do with your time and thank us later. And since I said thank us later, it's time for listener mail. Yeah. I'm going to call this Return of Noah from Scotland. I'm pretty sure I read this on the air, but I told Noah to write in once a year. And here's the follow up. Because Sarah, the amazing eleven year old fan, is now probably in college and has long since forgotten about us. So we miss Sarah. We've been ghosted. We've had ghosted years ago. But this is our new friend, Noah. Hey, it's me, Noah, from Scotland. You told me to write in once a year, so this is my annual letter, in case you don't remember me. I've been listening since I was four and writing you a letter every year since I was five. I still live in Scotland, and for most of the last year, my mom has been homeschooling me because of the coronavirus. It's always great, but when I'm doing my own topics, I can choose them based on your episodes. Nice. My favorite was space weather because I didn't know there was weather in space. My favorite fact that I found out was the most powerful northern lights can generate over 1 trillion watts of power, which is, I think, about 300 million solar panels. It was a hard sum, but I think it's right if you're asking us about math and no, we're just going to say, yes, you got it right. You just ran a circle around us. I don't want to be an engineer anymore, by the way. I really like chemistry now. I think the periodic table is interesting, and I want to find a way to stop global warming using science. Man, this kid. I love it. I've asked for your book for my 9th birthday in May, and I hope to get it because I think it'll be interesting. I'm glad you're still podcasting. Love from Noah. And this was sent to his mom's Rachel's email, of course, as always, and she added a very sweet note as well. So much love to Noah's family there. Yeah. Thank you very much, Rachel and Noah and the whole family for writing to us from beloved Scotland. Keep us updated. Your progress is just fascinating. Yes, we love it. And happy early birthday too. From Josh and Chuck. If you want to get in touch with us, like Noah did, you can give it your best shot. You can send us an email. Send it to Stuffpodcast at iheartrad. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
How Police Sketches Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-police-sketches-work | Creating composite drawings of suspected criminals from eyewitness accounts has been around since a Frenchman introduced it in the 19th century. Despite the introduction of new techniques and software it hasn't changed all that much. | Creating composite drawings of suspected criminals from eyewitness accounts has been around since a Frenchman introduced it in the 19th century. Despite the introduction of new techniques and software it hasn't changed all that much. | Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:11:25 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=16, tm_min=11, tm_sec=25, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=71, tm_isdst=0) | 36352911 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. Before we get started, we should tell everybody we have a brand new animated web series. That's awesome. Yeah, they're animated shorts by this dude that was a fan. Started out as a fan. Nick shown and said, hey, I'd like to do this for you. And we hired him, and he's done ten episodes. Dude, he's amazing. He's really very cool, actually. He's one of the most astute animators I've ever seen in my entire life. Just little pauses and things like that that I wouldn't have noticed. We did he totally gets and then just exaggerates through animation. It's pretty amazing stuff. Yeah. And the reaction to these so far have been great. People seem to really like them. And so we wanted to get the word out on the podcast. Just go to Stuffyheno.com and click on the videos tab, and you're going to see one, and they're going to release one each Monday for the next ten weeks. That's right. And it's pretty awesome. I think you'll enjoy it. Hopefully it'll keep going on longer than ten weeks, too, if Sean's Arm doesn't give out. I agreed. Yeah. Well, thanks a lot to Nick Shim for the Just Amazing animated series he's delivered to us. And thank you in advance for watching it@wshitnow.com. Share it with some friends. Yeah, that's a problem. All right, ready? Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. Charles W. Chuck Bryant. He's got the best mood today. You just ruined my mood. Like you're dumping today. 10 seconds before we recorded. I was heading in a good direction. I didn't ruin you. You reminded me of some tasks that we have to do tomorrow, like, what can you do after we recorded to say those words? That's okay. I wanted to get it off my chest. That's Thursday. And you know what today is? Tuesday. You're going to be mad until then. No, I'm saying I'm going to put off being mad again until Thursday. Oh, good. I'm going to put on a sunshine face back miley. It's kind of hard in the serial killer lair, but I hate this place. I hate this place. I'm going to use every bit of power that I have, which is not much around here. Let me know how that works out. Get this changed. Okay. At the very least, can we turn the overhead fluorescent lights on? No, we don't want that on. Does it not work? No, we don't want that on. Are you sure? That would make it more serial killerlight. This is not all right, we'll turn it off. Thanks, Casey. Casey is our editor again. Oh, yeah, that's Chuck. And I'm Josh. And this is stuff you should know. That may have been our most flat dash every intro. Now prepare for that one. OK. Are you familiar with the guy named Timothy McVeigh? I do not know him personally, but I am familiar with his work. So in 1995, he rented a rental truck, packed it full of fertilizer nitrogen based explosives, parked it next to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and detonated it and killed oh, God, 168 people, including a bunch of kids at a daycare center in the building. Yeah, I remember seeing that as it unfolded. That was one of the few that I was up early when I was living in New Jersey. Do you remember the view of that billing side missing? Terrific. It was horrific because this is pre 2001, and this is at a time when terrorism happens in Beirut. Right. They just don't fly a plane from Germany to Beirut, and you're going to be fine if you're in America. This was weird. I mean, it was after the World Trade Center bombing, the first one, but that one hadn't gone very well. And I remember, I think America felt a little cocky. This is the first big Homeland incident that kind of shocked everyone, I think. Yeah. So Timothy McVeigh got away. It wasn't even a suicide bombing, right? Yeah, he got away within 2 hours. He happened to be pulled over for a traffic violation. And the cop said, you seem a little hinky skinny. Let me search your car. And found some weapons and said, do you have registration for these? Yeah. And I'm sure Timothy McVeighs said some crazy things like, I don't bow to your authority pig, or something like that. Right. And the cops said, well, you're coming with me, just on suspicion of totally of those things. Totally accidental. Yeah. It was totally circumstance, as Congo put it in this article, that he was pulled over, but he was ultimately found out as the guy who blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, because while he was in police custody, after being pulled over, a police sketch came across the wire, and I guess the highway patrol looked at it and said, you know what? This looks a lot like our guy. And in fact, it was. And this police sketch helped catch the Oklahoma City bomber. Have you seen it was ultimately executed. Have you seen a sketch? Yeah, it's in the article, and it's actually, like it's pretty good. It is. At first glance, it's like, that's not that great. And then when you really start to look at it feature by feature, it's pretty close. There'll be two things that should have been changed. Or when you look at other police sketches, you realize this one falls in. What we'll learn later is a very small percentage. Yeah. The 9% that are pretty darn accurate. Yeah. And if you are in the mood for amusement, you can type in funny police sketches, bizarre police sketches. There's a lot of image galleries out there of just there's no other way to really bad police sketches. And hilariously, some of them are in, like it's a photo of a police sketch in a newspaper, they made it out and we're disseminated. Yeah. Well, we'll learn there are varying levels of competency and artistic merit when it comes to these. So that's probably where you get did you ever see the one where they did the literary characters? No. I think they gathered sketch artists to do some of the more famous literary characters based on their book descriptions. That's awesome. And it was pretty cool. Casey Snowing, did you see that? It was awesome. It was like a big internet thing a couple of years ago. I have not seen it. I would like to, like, what is the Great Gatsby look like? I'm fond of those ones where they illustrate, like, with photo realism, a cartoon character, like what they look like in real life. Like, those beavis and butthead sculptures are so creepy, aren't they? And I think everyone looked at those and be like, wait a minute. I think I knew that. Exactly. Yeah. So we shouldn't start the whole thing out by making fun of police sketches. There are some really bad ones. You could have a really, genuinely talented artist sure. With a sketch pad in the hand. And if the eyewitness isn't giving it up, well, it's not going to come anywhere close. Yeah, exactly. Ultimately, it comes down to the eyewitness. The problem is we're going to find out eyewitnesses are not very reliable. And so it's up to the police sketch artist to figure out how to pull information from the eyewitness that the eyewitness might not even know. They know the sweet science. That's boxing. That's right. I've never understood why it's called sweet or science. It doesn't make any sense either way. I think that's the whole point is they call it a science to combat the notion that it's just like two brawling guys. It's like a lot more oh, sure. Strategy. Yeah, sure. Boxing. Not a big fan of MMA, but I like boxing. Agreed. Okay, so police sketching has been around for a while. In fact, there's an anecdote in here about a guy named Annabelle Karachi. You should say it. Annabelle Karachi. Yes. Who was a 16th century a good one, too. And as a boy, he and his father were attacked by robbers on the road to Crimona. And Karachi said, you know what? I have a secret weapon you don't know about. I'm going to draw you guys my hands. Yeah, exactly. And he drew the band of robbers, and apparently he did such a good job, the robbers were immediately identified and the kid got his father's stuff back. Yeah. That's awesome. That's a great story, at least, whether it's true or not. Right. Modern police sketching came about around the time of Jack the Ripper, actually. Oh, yeah. There were a lot of police sketches associated with the Jack the Ripper case. And that was actually one of the births of forensic police work, which was actually founded by a guy named Alfonsbertillon. Yes. In the 1880s in France, obviously, because from Josh's outrageous accent, you could tell. So this guy was a criminologist, and he became obsessed, some say, with notating these physical characteristics of various criminals. Right. And he would measure them and measure their forehead, measure their arms and ears and anything that stood out scars, tattoos. And it became known as criminal anthropometry. And in 1884, the police there in France nabbed 241 repeat offenders based on his notations. And from that, people started saying, you know what? Might be good to start noting what these people look like. Right. And drawing them, because that could help us. Yeah. At first he was just looking to find repeat offenders that kept coming in and out, because this is prior to fingerprinting being a reliable technique. Sure. But eventually people started to think, maybe we should start using this one particular thing called sketching, police sketching, to create an image of a suspect. Yes. A lead, perhaps. Exactly. And we mentioned this guy in our crime scene photography episode, if you remember, because he started that as well. Oh, yeah. Same guy. Same guy. Wow. We owe a lot to Alfons. Yeah. He was an obsessive Frenchman that we owe a lot to. All right. So a forensic artist these days, it sort of depends on what kind of outfit you're running with, because they point out in here this is cong. Yeah. Kristen points out that if you're in a sort of a small town, it might just be a cop that draws better than the rest of the cops on the boards exactly. Who is like, a patrolman otherwise, but is like, we need somebody to make the sketch. And I took some art classes. You can draw that turtle. What a turtle? The pirate or I can't remember the other thing. What was that anyway? It was for mailing art courses, and if you could draw it really well, you send it in and got what? Well, you send them some money, too, and they would teach you how to draw even better. Got you. It was a mailing art courses. Some sort of a scam, probably, but not necessarily. I'm sure they taught you some techniques. I just remember that as, like, part of the simpler times. Yeah, me, too. Sure. If that was the only scammy. Come on. Yeah, that in Sea Monkeys. That's all you got to worry about. Those are real. They're brine shrimp, and they were alive, but they don't have faces and stand around and chat like the little cartoon depicted. No. Okay, so it might be a patrol officer that can draw really well. Right. Or a civilian contractor that's qualified. Although I learned there is no official university degree that you can earn. No, but you can go of course you can go to the FBI. They have a training program for forensic art, and a lot of private people teach this kind of thing, too. It could be a private civilian contractor. Or it could be a full time, fully employed artist that you have on staff. Right. I guess if you got enough crime going on, it might be good to pay that person on a yearly basis. Exactly. Instead of like, hey, we got a murder once every six months. Like, Atlanta probably has their own sketch artist is what I'm guessing. I wonder. I bet they do. Or more than one, probably. Oh, I don't know. You know what I think? No. We have to look into this. So we need to find out a lot of crime in Atlanta. So if you are a witness to a crime and you agree to give some eyewitness accounts to a police sketch artist, you're going to find what's kind of like the lie detector test? A little bit. Yeah. It can be broken down into three parts. Never thought about that. And the first part is just like what you will get when you go take a lie detector. It's rapport building. Sure. Where the police sketch artist is saying, like, hey, how's it going? How are you feeling? You're okay? Everything's good? You want some ice cream? Can I get you a Coca Cola? What's going on? My name is Dave. This is a pencil and this is a sketch pad. Right. Don't be alarmed. Make yourself comfortable. You can throw those magazines anywhere. Just have a seat. I'm sorry, I'm an artist and my cramped quarters. Right. I'm going to go off and smoke some opium. All right, I'll be right back. Let me go get my Beret. So that is part one, wherein they disarm and make the person feel comfortable. Yeah. With opium. That's right. That is not true. Then what's the second part called? That is recall. It's free recall. Basically, like, tell me everything you remember about this person. And apparently most eyewitnesses start with the shape of the head or the hair. Usually the hair. Sure, that makes sense. Like, if I were to describe you, I'd be like, well, he had fantastic hair and a beard. Yeah. They would draw Zach Galvanakis. Yes. He has great hair and a beard. He does have nice hair. Doesn't he stick lustrous? You could call it mane. It's a mane. And the guy would be like, really? That's it? The free recall is over. And you'd be like, yes. Let's move to part three. But that's a perfect point, even though you're kidding around about why I bet a lot of times these artists are just like, come on, man, I'm really trying here. Right. But you're not giving me much besides horse face. And apparently that's what a lot of people say. Yeah, he had a horse face, or he had bug eyes or something like that. Yeah. And again, part of the forensic artists, the sweet science, right. Part of their job is to say, okay, well, I kind of know what they're talking about. And they can't just, like, draw bug eyes. They know that bug eyes also includes, like, a certain kind of bridge of the nose and makes the cheekbones go this way. Exactly. And so if you say bug eyes, it can be helpful, too, if you're saying it to an experienced forensic artist. Yeah, I mean, that's the great skill, I guess, to draw those things out. Right. Literally. And so that's part of free recall where the eyewitness or the victim says, here's all the stuff I remember. Buck teeth, claw hands, club foot, wearing, like, a high lace collar, like you'd see on, like, Emily Dickinson or something disco. I and then they say, okay, well, I'm glad you came up with all that really mean stuff to say about this perpetrator. Yes. But we didn't talk about the mouth. So tell me about the mouth. What did the mouth look like? Did it look like this? Did it look like that? That's cute recall. Yeah. And they may bring out pictures of other criminals in the database just to see, did he look like this guy with a big nose or this guy with a big nose? Right. They might pull out celebrities and show them celebrities because I guess and the person goes, Sam, it's Burt Reynolds. Right. He did this to me. But I guess that can help. I think people operate on those terms in this age of celebrity anyway, because when someone says, what does your friend look like? If I'm setting your friend up, you would often say you wouldn't say, well, he's got a horse face and great cheekbones. You would say, he looks like Josh Duhamel. Right. Because that's just the way we operate, because everyone knows those faces. So it doesn't surprise me that they use that tactic. I'm with you. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, man. It's sad, but it's the way things are these days. Well, it's part of the way we remember things, is we'll see eventually. Yeah. So you've got the interviews kind of done, the queue recalls done, and the forensic artist has probably been kind of sketching. It's a work in progress, for sure. Right. But as the work progresses, the eyewitness will probably be like, oh, yeah, it's starting to look like this person. But maybe just change this a little bit. Change that. And as this kind of fourth part where they're working together to kind of carry out the details, that's when the sketch really starts to pop. Yeah. That's when they put, like, the shadow in the eye or something. You had a third eye in the center of his forehead. Where to go? All right, so who are these people? Well, again, you said that they may or may not be a full time employee. Sure. Just be like a patrol officer who's good at drawing or I guess what are their skills? Like, if you're not an artist with a pen, you can use things like computers, right? Well, yes. Sometimes you don't even have to have skills. So in 1959, a company called the Town Zone Corporation introduced this thing in the United States called Identicate. Yeah. Still around. It is still around. Now, there's Identicate 2000. Yeah. Version six point out is what they're on. Originally, Identicate was a wooden box that had a bunch of little, I guess, plastic snazzes. Now, what was it called that you used on the overhead? Like an overhead projector? Yeah. What was it? The transparency. Yes, transparency. And then that transparency would have a certain type of eyebrows. I got you. And then another. Transparency has a certain type of eyes, certain type of nose, and you have this literal toolkit of facial characteristics that anybody you didn't have to draw anything. You just construct a face to the eyebrows look like this. Yes. And then you construct a face like that. That's pretty cool. It is pretty cool. But it also created some pretty laughable images. And we should say that is what's called a composite image. It's like a bunch of different stuff put together. You could also call a composite image. If a police sketch artist interviews a bunch of different eyewitnesses and then pulls it all together, that's a composite image as well. I bet that's frustrating. Yeah. Because people see things so differently. It's like, he had a small nose. He had a huge nose. Right. And the guy, the artist, the lady of the dude is just like, oh, my God, when is it? 05:00. So you've got Idica. That was the first one. And they've kind of expanded on that ever since then and entered the realm of computer software. And there's basically, like, a division among forensic artists, computer or paper, and a lot of people say, Why not both? Man yeah. So, for example, there's a guy in the NYPD who uses nothing but pencil and paper. Steven Mancusi. Then there's a guy named Roderick Scratchard who works for Philly, and he basically creates a composite of all, like a computer composite of all the features, and then he draws a sketch from that composite, and both of them kind of have in common the idea that a hand drawn sketch is better than a computer composite. And FBI actually agrees. Yeah. My first question was, why would this guy draw it after he's done the computer composite? Because they found there's about a 4% greater likelihood of it being accurate when it's hand drawn. Yeah. It gives the ability to add more nuance. Sure. And apparently computer software is getting better and better at that, but you still can't compare to a really good hand drawn composite sketch. And those numbers are right. Sadly, 9% of the time for hand drawn and 5% of the time do you create what ends up being in terms of what being accurate? In terms of producing an image that looks like the suspect. Right. That's recognizable. Yeah, that's the first. Yeah. So it's not like they take the percentage on the number of people who are the number of sketches that it actually led to an apprehension. Right. But that's probably way lower even that's the only way to create this estimate is by taking a police sketch and then taking a picture of the guy who was eventually caught for this and comparing them. They have a good website that I found today that had some of the more famous killers and then their police sketches, and a lot of them are pretty good. Close. And that's what you're gunning for. You can't do a photo real picture of someone because as we're about to learn, people's memories suck. Right. So like we said, if you have a really great police sketch artist and a really bad eyewitness, you're not going to produce a recognizable sketch. And the reason why eyewitness testimony is so unreliable is basically like what you were talking about earlier. Like when you're saying that you set your friend up with somebody else and you don't say they have bug eyes or horseface. They look like who? I said Josh Dahmel. Okay. And if that's the case, ladies, you're in luck. Hunky. The reason we do that is because we use what's called recognition memory, where we look at someone's face as a whole. We look at the forest rather than the trees. If we were to look at it as the trees, what the eyes look like, what the eyebrows look like, what the nose looks like, what the mouth looks like, and broke it down in those component parts, that would be recall memory, and it would pretty much be perfect. Our recall memory requires almost no priming. Recognition memory does require priming. So you could say that he looked like Brad Pitt, right? Well, kind of, but also he looked like Brad Pitt with Steve Bushemi's eyes. And then the sketcher goes, Whoa. Yeah. It's like that kind of nobrain thing they do if they made it. Yeah, exactly. That would be a composite skin. Yeah. And that's why I could see Josh Duhamel walking down the street and my heart would flutter. Right. But if I sat down with a sketch artist and had to describe Josh Duhamel for him to sketch, it would probably end up looking more like Josh Clark, which is even hunkier. Thanks, man. But yeah, it probably wouldn't look anything like Josh. I started to think about when I read this, they used Brad Pitt in the article. Like, how would I describe Brad Pitt besides handsome and sort of looks like Robert Redford? He's starting to a little bit, isn't he? I think he always has, especially as Benjamin Button. That movie was sad. It's was good. Did you like it? Yeah, I liked it was touching. But the whole time it was just like the inevitable sad conclusion was just looming, you know? It's weird, this is the second time I Scott Fitzgerald's come up because he wrote that short story. Oh, really? Yes. I don't think I knew that one. Episode Two f. Scott Fitzgerald What was the first reference you said that The Great Gatsby was on by police sketch artist. Look at that. See? I told you I'm paying attention. That time you took me to the side and you said, you need to pay attention while we're podcasting. I said I am and I just proved it. Okay, we can put that one. So we're talking about memory, right? Yeah. And now it stinks for the most part. Well, it stinks in general, but especially if you're the victim of a crime. Right, that's a good point. I think you should make it well, you're stressed. It happens very fast. Right. You're probably not thinking, all right, I got to get a good look at this perpetrator's face and features. And have you ever noticed that in a convenience store, if you look at the door frame inside, it'll say, like 45670h? Really? You know it's four. Well, I do now, but I never knew it existed. That's exactly what it's for. When a perpetrator runs out, the person can just very easily, at the very least, get the guy's height. Well, now every convenience store Robert is just going to get small as they exit or jump. He's between four and 7ft tall. Right. So that's a great tidbit. But yeah, if you are the victim of crime, you're not going to recall it very accurately. And one of the reasons also is Congratul points out that to create a long term memory, it has to undergo consolidation, which means we have to file it away. And the neural pathways that that memory follows have to basically be strengthened over and over again. And that requires thinking about that person, which you might not want to do. Sure. So a strong memory may never be created, which means that the eyewitness account may be flawed from the start. It might not even be there. If it is there, it's also subject to a lot of infiltration by unreal memories. There's some work that's going on. They used to think that once the memory is consolidated, it was done. Right. Apparently the guy who came up with that one, the Nobel Prize for it, they've recently proven or shown that that's probably not the case, that every time we remember something, we're actually taking all of its constituent parts from the different parts of our brain where it's stored and putting it back together. And when we do that, it's subject to infiltration. So, like, if you are a victim of bank robbery and you're remembering the bank robbery, you may also inadvertently remember a scene from a movie about a bank robbery, and that detail might enter and become part of what you think is the actual event that you witnessed. Right. That's a big problem with eyewitness testimonies. Our recall is very flawed. The other problem is just eyesight. Being poor is one of the fundamental basics. I wrote another article called Why Are Eyewitnesses Unreliable? And they did a study in University of Virginia and it's not surprising they found that participants over the age of 60 perform much worse than younger people. Right. But what's scary is the older eyewitnesses were more adamant than the younger ones. So they would have the face wrong but be like super adamant that was what he looked like. I never forget a face. Yeah, exactly. It sounds like some old guy would say yes. And then they did some testing with eyewitnesses and they found that even if you have good eyesight just 10ft away, you may not be able to tell what color and persons eyes are from 200ft away. The eyes themselves are just a blur. At 500ft, you probably won't be able to recognize any facial features at all. Right. And if that sounds like Big D 500ft away, there have been convictions of 500ft away eyewitness accounts based on that. Convictions based on that, yeah. What about Scary Twelve Angry Men? Yeah. Good movie. Yeah, it's a great movie. They've come up with this thing called DNA phenotyping that actually is showing a little bit of promise, at least in theory. If a suspect leaves behind some sort of usable DNA of some sort, you could test it and you can say, oh, well, the suspect has brown hair, brown eyes and it's probably Caucasian. Right. So at the very least, you have that set. And then if you could add to that eyewitness testimony that's a good one, too. Punch, I think. Yeah, but it's still in its infancy. So we talked about sketching criminals. There are other things, if you're a forensic artist that you do that you probably don't think about a lot, but you see it a lot. Like, for instance, this child was abducted when they were six and here is what they might look like today at 16. Right, so advancing. Or a criminal who has been on the lamb for 15 years. On the lamb. Or here's what they might look like with a beard. It's believed that they've grown out their hair and this is what they might look like now. Here's what they might look like as a clown. Exactly. Here's what they might look like as a clown under your bed. So that's called age progressed imagery. And then they have reconstructive imagery when you have an unidentified body that's decayed quite a bit and sometimes it'll be sculpture even, that they'll try and put together what the person amazes me. Yeah, it's so cool. And I've never figured out how they know where to put the points. You know, the little points that stick off of the skull that they use is like a guide, a structure for the putty. How did they figure out how long it should be, where it should be? I guess it's just a decision by the artist. Or was this person really fat because. Your skull wouldn't be any different. But it blows me away, man. I bet there's a lot they know. As far as I bet it's not just like surmising. They're not telling. No, you can probably find out. Take one of these courses. Oh, and then there's also ones where they basically catch up photos of really gruesome dead bodies if they need to show the public something. Yeah, chuck if only 9% of hand drawn police sketches are recognizable as the actual suspect, and even fewer are computer generated sketches. Do or are. What's the point of police sketching? I was about to say there was no point. But there is a point, because what it does is, like I said, it provides a lead. It publicizes the crime. Yeah. It gets a face out there. And this is me talking here. Even if it's only 9% accurate, it's probably not so inaccurate that it's probably in the wheelhouse as far as some features. Like, this is a white guy who had dark hair and bug eyes. Exactly. So at least that puts you in the wheelhouse in most cases. I would say so. Also, if the witnesses all agree, oh, yeah, he had a huge scar across his face. Well, that helps, just seeing that in print. The suspect has a scar across his face might not do the same as seeing it. Even just on a rudimentary drawing of the scar, maybe the direction it's going in, maybe how long it is, that's going to help tremendously as well, because we're visual creatures. That is certainly true. Sure. So I did look up a little bit of the schooling, and there are all kinds of courses. That one guy, the pencil and paper guy mankuzi yeah. I think he has his own website. It's very outdated, but he teaches courses. Cool. So if you're listening out there, you should update your website. Might get a little more boy, what was that one website we went to? The Cryogenics One, remember? Yeah. That's one of the worst websites I've ever seen. That was pretty bad. But this lady, Karen Taylor, is a forensic artist and she says that besides the FBI, there are all kinds of courses you can take. You probably should have some artistic merit to go into it. Otherwise, why would you even be interested in it to begin with? And it can involve sculpting, model making, computer graphics, animation even. So, they're doing all sorts of stuff. You can work with anthropologists and dental specialists and other forensic scientists. Like a team effort sometimes. You mentioned animation. You know, those Chinese, I guess, state television news where they do like, the CGI recreations of I haven't seen that. Big news stories. Yes, they did. Remember it's like anime or no, it's almost like instruction manual art. All right. But they've be awesome. They did one for the steward, the Sky Stewart, the flight attendant guy who told everybody to go to hell and then grab two beers and slid down the shoot. Stephen something. Remember him? They did one for that for some reason. Normally it's like crimes that they do, but they did it for that one. It's weird, but I imagine, like, you would be a forensic artist in that sense because you're just taking a recounting of the episode and drawing it. Yeah. Hey, do you ever make note when you see something you think might be shady going on? Especially license plates? Yeah, I do that. I do license plates and I look at people and think, this guy looks shady. And I'm just going to take an extra glance and notice that he's tall and has long blonde hair and the horse face, sean White. It's never come up, but you never know. I think you should owe it to the world to be, like, a vigilant citizen and no CPR. Yeah, don't be a dummy. That's true. Let's see. You got anything else? No, sir. DB. Cooper. Great. Police sketch. Who knows what he looks like, though? Uni bomber. Yeah, they didn't give him much to go on. Anybody with a hoodie? Sunglasses, pretty much. Which anybody who wears a hoodie and sunglasses now looks like the unit. Yeah, they got a nose wrong, big time. And it's Harry, like Jerry Curl in it, like a perm. Yeah. The real uniformer's nose is really bulbous. And this nose was a nice nose. Anything else? No? Okay, that's please. Sketches. You can type those words into the search bar athousteporkworks.com. It will bring up this great article, and you can see some police sketches in it, including the one at Timothy Mcbait with a photo of him side by side. And I said, Search bar in there somewhere. So it's time for word from our sponsor. All right, now, listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this we laughed, he cried. My name is Luke. I'm currently a junior at Grand Valley State. I'm a bottle deposit broke student, which I guess that's a term for when you turn in glass bottles for five cents. I guess so. I guess he's also in the 50s about 97% of the time. I'm broke because of this. I got a job at the beginning of the school. You're making hunting knives. And I just want to thank you both for giving me eight stitches and a trip to the emergency room. I always have the iPad preloaded with a variety of stuff you should Know episodes, so I'm prepared for any situation of sheer boredom. It was while I was listening to why does music provoke emotion? That Josh made me laugh so hard, I was sent to the Er. Oh, wow. That's really something. 33 minutes and 42 seconds into the episode. Chuck, you had just officially introduced Ben Soli to the audience, our musical guest. I was sitting on a bench using a belt sanders sharpen blades when Ben said, all right, well, I can't wait to hear what you all have been talking about. Ben. Chuck managed to keep it cool, but Josh loses it and starts immediately laughing hysterically. I don't remember that. I guess because we did it in two parts and it was clearly faked. Yeah, and you just couldn't get it together. I don't remember that, though. Like always, Josh, your laugh triggered my own laugh. And I was laughing so hard that my left knee jerked up to my chest, only to be stopped by the belt sander. Oh, man. Caught my lower thigh and sanded the hole so big in my leg, you could see the muscle and the meat. This is your fault, dude. I never admitted to my employer that it was you guys that made me laugh so hard. But a trip to the Er. And eight digits later, I still can't listen to that clip without laughing out loud. Really love the show. No hard feelings at all. Good. Trip to the Er is good for a person every now and again. I disagree, by the way. That's a terrible philosophy. Yeah, and my parents aren't too happy about the hospital bill, but what's done is done. Well, thanks for covering for it. Keep up the good work. And if you feel a desire, I would not deny a free T shirt that is from Luke Newman. And if we can dig up a T shirt, Luke, I'll send it to you. You can find them on Discovery Store, but they ain't free. I might try and dig one up for this kid. That is very nice. Legitimately injured because of our actions. Yeah. Thanks again for covering for us, Luther. Thanks for writing. And we're glad you're okay. Seriously, we do think you should reconsider your trip to the Er every once in a while. It's a good thing idea, though. Let's see if you want to let us know how we've made you injure yourself in a light hearted way. I hope there's not a lot of the stories. I would hope not. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S kpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyshnnow, email us at stuffpodcast@discovery.com, and visit us at our website, STUFFYou. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com." | ||
How the Scientific Method Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/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 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 episode. | Tue, 13 Jan 2015 19:35:19 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=19, tm_min=35, tm_sec=19, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=13, tm_isdst=0) | 57407194 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to Steffie Chanel from Housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry. Steffie Chanel. Mike grinning. It's been a while, man. Know? It's funny. Like, those words come pouring out of my mouth. It's cool. You wake up in the middle of night saying that, and you mean, like, slugs you in the face, right? She's like, Go back to sleep. 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 buttermilk. Yeah. 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 and 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 explained 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, you're feeling good? Jerry's got two thumbs up and a big goofy smile. Two of her three thumbs. She looks like Bob from that male enhancement pill ad. She's the guy the old man that's, like, super buff. I would call him old. He was middle aged. He looked like a kind of a Bob Dobbs type of dude. I think that's kind of who he was modeled. See 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 because 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 quotes. 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've seen these ads? Yeah. I was going to start asking questions, but why bother? I will find it on YouTube. I'll be like, oh, Bob. Yes, you will. You'll go, oh, I want 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. 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 mailhood. Well, Bob hadn't come along yet, so chuckles, let's just quit stalling and talk about science. 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. Yeah. Old William Harris did a great job with this. Yes. William Harris did a great job. 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 the 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 when you figure it 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. 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 want 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. I think I say 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, hadn't it? Yeah, it used to be like, if you were a human being, your body temperature is 98.6. And they always 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. 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 and science, that it should all just be quantitative 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 and 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. 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. 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 like, 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. So 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 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. 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 Rebel Without a Cause? No, that's Griffith Park Observatory, which has been redesigned and is really cool now. 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 this James Dean statue there too. Oh, I didn't know. Like a bust. So, yes, Edwin Hubble, he's a 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. Yeah. 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 they're 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 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. 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. 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. Yeah, right. And every scientist needs one another. It's why there's journals and conferences and things like that, to share information. Right. And Hubble came up with his own observations and rather than just experimenting experimenting. Experimenting himself, which I'm sure he continued to do, he created this basis of work that he probably realized was 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 for experiments. Exactly. So this is how science works. Like, some guy back in 1919 makes some observations in California in 1025. He proposes this big, broad generalization. And over the next ensuing half a century, more and more scientists all around the world start testing this 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 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 you did it. One thing that really chased 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 poopooed that do you remember what website that was? No. No. Although I do want to give a shout out, now that you mention it, to explore. 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 and 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 use. Like, I got a theory that Jerry in a 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 and 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, that would be a scientific law. But ultimately it would begin as a hypothesis, a hunch based on intuition, based on data you've collected, observations, that kind of stuff, where 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 the hour long bathroom breaks, she's actually down to 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 found Jerry playing Words With Friends five different times and you told me about it and I was like, I'm going to run the same experiment exactly the way you did. 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'd 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 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 do you run it on these days. What do you mean? 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. I'll get to work on that. I could handle this. So you teased 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 but 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. 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 the years, 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 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah. I think the Greek knowledge was completely vanished. Yes. Somehow 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 his rediscovery of Greek and Roman classical thought. And this is the basis of scientific inquiry, of rationalism, of saying, 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 was 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 look 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 rented. 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 that's an excellent point. It wasn't necessarily through his 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. Aristotle 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. Yes. 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. Yeah. Interesting. So what do you mean, like, wrote those under a 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 that's a good credit. Was it her brother? I think that was one of the theories. This is a good Smith song, too. Shakespeare sister. Is that the name of it? Yeah. Wasn't it a band, too? I think it was. Was 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 how 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 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 any time, 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. Yeah. 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. Right. And said, basically through the advancement of lens grinding. Antonio Van Leenhooke, 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 you're right. Robert Hook found cork. 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 Lee and Hook. Yeah, it was neat, because Hook heard about leaving hooks microscopes, got his hands on one or a microscope, looked at him 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's having dinner one night with his zoologist buddy. Yes. 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 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, Rudolf 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 grass? There's a lot of weird ones. Press basil between some bricks and you'll get a scorpion was one. Like 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. And 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 get the cell thing over here, let's investigate that. 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 that's been around for a couple of decades. Cell 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 in article makes a good point, 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. But so he says, okay, the cell 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 the straight neck eventually became cloudy and discolored, meaning there was some junk growing in there and the one in the shape neck did not do anything. It remained the same. Right. So it 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 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 shaped 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 a 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 the experiment, it went from the cell hypothesis to the cell theory. Right. Because it was just so persuasive. And that's what the 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 shaped flask won't turn cloudy. He didn't prove that. You can't prove that, which is, again, science can disprove and when 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, yeah, we should carry those around. We should make little wallet cards as a scientific method just to carry stuff you should know, logo on it. Yeah, we'll make a million bucks. You can rent them and sell them. Yeah. Generally speaking, though, it follows these steps. The first thing you do, like 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. It's been like a week on 3 ground property. It was like, even longer than that. It was, wouldn't it? He said that he wasn't going to mow his lawn for, like, three years because he 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, and I aim to find out why. Yes. He said, what caused the diversification of finches on Galapagos? You should have done that with an accent. Yeah, he would have had a British accent, huh? Yeah. Unless he was pretending to be someone else. I 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. Yes. Well, I saw the movie 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. Do you see that? Yes. Great movie. I disagree. You didn't like it? What? Wow, that surprises me. We'll get into that off here. 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? Yeah, 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. And 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 shaped like a box. Yeah, if you're thinking, 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 are 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, 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. 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 of that X. Yeah, 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 that it's 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. It's a thing. So next up in the steps, you're going to experiment. And when you experiment, you can't just go in there willy nilly and do whatever you want. You have to set up specific conditions. And they must be controlled. Yeah. And 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 air 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 shaped 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 need a third 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 to draw it 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 that Eggshaped 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. That's right. And you would have 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. Oh, sure. And this is a huge problem with science right now. Yeah. That article you said 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 one rule of thumb among biotech venture capitalists is about half 50% of published research can't even be replicated. And biotech firm and Jen 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 this is our career advancement sure. 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. 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 and experiments. Right. Or, 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 well, 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 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, 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. 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 he said the peer reviewed thing isn't even all scratched 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 seems 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 like the there were a few thousand, maybe. Right. So there's just a lot of career competition. He calls it careerism. And 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 famous 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 that 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 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. Right. 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 it'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 until 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, it's 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. It's not a flaw. That's a limitation. And it's when it's misused, then the 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. Let's start out with a bang. Boom. All downhill from here. If you want to know more about 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@housesfours.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? Yeah. And one thing you can do that we would appreciate is go to itunes and leave a rating and a review for us. Yeah, that makes sense. It 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 are 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. Be honest. We're not saying, go, leave us some great review, but go leave us a great review. You said it. And tell one person about stuff you should know. We would appreciate that, too. Turn somebody on to the show. And that's it. That's our version of a pledge drive. Wow. We do that once every three years now. Not very obnoxious. And it lasts 40 seconds. All right, so on to listener mail. This is from my sister in law, actually. Yeah, there's some nepotism. Yeah, Jenny Bryant. She makes sense. Mentioned in the home school episode. Home schooled 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 home schooling community is what Abby and my niece does, which is hybrid home schooling. 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 a 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. Right? 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. 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 pasted to an email. Yeah, forgot about that method. How in the world did you print a text? Did you do that with your thoughts? I have a niece who is excellent at volleyball, too. We should get them together. I don't know. 1011? Okay. Something like that. Abby just turned 13. Oh. Maybe they face off against one another. Yeah. Is she in Atlanta? Yeah, she's up in Canton. You never know. Where's Abby? 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 siskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstuffynow. You can email us. We still do that. Yeah. You can't text me at stuffpodcast@houseworks.com. And as always, join us at our home, on the Web stuffyshow. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com." | ||
How the Antikythera Mechanism Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-antikythera-mechanism-works | In 1900 sponge divers found the wreck of a 2000 year-old treasure ship that contained within it a machine that should not exist. Learn of the device that reveals an understanding of the cosmos far more sophisticated than anyone knew the Greeks possessed. | In 1900 sponge divers found the wreck of a 2000 year-old treasure ship that contained within it a machine that should not exist. Learn of the device that reveals an understanding of the cosmos far more sophisticated than anyone knew the Greeks possessed. | Tue, 15 Dec 2015 17:54:29 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=15, tm_hour=17, tm_min=54, tm_sec=29, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=349, tm_isdst=0) | 29796815 | 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 trendy apparel company facing an avalancho demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa lined jackets you call IBM to automate your It infrastructure with AI. Now, your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes, and you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It systems that rule up their own sleeves. IBM let's create. Learn more@ibm.com It automation. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. So this is stuff you should know. The podcast guess indeed. Archaeology was the first word, first big word I could spell early. Yeah. I was like two weeks old. You're spelling archaeology. Yeah. Couldn't spell anything else for years and years, but I could spell archaeology. I love archaeology. Yeah, me too. It's one of my favorite things, actually. Me too. Although I didn't list that when I was asked what my favorite things were in that one listener mail. Still, it's up there. Yeah, but you too. Oh, yeah. Starting with? Well, starting with Indiana Jones. Yeah, that definitely helps. That we were alive at the right age when those came out. Oh, yeah. Well, Chuck, there's a ship, it's an unnamed ship, as far as I know, that went down in the GNC off the coast of a tiny teeny little spit of land called Anti Cathara in Greece, in between Crete and the Greek mainland, I believe. And in 1900 it was discovered and it actually ended up giving birth to the field of marine archaeology. Actually, it was the first shipwreck that was ever excavated archeologically. Yeah, I think I wrote an article on that way back in the day. Underwater archaeology. Yeah. It's very tricky. I would imagine so, because most of the stuff you find is falling apart. Like the second you take it out of water, it starts falling apart. Right. So they've gotten really good now, and I imagine they were not as good about it in 1900. About bringing stuff up still in water. Yeah. And transporting it in water. Makes sense. Same sea water, display it in water. Oh, no. Then they start poking around underwater. Yeah. In a lab. Right. Water. Yeah. With the water. It's pretty sensible. Sure. I could have come up with that. I think with that method. Yeah, good for you. Anyway, this shipwreck that was discovered in 1900 was discovered actually by accident, right? Yeah. There were some sponge divers, you know, sponge diving. It's a big deal. Apparently it was in Greece. It was that's where you had to get sponges back in the day in the ocean. And they were the sponge divers who they actually got blown off course by a bad storm and ended up in that lovely part of town. And they said, Boy, this is great. Let's just dive here, right? One guy dove down, came back up, and they weren't free diving at this point, actually had you can listen to our well, it wasn't a diving bell, but underwater breathing apparatuses at this point, right. He came back and he's like, oh, my God, there's dead horses and dead men everywhere. Yeah. And the boss is like, I don't know about that. Let me go dive down there. He dives down and comes up with a bronze hand and says, you make dummy smack the guy over the head with it. It's a statue and a bunch of statues down there decomposing. And then he went, Wait, why are there a bunch of statues down there? And they said, let's figure out let's remember where the spot is, and we'll just head off to North Africa and do our sponge diving like we were going to initially. Yeah, they started to make some dough, right? But when they came back, they took the bronze arm and the location of the ship to the Greek government. And the Greek government said, you know what? This could be a big deal. We have a lot of antiquities out there under the sea, and this might be some sort of treasure trove. So they hired the sponge divers to go back and excavate this place, and they found some pretty amazing stuff. In addition to the bronze arm, we found all sorts of marble statues. They found a bronze statue of a young athlete. I think it was like 6ft tall, a little bigger than life, is what they call it. They found a bust of a cynic, a philosopher, a very detailed lifelike bus. It's really neat. That was the guy whose arm? That was his arm. Oh, it was his arm, yeah. Okay. And they found all manner of stuff, some really cool stuff, and brought it up and they displayed it in the museum. And among this trove, there was a greatly overlooked item, item number one, 50 87. And it was this weird kind of it looked almost like a kind of a clock face in a wooden frame, and no one knew what it was. And compared to the amazing art that had been brought up, it looked like a pile of garbage, basically. So they just filed it away and it languished for a while until it was kind of rediscovered again. Yeah. And giving credit where credit is due, the sponge team captain, I think that's what they call themselves. He was captain Sponge team. Yeah, sponge team. Captain Demetrius Contos. And then the crybaby who dove down there and he saw dead people was Elias Stadia at us. And if there's one thing I love, it's Greek names. Yeah. Love the names. Do you like those as much as archaeology, greek archaeologists, you're pretty much flying in the upper atmosphere for me. So those were the dudes that led the Sponge team and all those antiquities? They're scattered about a little bit, but most of them are in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece, and also some in Switzerland, oddly enough. And then some more in a different museum of underwater antiquities in Greece. And the reason the Greeks went to this trouble and didn't just say, whatever, who cares about a bronze arm? Apparently they'd been defeated recently by the Ottoman Turks within the last few years, and we're looking for a way to restore some national pride. And what better way to restore national pride than raising 2000 year old statues of your ancient gods that are made by your predecessors? Yeah, and not only statues, but lamps and bowls and utensils and tools and just all sorts of stuff. It was a treasure trove. Yeah. So this site still is basically intact. The shipwreck is over, I think, about 300 foot span, about the length of a football field. And there's actually, for a long time, they thought it was two ships, but they think, actually, no, it was an enormous, massive ship that broke into two. And they've only just found the front. They found, like, the cabin. They haven't even found the hold. And that it was a huge grain ship that had been converted to basically a treasure ship that was taking Greek antiquities to Rome around 60 BCE. And it sunk. So there's all these treasures that they haven't even found yet. They dove on it in 1901. Jacques Cousteau hit it up in 1950, and then again in 1976. And now there's the most sophisticated dives that are being taken on it. Zisu was on it. Yes, he's on it. As of 2014, there's an international team that includes some people from Woods Hole Geographic Institute or Oceanographic Institute who are really starting to figure this out. Yeah. And one of the reasons they're still doing this is because, like you said, it's just a great find no matter what. But the other reason is because item number one 50 87, aka the how is it pronounced again? Anacothera. Anacothera mechanism is one of the most mysterious finds ever because nobody knows who made it. And until recently, no one knew exactly what it was, but now they pretty much figured it out. Yeah. Well, so when they first brought it up in 1901, again, it just looked like some weird kind of like a clock, but it was in a wooden frame. As the wooden frame was exposed to the air, it split and the stuff inside fell apart. And when it fell apart, one of the directors of the museum, I believe, spirit on staff, not a great name, he looked inside and realized that these are all like actually different bronze parts and they have inscriptions and they appear to be geared teeth. Yeah, like precision gears. Right. They said that's impossible because that technology didn't come along for well over a thousand years later. Yes. 1000 plus maybe 1400 to 2000 years later. Right. So it pops up in the west about the 14th century in Europe. Like you say, it's totally impossible that this could be what he's looking at. Yeah, not 50 or 100 years. So some people said this thing probably accidentally was dropped over this wreck site and just happened to nestle in and make it seem like it was part of this ancient shipwreck. No, it was found underneath other debris in the shipwreck. So that's virtually impossible. But it was so confounding and it's so completely undermined our understanding at the time of technology like that, and just the understanding of that kind of precision engineering that it was just set aside. Like no one knows what this is. Let's just pretend it doesn't exist. Yeah. And that happened until about the 1950s. And we'll take a little break here and we'll get back to what happened in the 1950s right after this. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office when you could be using Stamps.com? Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses. Because Stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and Ups shipping services you need right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with Stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary. And you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS rates and 86% off Ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. Alright, so it's 1950. Everyone's drunk at lunch, smoking cigarettes, throwing trash out of their window. Right. And there's an impossible machine rotting away in a museum in Greece. That's right. And that's when a man named Derek Desolo Price said, you know what? This thing is pretty neat and I think I'm going to make this my new obsession. So he spent years researching this thing and basically said, I think it's some sort of weird. He said, computer he meant well, he didn't mean computer, because it can't be a computer. Obviously, it's not programmable now, so it can't be a computer. That word is not terribly far off. Yeah, it's not a computer. Okay, so he's using the wrong word there. But along with Dr. C man, another great Greek name, thomas Carratos. He's a radiographer. He said, let's take some X rays of this thing. In 1974, he published his findings in Gears from the Greeks, which he thought was going to light the world on fire. Yeah. But it turns out people were a little scared to say, yeah, this thing predates these kind of precision gears by well over a thousand years. So let's rethink everything we know about this kind of technology. No one wanted to touch it with a ten foot pole, is what I gathered. No, it's kind of ignored at the time. The people who were studying ancient Greece were studying their written documents. Right. They weren't studying artifacts, like physical relics or anything like that, and they certainly weren't really up on the ancient Greek technology. He wrote this book and just expected it to change the world, because he really had approached it from a very scientific standpoint. When they finally released his book in the 70s, his theory on what it was was correct. Yeah. He theorized that it was a I'm going to use the word computer. All right. A mechanism. Yeah, that's what it is. It was a mechanism with, at one point, up to 72 different precise tooth gears that all interacted with one another to track the movement of the celestial bodies, the five planets that were visible to the naked eye the sun, the moon. It tracked eclipses, solar and lunar, and it also tracks the Olympic Games just as an added bonus. Well, if you're going to have an astronomical calculator, you might as well throw in a sports calendar. Yeah, might as well. The whole thing again, this thing should not have existed. It wasn't for another 1400 years before anything like this appeared in the west, so it shouldn't have been. Which is another reason why a lot of people weren't like, yes, this is a great book, gears from the Greeks. It changed everything. They were like, you're totally full of it. And this poor guy Price was not helped at all by a guy named Eric Von Danikin. Right. Yeah. He wrote a book in 1068 called Chariots of the Gods, and in that he proposed that there are aliens who have been bringing us technological gifts to Earth, and this is one of them. And everyone this was a really popular book, so he got all the headlines with just a completely fabricated story. Yeah, it was the birth of the interest in Ufology and the Bermuda Triangle, the nazca lines and landing strips, that kind of stuff. Right? That's right. So when this guy came along and put his stamp of nuttiness, I guess it's certainly interesting. That whole Time Life Mysteries series definitely came out of this Von Danikins work kind of thing, but it had nothing to do with any kind of academy or scholarlyness, right? That's right. So he really helped put the kibosh on price's work, this gears from the Greeks. And it languished for a while, for another couple of decades, I believe, right? Yeah, that's right. It wasn't until the mid two thousands that they decided, you know what, we had this great technology now called CT scanning, computed tomography, and what we can do with this stuff, we can actually get inside this thing. And there are videos of this actually being done on the mechanism. It's really cool looking. You can watch it unfold in real time. And they basically figured out from the inside out how this thing worked and how it operated. Yeah. And it is as follows. Picture like a wooden box. Okay. About the size of a shoe box, right? Yeah. It looks bigger to me, but I guess I saw someone else describe it like a thick laptop size. Okay. Again with the computer. People just can't stop an ancient computer on one side of the box if it's standing like a shoe box on end. On one side there's a crank, like just a small dial with a little handle they would use to crank this thing up. The handle is missing. Now, by the way, this is what you're describing is what it looked like originally, right? Oh, yeah. Now it's just disintegrated blobs and chunks of things. Yeah. So the knob on the side is what wound it forward and backward. And then you had a big front side and a backside. All the gears are in the middle, contained therein. Yes. And again, these are gears with teeth between 223 of them on a gear. And all of them, the number of teeth that they have has to do with their relationship to the other gears they interact with. That's right. So they have all these different hands. If you wound it up, it would engage these gears. Each of the hands moves at a separate pace and represents what you said earlier, the five planets and Earth and the moon, basically. Sun and moon, basically anything we can see from Earth at this point. Right. And these are the gears inside. And the gears are physically representing how the sun and the moon interact. Yeah. Now these are the hands. Right. But then they're driving the hands. And the hands have a representation in the form of a colored orb on the face of the actual mechanism, the machine. Exactly. So on the backside, you've got two more dial systems. One is a calendar of the lunar and solar eclipse, and another one, basically, like you said, was the sports calendar. Right. The Olympics are coming up. Then four years after that, there'll be more Olympics. Yes. So four years. So on the front, it tracked the day. Right. That was the big front face of it. I believe it did. Okay. And then on the back when it's tracking eclipses. So, Chuck, when you make a clock, the whole purpose of a clock is so any guy can come along and be like, oh, it's this day. Right. So you want your clock to be accurate. The problem is, if you're tracking just the solar calendar or you're tracking just the movement of the moon, your clock is going to or your calendar is eventually going to fall out of sink. And all of a sudden, something like one of the solstices, your summer solstice, is going to show up in December after 18 years. Right? Yeah. So to do that and this has been, like, one of the big things that clockmakers and calendar makers have had to deal with forever, you have to figure out how to reconcile the movement of the sun and the moon with your calendar so that it stays up to date, literally. Right. Mechanically. Up to date mechanically, but also mathematically. Right. So several great thinkers figured out that if you take the tracking of the moon and extrapolate it by enough times, it will eventually sync up years down the line with the solar calendar, I think, over the course of like, 19 years. And this is what's called the metonic cycle, right? Yes. There's like, 534 phases of the moon in 119 year period. And if you can track that, then you can keep your calendar in sync. This is the level of sophistication that the anti thera mechanism operates on. To this point, we did not realize that the ancient Greeks had this level of understanding of astronomy. Yeah, it was a big find for a lot of reasons, and that's one of them, for sure. Yeah. And one of the reasons that we know that they knew this and we're not just kind of putting our own ideas onto it is when they use that computer tomography, they found inscriptions on all these different gears, which basically said how they work and what they track, which is another reason this find was so amazing. It basically had an instruction manual engraved on it. That's right. And we will talk more about that right after this. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office when you could be using Stamps.com? Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses because Stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and ups shipping services you need right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with Stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS rates and 86% off Ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page, and enter code stuff. All right. So you're talking about the inscriptions. Like you said, it was a user's guide. If there's going to be a sophisticated piece of equipment like this computer, it's going to come with a book that says, here's how you use it. They're doing a pretty good job of discovering the stuff on their own. But then finding the user's guide, piecing that together became even a bigger part of the puzzle. It did. And then that user guide also, too, if you're an anthropologist from 500 years in the future and you happen upon a user guy, do a Mac or something. Right? Yeah. It also describes the level of technology that the people who built this computer had in writing. It says, this is what we know, this is what we understand. So, again, this backdated the understanding of astronomy among the Greeks to far earlier than we'd ever given them credit for. And it confirmed a lot of stuff that had been thrown out over the years is flights of fancier imagination by writers who had cited this kind of understanding of the people of their time. And later historians were like, these people were just making up, and it was a lucky guess. This mechanism has helped show no, these guys actually knew what they were talking about. Yeah. One of those was there was a belief, well, by some, but not held by others, that ancient Greeks had calendars where they excluded certain days to adjust the lengths of the month. Right. A lot of people are like, no, there's no way that they were that sophisticated. This machine, basically, and the accompanying guidebook proved it to be true. It's true. Which is pretty great. It is. And because of its sophistication, there are a list of people from that time that they think may have had a hand in this. Of course. Archimedes. He's going to be in there anytime something special is found. Yeah. And there's actually writing about Archimedes creating, like, a sphere, a three dimensional model. That actually doesn't really sound like the anti thera mechanism. No. But he'll be on any list if you find something that, like any mechanism, is sophisticated. Hipparchus, who I think I don't know if we talked about him yet or not he's a mathematician and astronomer, and I think the time period worked out for him. So he could have been one of the people involved. My money's on him or his student Poseidonus. Okay. Was that posedonius? Yes. I like Poseidonus. Sure. He did, too, because that makes him sound like a Greek god. Yeah. There are also some other hints trying to piece together the mystery. One of the inscriptions refers to an athletic event in Rhodes, which is where Hipparchy is taught, where his school was. Yeah. And there's a man named Alexander Jones. He's a specialist at NYU. That's what he said. My money is on roads. That's where this thing came from. Yeah. Hipparchus, maybe Poseidonus. The other thing that helps is well, it doesn't help necessarily Hipparchy's case, but it kind of excludes Archimedes. Some researchers looked at old Babylonian records of eclipses and tried to sync this thing up, and apparently they were able to exclude hundreds of different possibilities and settled on 205 BCE being the start date for the mechanism. Yeah, I think it's a little older than they originally thought, right? Yeah. They were thinking 50 to 100 BCE. And they're like, no, 205 is probably the date that this thing was intended to be set to, because, again, this thing's tracking the movements of the bodies in the heavens based on the movement of the sun and the moon. And how do you track that? By tracking eclipses. So you would want to set it to an eclipse because there has to be some starting point to set it to. Right? Sure. So they figured it was 205. Well, Archimedes, as you remember, we did a whole episode on him. We did some on the death ray, maybe. Yes. He was killed by a Roman soldier in 212 because he wouldn't pay attention to the soldier who was telling him to pay attention, I think. But he was killed in 212, so that probably excludes him. He was so smart. He knew that an eclipse was coming in seven years and wanted his mechanism to start. Then he was so broke he couldn't pay attention to that one. No, this is my first time, but hearing that joke. Yeah, those are good in the burn contest or whatever. Your mama jokes. Yeah, kids. It's a good one, though. What else you got here? Did not think that was going to make an appearance in the well, since then, there have been ten models, at least ten that have been built kind of recreating this thing. There was a watchmaker that got into it, and of course, that was pretty the way this thing is put together, it seems like a watch and clock maker would be an ideal candidate. You blow made one. Well, they made three of this watch, and it's like a watch version of it. That's pretty amazing. It's pretty cool. I wonder how much they went for those three. Oh, I'm sure they were pretty cheap. Somebody made one out of Legos. Yeah. Was it a Lego set, or was it just someone made a Lego model? They made a Lego model. It was like an Apple engineer. I didn't know. I thought it might have been a Lego set. Like a very obscure Lego set. Not yet, but the engineers like, I'll sell you these plans lego if you want them. Old Kirk Chuck there's one thing that it's amazing when we're like, wow, this knowledge is even older than we thought. And a lot of people point out that in the west yes, it took until the 14th century for this knowledge to come about. We likely got it from Muslim scholars, but it's possible that it came to the west via Muslim scholars from the Greeks. So this knowledge was around. Right. The Muslims that were interacting with the Greeks gained this knowledge and they had it themselves until they finally interacted with us in the west in the 14th century. Right. It's pretty amazing. But other people are like, yeah, that's great. Why didn't the Greeks build on this? If they have this sophisticated an understanding of how to track time and the movement of the heavenly bodies, why did they stop there? Well, they may not have. They did. That's the thing. Well, no, until we find the next thing that was three or 400 years after that that we previously didn't know about. Now, the point is, why didn't they build stuff that survived and came down to this day? And they didn't incontrovertibly they did not build on it, or else we would have it today. And Arthur c. Clarke is saying, if they had built on this level of sophistication and it had continued uninterrupted today, we'd be traveling amongst the stars by now. After 2000 years of having this knowledge. Yeah. I don't see how anyone can say that, though. How can he say that they'll never find another mechanism after this that built on this? You won't. What I'm saying is that knowledge wasn't built on and built on and built on and built on uninterrupted. Oh, so they may have built on it. Yeah, they could have. But from what we understand that they didn't. My money is on finding something else that makes a little more sense out of this. Well, they did find something else. In 1983, a man in Beirut was in a bizarre and found some weird geared mechanism, and they figured out that it was a six century Ce calendar. Like a geared calendar. It's the second oldest geared mechanism known to humankind for now. After the anti Katherine mechanism, we may find an entire civilization underwater. No, but you never know. All right. You never know. You never know. I'm sure before they found this, they were saying that they were never advanced enough to make something like this. Yeah. The point isn't that they weren't advanced enough. The point is that they didn't build on this advancement until we find out that they have. Right. Well, whatever came in and broke that building on it and interrupted it, that sucks, because we could be far more advanced than we are. Yeah. It could have been a volcano that covered a laboratory in ash sure. That sunk underwater and that's. Where the underwater civilization has been. Yeah. You never know in the lab. If you want to know more about the antique therapy mechanism, you just try your hand at spelling that. It's fun to say, isn't it? Yes. It's easy to spell if you sounds. And do that in the search bar at how stuff works. I said search bar is fine for listener mail. I'm going to call this me a callback. Hey, guys. Absolutely love stuff. You should know and have listened to every episode, many more than once. You keep the company on many along. Commute. While I was listening to the Voyage manuscript podcast, which was awesome, I noticed Chuck said a possible explanation was mental illness. Josh said yes, like an autistic monk. I'm sure you know this, but autism is a developmental disorder, not a mental illness. Behavioral therapist who works with autistic children, it makes me very sensitive to these matters. Thanks for your great work. My favorite ever was Berlin Wall. And that is from Tricia. Flowers. And I think her subject line was, I still love you guys. So we got quite a lot of feedback on this and I'll let you take it away. It was a mistake. Yeah, it's totally misspoke. I don't think that autism is a form of mental illness. What I should have said and meant to say was or an autistic monk. Right. Or a monk with autism, I think is the proper way to put it. Yeah. Not like sometimes in the heat of the moment. Sure. Like or as, but yes. No, I don't think that those two are things. Yeah. So all apologies, people. We certainly don't think that. And I always want to correct ourselves. Yeah. Especially when something we say accidentally causes distress among people. There's no reason to let that stay. And agreed. Yeah. So thank you, Trisha. We appreciate you writing in to let us set us straight, call us out, whatever you want to call it. Yeah. In a very nice way. Yes. And if you want to set us straight or say whatever, you can get in touch with us via SYSK podcast on Twitter. You can send us an email to stuff podcast athousefs.com you can hang out with us on Facebook. Comstuffyshow. And as always, hang out with us at our home, on the web, stuffysheno.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun is shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon music My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarif and Georgia Hardstarkk, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen. Today you know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. 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20fbef5c-121b-11eb-85ed-7ba3db6a8d40 | Short Stuff: Ivar The Boneless | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-ivar-the-boneless | Was Ivar the Boneless a real Viking warrior? Probably. Did he really have no bones? Probably not. | Was Ivar the Boneless a real Viking warrior? Probably. Did he really have no bones? Probably not. | Wed, 28 Apr 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=118, tm_isdst=0) | 10521332 | 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. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And this is Short Stuff. Just the two of us with the Viking hordes. We've taken a bunch of mushrooms, and we're entering berserker mode now. Yeah, man, I remember. That was one of the early stuff you should know episodes. Was our episode on Vikings. That was one of the great facts of the podcast in the early days. Berserker in the mushrooms. Yeah. Can you imagine seeing a Viking with the battle axe on mushrooms coming at you going crazy? Yeah, and I know I think I mentioned it recently, but the guy who did The Lighthouse, his next movie is a Viking movie. That's a good reason to build a time machine, so we don't have to wait around for that. Yes. Robert Eggers. Boy, that's going to be good. And I bet it's going to be crazy. Yeah, I can't wait, because the Vikings were crazy. And if you watch the History Channel show, Vikings I have not. I haven't either, but it was pretty popular. It ran for about six seasons. But there was a character in there named Ivar the Boneless, and on the show, he was a ruthless guy. He was sort of the leader on the battlefield, and he had a medical condition on the show that made his legs useless, basically. So he would crawl around and he would ride on chariots and stuff, and he had crutches, but he led what was known as the Great Heathen Army on that show, and he was actually a real person. But there's a lot more mystery about who he was and whether or not he even had this condition in real life. Yeah. So I've already Boneless, one of the great all time nicknames ever, but he does pop up here and there in historic documents that chronicle the Vikings. And we're working from a housetofworks article that I think makes a great point, or one of the historians that they interviewed, very cautious historians in this article. Yeah, totally great. But this historian makes a really great point that, first off, let's kind of get across the Vikings. And everything we understand about the Vikings were written by our historic or cultural ancestors here in the States and in the US. Or the UK, in Australia and Canada, who were the enemy and the sufferers at the hands of the Vikings. They didn't paint the most flattering portrait of the Vikings around. And you can make really good cases. The Vikings were no more violent or terrifying than anybody else during the medieval age. It was a violent time. Like, we're not saying they were just super chill dudes who would just hang around and drink beer. But it was just a violent time. Like everybody was killing everybody. Charlemagne, they point out this article ordered the beheading of 4500 Saxons in one day. He was the Holy Roman Emperor at the time too. Not a Viking. Yeah. So there were plenty of violent cultures at the time. And this whole image of these barbarians that we get you're right. It's because it was written by people who were their victims, and I'm sure they were pretty scared, right? Exactly. And again, rightfully so. It's not that the Vikings weren't violent. It's just that everybody was violent. And I feel like that was such a mind blowing, paradigm altering part Chuck, that we should take a break real quick. Let's do it. What if you were a global bank who wanted to supercharge your audit system so you tap IBM to UNSILO your data, and with the help of AI, start crunching a year's worth of transactions against thousands of compliance controls? Now you're making smarter decisions, faster operating costs are lower, and everyone from your auditors to your bankers feel like a million bucks. Let's create smarter ways of putting your data to work. IBM. Let's create learn more@ibm.com. It's 2022. When things look different, like doctors visits, for example, sometimes you don't have to go into a doctor's office to be treated for 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 teledoc is ranked number one by JD. Power and telehealth satisfaction with directtoconsumer providers. Teledok is available through most major health plans and many employers. But even if you're not covered by insurance, everyone has access to use teledoc. That's right. If you want to check it out, download the app today or visit teladoc. comStuff to register or schedule a visit today. That's teladoc.com stuff. For JD. Power 2021 Award information, visit JDPower. comAWARDS all right. Late 9th century. 9th I said that weirdly. Something came out called the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, which was this sort of a history book. It was a collection of records about English history, and it was updated over the next couple of hundred years. And in that book, we do find a notation for the Great Heathen Army, or the Great Army, which were the Scandinavian invaders, and this big Viking army, basically, that hit the British Isles in 865 Ce. Right. So this is like the Viking horde that you think of, and apparently this Great Heathen Army, which, again, they call it the Great Army, too. But I'm not going to call it anything but the Great Heathen Army because it's just so much cooler. This is a number of different armies from different Scandinavian lands that kind of all work together. But over the course of more than a decade of invasions and conquerings and all that, they were just this kind of fluid group that collectively were called the Great Heathen Army. It wasn't just one single solitary mass of the same people over 13 years who invaded England. Right. So they are mentioned in the Anglosaxon Chronicle, and Ivar himself is mentioned, I believe, in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle as well, right? Yeah, I think so. At least the brother of Ivar was mentioned with two Rs, which would have been the Norse spelling of it. So if the brother of Ivar is mentioned, therefore Ivar is mentioned. Right. And it actually makes Ivar seem that much more important if you're saying that somebody is a brother of somebody else, you know what I'm saying? Right. Otherwise, who cares? So I guess that's the only time that he pops up in the Anglosaxon Chronicles. It's more that he's associated as a leader of the Great Heathen Army in the Anglosaxon Chronicles. So we have a contemporary piece of writing that basically chronicles, at least in part, the Great Heathen Army coming from the north and messing stuff up pretty bad. And Ivar is in there. Okay, right. And he's also mentioned in some Irish records, the Annals of Ulster. Really cool, great read. And they reveal a Viking by the name of Ivar, or Imar, who was the king of the northmen and all Britain in Ireland when he died in 873. And the thing here is, we just don't know 100% if that is the same person. But chances are it probably was. Yes. I think most historians of that period in that region tend to think that this is the same Ivar. I think that the timing potentially works out. And, yeah, it's possible there's more than one eyebar. But if he was a leader of the Heathen Army in the Anglosaxon Chronicles and the leader of all the great army in the Ulster Annals or the Annals of Ulster, why not? It could be the same guy. Does it really matter if it's not at this point? Yeah, they think that the same. It's England and Ireland. They're close enough to where he was probably just conquering everywhere he went. But none of this has anything to do with his boneless nickname that we hear on the TV show. So now we need to talk about the Icelandic sagas, which were transcribed in the 13th and 14th centuries. These are prose narratives, these aren't history books. These are novels, basically. Yeah. And they were written by the descendants of these same Viking conquerors who would have revered and looked up to and probably exaggerated the legends of these guys. But it's apparently in the Icelandic sagas, they've been compared to historic novels, definitely based on real things, but just maybe a little more overblown. So you got to take them a bit with a grain of salt. But apparently it was in the Icelandic sagas that ivar gets his boneless nickname. I guess that's right, because all I can think of is chicken. Sure. Yeah. Boneless Wing is awesome. So this is where it could have been some transcription problem. Like Boneless could have been legless, maybe, which that would make sense if you've watched the TV show. He wasn't legless, but he at least didn't have the use of his legs. So they may have called someone with that disability legless at the time. But, Chuck, there's another potential transcription error that makes the History Channel interpretation really unique, or singular, I guess you could say. Okay, let's hear it. So there's two Latin words that medieval transcriptionists may have mistaken. One is exos, which means boneless. One is exosus, which means detestable. So it's possible that Ivar's nickname really was Ivar the Detestable or Ivar the Hated, and that some medieval monk got it wrong and he became Ivar the Boneless. And then centuries after that, some executive producers for History Channels decided to actually take that literally and create this character. I've heard the Boneless, who did not have the use of his legs either. I think that's probably the likely story. I think so, too. This great conqueror probably did not have no use of his legs would be my guess. Which makes it kind of funny in a TV way. Right. But from what the historians are saying, it just doesn't jive with the Viking culture. That's just probably not the case. Although they do say it's possible the History Channel's interpretation is correct. It seems to be doubtful. You never know. You never know. This is when we need the Wayback Machine. But it's in the shop right now, unfortunately. Yeah, we should do a Go fund me to pay that bill. Although I think we might be convicted of fraud if we actually collect any of those ones. I think so. You got anything else? I got nothing else, short stuff, everybody's out. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2009/1233171249931hsw-sysk-hypoallergenic-cat.mp3 | How Hypoallergenic Cats Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-hypoallergenic-cats-work | One-third of US cat owners are allergic to cats, resigning themselves to years of suffering and expense on their pet's behalf . Could hypoallergenic cats be the solution these allergic pet-lovers need? Tune in and learn more in this HowStuffWorks podcast. | One-third of US cat owners are allergic to cats, resigning themselves to years of suffering and expense on their pet's behalf . Could hypoallergenic cats be the solution these allergic pet-lovers need? Tune in and learn more in this HowStuffWorks podcast. | Thu, 29 Jan 2009 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=29, tm_isdst=0) | 14657566 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Meow. And welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. That's Chuck Bryant. That was terrible. That was pretty bad. That was about as good as your Elvis impression. Actually, Chuck, it was great. I'm sorry. I just hate that. So, Chuck, do you have cats? I have two cats. Oh, yeah? What are their names? I have Lauren and I have the wizard. Nicer. With two cats. Don't you hate it when people name their pets, like, actual human names, like Jason or Gina? You know, my in laws are big on that. They always give their dogs and cats regular names. Well, my apologies to your in laws. Is Chuck right? Well, Laura gets conceivably a real name, but the Wizard The Wizard. Yeah. You're probably going to be brought up on charges if you name your kid The Wizard. Okay. So you know what it's like to live among tumble, weeds of hair just kind of going through your house, the mice put on little gunslinging shows for your amusement kind of thing. Right. Between our two cats and two dogs, we could literally collect enough hair each week to make an entirely new animal. Yeah, I could sweep every day and still get an astronomical amount up. I'm too lazy, though. I don't sleep every day. We live in a toxic environment. My wife Emily is. Is she? Yeah. But she loves animals so much that she lives with it. So your wife Emily, you realize, is part of the one third of Americans who love cats so much that they keep them even though they're allergic to them. Yeah, think about that. A third of the people who are allergic to cats still keep them. That says something about cats. It really does, doesn't it? Yeah. That's pretty cool. Yeah, it's awesome. So what does Emily do for allergies? Well, she's got big allergies as a whole, anyway, so she's on shots and pills and nasal sprays, and there's a voodoo guy that comes around once a week and does a little new dance in our room. That has nothing to do with the allergy. Nothing. She just told you it does. That she dyed her hair red recently. No, she has not. She's on a slew of things, but it still acts up, you know. Those are some bad allergies. Yes, she got bad allergies. Wow. How often does it act up? The allergy shots have kind of worked, so it's not as often, but during the worst of times, it was a couple of times a week. Severe debilitating allergy as well. And is it because of the cat? I'm sure it helped. Yeah, I think her allergies said, you should get rid of your animals, and she kind of said, thanks, I'll get a new allergy. Well, okay. So she's a third of the population of people who are allergic to cats still keep them. And about 15% to 30% of the population in the United States has a dog or cat allergy. Really? Yeah. That's actually a lot more people than I thought. It was pretty substantial. And a lot of them will actually undergo immunotherapy right. To kind of get over their allergy to it. Right. It is the shots. Basically, it's like using local honey to get over hay fever. Right. Same concept. And the local honey thing hasn't been proven, but it seems to work. This actually has been proven. True. And all it is is you're introducing a low level of the allergen that's causing the allergic reaction and letting your body get used to it. Correct. Do you want to talk about allergic reactions for a second? It's my favorite topic. Is it really? No, I have to deal with it a lot, so I'm used to it. Okay. Do you want to explain them? I'd feel better if you did. Okay. So basically, an allergic reaction is nothing more than a case of mistaken identity. Okay. So the cat allergy, the allergen that you're allergic to from the cat we'll get to that in a second. It's actually totally benign. What happens is if the first time your body is introduced to it and it takes it as a foreign invader, it will produce an antibody to fight it off. Exactly. And then every time it comes at it, it will produce that antibody again. And basically one of the results is the release of histamines. Correct. Which actually makes your opens up the capillaries in your soft tissue. Yes. Which is why your eyes water and your sneeze and your gums bleed and you get the spin running nose. Yeah. Well, that's another one, too. That's actually the reason why that's amazing. You really think so? Yeah, how the human body works. I love that stuff. I think it's strange that the human body can make a mistake like that. Well, true. Stupid body. Yeah. So what is this cat allergen? I believe it's called I'm not sure if you say it or spell it, but I'm going to spell it. Feld One Glycoprotein, and the fel clearly stands for feline. So no matter how you say it, what it is is it's something that cats secrete through their skin and their saliva. And it's actually smaller than dust. Yeah. And it gets everywhere, doesn't it? It does. There was actually a study of a mattress store in Sweden. This was disturbing. It was disturbing. All these mattresses for sale, you know how they have mattresses out? Box spring set you can lay on them. I don't have those places. I've never been one to actually get on the mattress, but rolling around and stuff, I don't like that at all. So these are brand new mattresses that never been in anyone's home. And the Swedes tested them for the Feldie One Glycoprotein and found it in aces on every single one of them. Right. So this just came from people that owned cats. So it's very easily transferred. It's very small. It's almost impossible to get rid of. And your cat produces it constantly through saliva. A glycoprotein, actually, it does all sorts of different stuff. It's found everywhere. It can serve as a lubricant. It can serve as connective tissue. Right. It's also structural, so it can be found in cell walls. It's all over the place. And it's big and keratin, which is the hair part. Exactly. Right. Which is why pet dand are so allergic. You got it. Okay. Man, you're smarter than I thought you were, Hal. Thanks. It's good stuff. Okay. That's the glycoprotein. Right. That's the histamine reaction. That is the cat thing. We've already discussed all of our stuff, and a lot of people are allergic to cats. I think the stat is 50% of asthma cases are allergy related, and 30% of those are cat allergies. Yeah. Cats in particular seem to be very allergic. So what do you do besides Emily's course of action? Sure. I know one thing that the article mentions is washing your cat twice a week. But if you're cat is like my cat, cats don't like that. No. I washed my kitten. Ellen. I found him in a dumpster in Los Angeles, and I washed him when I first got him immediately, because he was a dumpster kitty. And I tried to wash him again about and he's probably five years old now. I tried to wash them again, give him a Fleep half about six months ago. And he was not happy. No, he just complained a lot. He didn't, like, fight us or anything. Got you. Yeah. There are some cats out there that will draw blood if you try to put water on them. My other cat, the wizard, would he would attack. Yeah. So you know better than to wash them. So that's not necessarily an appropriate course of action either. No. Depending on your cat, do you know what is? Please tell me. You could buy what is called a Hypoallergenic cat. Yes. If you have a cool $6,000 to spare. Six grand. It's actually, what, 59, 95, probably. So six grand. There's a company called Alica, and it's an American company, I believe. And basically they have created a cat that they market as Hypoallergenic cats, and they don't have to prove that one bit. According to the FDA, any product in the US. Marketed as Hypoallergenic doesn't have to produce any proof whatsoever that it's Hypoallergenic. And Hypoallergenic doesn't mean allergy free. It just means that there's a much less likelihood that it will produce an allergic reaction. Exactly. But to back up its claims, Alarca published its own study, and basically the study could be called Here, smell These Cats. Right. So they took some people who are known to have cat allergies stuck in a control group that doesn't have cat allergies, and they use the allergic cats. Basically said, here you go, here's this cat. And neither group reacted to the cat. Yeah, it seems to work. But then they used a non regular cat and yeah, there was a reaction. Right. It's kind of mean, but it really serves to help market their cause. Well, the first thing I thought when I saw this article about hypoallergenic cats is that it was some sort of weird bio engineered type of thing. Like a mouse with an ear growing out his back. Right. We have a picture of it's. Really weird looking, isn't it? Disturbing. We paid extra for that one. It's an AP photo. Oh, really? Yeah, it's worth every penny. I agree. So, yeah, it's not actually bioengineering now, so those that don't agree with things like that, don't worry. It's actually selective breeding. Yes. And selective breeding, basically, if you're just taking a group that has a desirable trait and continuing to breed them while not letting them breed with the cats that have the trait you don't want. Exactly. And in this case, Aleca used a process called bioinformatics, which is basically slapping computers and molecular biology together. And from what I gathered, they fed the genetic makeup of, I guess, several different breeds of cats through an algorithm. And it basically spit out likelihoods that these breeds would stop producing the Feldi One glycoprotein based on their genetic makeup. Right. It's no wonder it costs six grand. Yeah, right. And I imagine selective breeding keeping these cats from mating constantly is probably a real pain. It's a fun job. So what the computer basically said was, go check out the British short hair. And so they grabbed the British shorthair, which I guess had the highest likelihood of abandoning this gene that produces it. Right. Well, actually, it still has the FLD One protein, but it's just a different version of it. Right, okay. Yeah. It has a different molecular way. Exactly. Okay. So they basically bred it out of them. They bred the LD One. We're going to breed that glycoprotein right out of you. Right out, yeah. What happened was the allergic cats, now, they may look exactly like a bridge shorthaired cat, but it's technically another species. Sure. A speciation event actually just occurred, thanks to allergy right, so it's genetic divergence. It's where you take one thing and split them in the two on the tree of life. Right. They're pretty popular. Right? Yeah. There's a two year waiting list. Two year waiting list, last I heard. And you could cut the waiting time in half, but you could get it in a year. But you have to pay an extra two grand. Right. So an $8,000 cat and you had to wait a year for it. Right. So I guess they are pretty popular. Either that or they're breeding fairly slowly. Right. These are some serious cat lovers out there. There are. But then again, I mean, your wife, she puts up with these allergies. Yeah. She would draw the line there, though. Yeah, well, I guess the moral for today is cats equal. Great. If you want to learn more about hypoallergenic cats, you can type that into our handydandy church bar@howstepws.com. Also type in Handy Danny and see what comes up. You'll be pleasantly surprised, but don't go anywhere. We have something we like to call, listen, or mail. Yes, Josh, we're back, as I say, mere seconds later, and I'm just going to entitled this segment from our young fans. We get some emails from some of our young fans. We love our young fans. We love the kids out there listening to us when they listen to the age appropriate shows. Where are we going to stick that at the end of Moonshine and then thought the better of it? We did, actually. Now we're putting it after the hypoallergenic cat one. Much more appropriate. Exactly. So we heard from Cole Silva in Marston Mills, Massachusetts, about flirting and young Cole is twelve years old and he says that he loved the episode on flirting and it really helped him a lot. And I may only be twelve, but thanks to you, I just found out that a lot of girls had flirted with me this year. Way to go, Cole. So as you know, I wrote back to Cole and told him, here's another bit of advice. Be nice and respectful to your female friends and that will give you a leg up in the future on all those little dorky friends that make fun of them. Exactly. No pulling pigtails. No good advice from us. Then. Ben, 15 years old in England, one of our favorites. He enjoyed the toothpaste making orange juice taste bad. And I wrote Ben back as I want to do. And he asked for a haiku poem from Ben, from our young love. Asking people for haiku. I do it's short and it's a good way to get them involved and engage our listeners. So he wrote back in January snowfalls on the frozen ground, I make a snowman. That sounds like a t shirt to me. That's a good one. And then Sarah S. This is our favorite. Sarah S, aka the Amazing eleven year old fan is riding us on a weekly basis, if not daily now. And Sarah is very awesome. She's eleven and she wrote out a haiku for us, which actually rhymes. And Sarah, you should know that they don't have to rhyme. In fact, no, she put in the extra effort. But she did from knowing Sarah, she knew that she just wanted to polish it up even more. Right. So here's sarah s haiku. Many people run straight into the sun for fun, but I am not one. And she says she wrote that because she hates to run nice and apparently isn't much of a fan of the sun either. Right? But we love our young fans and we appreciate them listening. Do we have any youth size t shirts? I don't think so. They could be sleep shirts. Okay. There you go. So if you guys ever go to a sleepover, you can be sporting your cool House Stuff Works t shirts. Good idea. Just email us your addresses. The three of you, thank you very much for writing in. And if you want to write in and roll the dice and see if you can get a T shirt or just tell Chuck and I that we made a mistake or that you love us, whatever, just send an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you?" | |
How Perfume Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-perfume-works | Women consistently rate scent as the most important factor in a man's attractiveness and men have been manipulating that for centuries with scents of all sorts. Learn about the fascinating history -- and, well, art -- of making perfumes in this episode. | Women consistently rate scent as the most important factor in a man's attractiveness and men have been manipulating that for centuries with scents of all sorts. Learn about the fascinating history -- and, well, art -- of making perfumes in this episode. | Thu, 19 Feb 2015 17:01:32 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=17, tm_min=1, tm_sec=32, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=50, tm_isdst=0) | 54882289 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles dubbed Chuck Bryant and Jerry shares. That would be great if that was her name. Jerry. Jerry Jers. Yeah. Tony. Tony, Tony. My friend used to call them Tony. Tony Tone. Y is the spelling. Okay? But I thought the last one was an E with a little accent. Well, that was Tony, but he didn't say Tony accent. I would say that's. Tony. Tony. Tony. Well, the point is, it's E-I-Y of the three letters. When Jerry presser cord, did you think we were going to be talking about Tony, Tony, Tony? I never know what the heck we're going to talk about for the first 30 seconds. I would not have predicted that one. I was going to tell a story, but I'm not going to now. What's that scent you're wearing? It is Chuck Musk. It's called chusk in French. That means water of Chuck musk. Gross. Yeah. I'm wearing Dracar Noir. Good. Are you really? No. Don't you think you'd be able to smell it? Well, yeah, sure. I never know. I'm very sensitive to making fun of people and what they choose to do. I'm not making fun of anybody. No, but I didn't want to say, you're wearing cologne. You're wearing Drecarnoir Gross. I used to love Dr Carnoir back when I was in the 7th, 8th grade, I believe. It man alive. Those are the cologne days. I looked it up and I was like, what is Dracar Noir mean? Noir black. Right, sure. What is Drakar? Apparently, Drakar or Dakar is a name for a Viking ship. Nice. So Dracar has kind of come into French colloquially as like a big ship or a yacht. So I think Drakarno R here's, the fact of the podcast, sadly, means black yacht. Nice. That means you are very fine, because all you see is white yachts. You ever seen a black yacht? No. That would be pretty slick. Yeah, it'd be very hot. That's why they don't paint yachts black, I would imagine. Yeah, I guess so, if they sit out in the sun all day. So I wore Benatin colors. I never wore that one. And that smell today is still very evocative because I have the bottle. I don't know if I still had it. Yeah, I keyed it in every once in a while. When you feel nostalgic, you just shed it. No, I can't find it. I thought you were saying you still had the bottle. I castored it and I can't find somewhere somewhere in your abdomen? No, I had it for the longest time. I don't think I still have it, though. And as we'll see, cologne can go bad. But this is in a dark drawer and it seemed to smell the same to me. Yeah, that sounded like a perfume industry propaganda. Oh. To keep you blind no matter what you do to protect it, it's still going to go bad into it. That's like, these Vicodin are no good anymore. Exactly. Don't believe that for a second. No, but definitely don't just assume that they've downgraded in potency and take like, four. Right. Although I do think cologne and perfume could definitely go bad if not cared for correctly. Right, but if you care for it correctly yeah. We should probably just go ahead and say if you keep it out of the sunlight, keep the artificial light to a minimum. Sure. Keep it in its original bottle capped. Yeah. Supposedly it stays good for two years. Yeah, that's what happened, I think, is BS. As long as you don't expose it to the outside air. Right. Keeping it in a surgeon bottle and the sunlight is not saying they're breaking its molecular chains. It's going to be fine and stable. Yeah. I mean, I had literally had proof on cologne and Vicodin, so I'm happy to come out on the record about that's. Great, man. All right. This is a good article, I thought a nice choice. Yes, I agree. I think perfume is surprisingly interesting. It's one of those things where you just take for granted, or you think, like, oh, that's just for the fashionista glitteratty types, or, you know, Madison Avenue folks kind of thing. And then you dig into it and you're like, no, that's pretty cool perfumes for everyone. Even if you don't wear it, it's still interesting to know about. Like, for example, the history. Do you read much of the history? Yeah, you sent me some pretty cool stuff. And this isn't necessarily perfume, but I guess perfume is really anything that smells. It doesn't have to smell great. Yeah. We're generally talking about perfume, meaning like a product that you go by to change or enhance your scent. Right? Yeah. But if you look around, like, everything is perfumed unless it's specifically marketed as unscented or non perfumed. Yeah, but just about everything else has some sort of perfume to it. Yes, but it has to be a substance that's what is the distinction between a perfume and an odor? Yes. I guess the odor actually comes off to, say, the plant. The perfume is when you go to that plant and squeeze the odor out of it, put it in a bottle, put it on your skin. Yeah, well, you don't need to put it in a bottle. Yeah, I guess not. You just rub those leaves all over you. But like I said back in the day, ancient priests, you sent me this thing. So they burned incense initially to cover up stinky dead animal carcasses that they were sacrificing. Which makes sense that the Latin translation is through the smoke. So perfume means yeah, like you can smell it through the smoke of, I guess, these burning dead animals, or through the smoke. You feel a lot better about sacrificing animals because you can't smell the death. Yeah. The Ancient Egyptians very quickly. So, like, originally, there were priests using perfume to cover up animal sacrifices. Right. Ancient Egyptians said, we got a better idea. Let's use the glands from those animals to scent ourselves for loving. Let's put it on her stinky parts. Yeah. Originally, it was animal sacrifice, and it went very quickly into sexuality. And ever since then, the purpose of perfume has remained virtually unchanged. It is to stimulate sexuality in some form or fashion. Yeah. Especially men wearing cologne. Yes. And we'll get to some of those reasons in a bit, but that's a good primer. I never really thought about that, but I guess you're right. You're wearing it to smell more attractive, even on the friendship tip. Sure. It doesn't necessarily have to be sexual, I don't think. Well, it depends, because some of the early ingredients that stuck around until in some cases of the are still being used in other cases, are from basically the sex glands, the scent glands of animals. Yeah. And this article points out it's funny to think about the first person who saw a skunk and said, you know what? I'm going to get all up in that anal gland and rub some of that on me. Exactly. Or the musk deer. The musk deer. Get some of that. The beaver produces castorium, the civic cat, which is a Himalayan cat. That's the Skunkle. Yeah. There's like a dozen animals they classify as civic cats. And then ambergris. Yeah. Or ambergris. I can't remember which way to pronounce it. Let's just say both are acceptable. Okay. We'll agree to it. Disagree. Amber. Gree. I can't remember. Anyway, it's the whale stuff. Yes. So supposedly everybody said, well, it's a whale vomit. When a whale eats a squid and its beak gets kind of in its stomach and it needs to dislodge it. Yeah. Squid beak. Okay. I thought yeah, it's a beak. It's probably the most disturbing part on any animal on the planet. The fact that a squid has a hard beak just like a bird is quite disturbing. It just keeps me up at night because the squid is like gelatinous and flimsy. It's not supposed to have a hard beak that can break bone. Well, I think it is supposed to. That's wrong to me. So if a whale has that beak in his stomach after eating a squid, it needs to get rid of it. So the common wisdom was that it puked up this stuff, and that's what ambergris is. Yeah. This is the sperm whale specifically. Right. Ambergris is like this bile and puke and that kind of thing, but it floats on the surface of the ocean and photo degrades and hardens and turns into this waxy substance that's actually flammable, that can have its own scent that has long been, and still, in some cases, used as a major ingredient in perfume. Right. Yeah. I think it's supposed to make perfume stick to your body more. Right. It's a fixative is what it's called. The weird thing is they're recently finding out that it's possible that ambergris, it comes out of the bottom end of the whale. Yeah. They don't poop in the mouth. Sure, they poop it out. That is basically whale diarrhea that you're using in your perfume. So consider this. Depending on the perfume and the fixatives it uses, you could be using anal glands from a beaver and diarrhea from a whale in order to make yourself smell sexy. What's insane, Chuck, is that it actually works. Well, sure. That's debatable depending on who you are, I guess. Right. I hate the smell of perfume. All perfumes. There's not a single perfume scent, even a component of a perfume that you find. I don't like scented perfume for women specifically, is what I'm talking about. As far as working sexually no, I don't even mean, like, sexually necessarily that you're worked up getting a little hot under the car, even. Just relaxing. Not pleasing to me at all, really. No. Don't like it. Do you like scents of anything? I mean, like, Emily makes all sorts of soaps and stuff. Do you like any of those scents? Those are all natural. That's the difference. Most every perfumed product is synthetic on the market. It depends for sure. The cheaper ones definitely are, but not all of them are. Most of them, I mean, there's still plenty of that used, like Abergris. What's more natural than whale diarrhea? Well, that's true. Not here in the US. We should point out it's illegal to use that in perfumes in the US. Of A. Europe injured, yes, but the European perfume houses still do. But no, I'm very specifically averse to most scents because we don't use chemical products as much as possible. So, like, I don't use scented sprays. Scented deodorants, like fabrize, to me, is, like, the most disgusting thing you can do to your home. Oh, yeah. Fabric softener sheets, laundry detergent. Like, nothing with scents. I hate it. Right. There's nothing, to me, worse than going to a hotel and smelling scented sheets that have clearly been washed with some kind of perfumey detergent. What if it smells like something pleasant, though? I mean, there's nothing I understand. No, they're all supposed to be pleasant. Like, this smells like lavender, and none of it does to you? It's just like this is synthetic, so it feels bad to me. It smells bad. Yeah, I got you. But the idea you just rattle off a bunch of uses for perfume beyond actual perfume, that's actually kind of an old concept. What's long been considered the seat of Europe's perfume industry is grass, I think. G-R-A-S-S-E in the south of France. And it's got this unusual microclimate to where all of these wonderful plants like jasmine and orange blossoms and lavender and all this stuff can grow. And the locals figured out, number one, that they needed to grow the stuff. But also to extract it in different ways. You can extract the essential oils. You can extract absolutes, you can extract concrete. But what you're doing is extracting these odorant molecules from plants and using it to perfume. But what they were originally using it to perfume and I think like the 14th or 13th century, were leather gloves. So remember Catherine Demetici? Oh, yeah. She's been coming up a lot lately. A lot, yeah. She was given some scented gloves by the Tanners of Grass, France, which was originally that was their gig, was making leather goods, but they stunk like death. So just like those ancient priests, the people of Gross said, we need to perfume these, they came up and started this whole trend of perfumed leather gloves by sending a complimentary pair to Catherine Demetchi, who loved them, and then all of a sudden, bam. Grass is not only making these awesome leather goods, it becomes the perfume capital of the world and stays that way for a very long time because she essentially was the first celebrity sponsor of a product. Right. She was in the copies of the local rag saying, I love the smell of my lavender leathers. Exactly. That's a pretty cool story. Yeah. And so that was the heart of it all then. Yeah. And Grass still makes not nearly as much as they used to, but they still produce tons of essential oils every year of all these wonderful plants. Nice. Yeah. See, I'm down with the essential oil. That's different. Right. But that stuff is frequently used in perfumes. I mean, they might not be using it in your Tide or anything like that. That's probably a synthetic scent. Not probably. It's absolutely a synthetic scent. But there are still plenty of perfumes that do use essential oils in there as snow molecules. Sure. Well, the reason people they don't is because it's expensive. Right. All right, so let's talk a little bit about what perfume as the stinky stuff that use an atomizer, if you're fancy, to spray on your body to smell sexy. Okay. And a little bit about smell in general. I guess the liquid perfume that we're talking about is basically just a concoction of alcohol and water and these smell molecules that basically what you're smelling is evaporation into the air. And they do point out in the article, not everything it's light enough to float, but not everything that's light enough to float has a smell. Right. And what did they point out? Carbon monoxide is the common danger. Right. You can't smell it. You might be dying. That's why you have the detectors in your home. Yeah. If all of a sudden you can't think right? Yeah. And there's no other reason why it's probably carbon monoxide leak in your house. That's right. There's no old Vicodin around. You should check the battery on your carbon monoxide detector. So not only do some molecules not have a scent, they're just not odorants. Some odorants aren't smelled by all people. Like, apparently, natural sandalwood is the most commonly unsensed odorant. Yeah. The natural original, the OG. Right. Yeah. So even if you are making a perfume or something like that, you may be making something that can't be smelled by a significant portion of the population, which is a challenge in making perfume. Yeah. And the whole cilantro thing posted a link to a story about that. I know we've talked about it before. It's like 10% of the population has a genetic marker that thinks it tastes and smells soapy. Yeah. And this article points out that what's going on is not that there's some alteration of the smell or taste of cilantro, but that there's a note to it missing so that it's incomplete what people are sensing. Right. And therefore they find it gross. But I saw another study that showed that 30% of odorant receptors are different from person to person. Take any two people, 30% of their odorant receptors are going to be just wildly different. Yeah. So it is a real challenge to make sure perfume that is pleasing to enough people. And as a result, some people have gone the opposite way, and they're just making exactly what they think is super cool. And if you like it, awesome. If it smells good, great. If not, whatever. Right. But that's kind of counter to the main mode of thinking in the perfume industry. Which is why audiences the best. Exactly. Because more people are going to buy it and make more money. And if it's a really good one, it'll be a classic that people develop, like, a brand loyalty to and buy again and again and again, year after year. Chin all Number Five. Yeah. Which classic perfume it is. And it was the first perfume to use synthetic ingredients. Did you know that? I did not. And apparently it was not a hit right out of the gate. It was created in the chanel. But it wasn't until Marilyn Monroe, in an interview in the mid 50s, said that all she wears to bed are two drops of Chanel Number Five that all of a sudden, it was like, sure, forever. The Forever perfume. So every guy bought it for his wife? Yes. Because it would make him think of Maryland Monroe. But it's just stayed that way ever since. Even though the Marilyn Monroe story has been kind of lost mostly to popular culture. There's a documentary on Coco Chanel. I haven't seen it yet. It's supposed to be good. Yeah, I have to check it out. So perfume oil, specifically, this is what we're talking about, being steamed or pressed out of, like, a fruit or a plant or something. It's super concentrated, so it's going to be a 98% alcohol and 2% water. So that's the solvent. Yeah. And then you take the solvent and the amount of solvent that's combined with perfume oil, you have different types of perfume. Yeah, exactly. So perfume, and it'll say this on the bottle if you've ever read the back of a perfume bottle, which I haven't. But perfume P-A-R-F um is at least 25%. Perfume oil, o de parfum, 15%, o de toilet, or toilet water is 10%, and O de cologne is like, 2%. It's Axe Body Spray. It's light. It's very light. Yeah, like body spray. Unless you're talking about, like, just a straight up cologne can also mean a man sent. Right. Which is sometimes way more than 5%. Yes. I think I've said this before. When I lived in Yuma, Arizona, post college, there was a lot of dudes wearing cologne, and I was like, you guys are still wearing cologne? Yeah, man. You don't work cologne? I was like, no. Where's your curve? Yeah, it was a very strange thing to me because I don't know, I don't see a lot of guys at work cologne anymore. Oh, it's definitely falling away again. Maybe I'm traveling in the wrong circles. Well, in America, it was cool at first, and then it kind of fell away. And then thanks to Marilyn Monroe and Chanel, it kind of came back big time. And then it kind of peaked, I think, in the men especially. But it's still going strong. Like one armani. G-O-D. Armani, I think. I can't remember what it's called. It made, like, several hundred million dollars in 2006. Is that one of the unisex ones? No, but it's for men. Okay. Yeah, I always thought that whole new well, it seems new. The Unitx cologne. I always thought that was interesting. Well, originally designed something for both men and women. Right. That's a throwback. Actually, originally there were no gender differences among any perfumes, especially in France, in the French court. Some men like to smell like lilac as well. Right. Nothing wrong with that. The idea that lilac is a feminine scent is a new and social construct. Or the idea that cedar is a manly scent, that's a new and social construct, too. And very American as well. Sure. So when it comes to categorizing, like we were just talking about, there are terms that are used in the biz, but it's not like there's any rule about it. It's just basically how people have grown to talk about perfume. They're in the business of perfume, but generally there are these categorizations floral it's a nobrainer fruity that's a nobrainer green that might be grassy or leafy. I like stuff like that. Yeah, like the olive oils that taste like grass. You ever had those? Yeah, man, those are good. Or wheatgrass shot. That is not good. I love it. You don't like it? No. Oh, man. I love it. It's like drinking down some grass clippings. I think I would rather drink grass clippings than wheat grass. Really? Yeah. Well, it is grass clippings, actually. Like fescue or something. Sure. We'll take a fescue shot then. I will. Herbaceous like herbs, woody, like wood, amber, tree resin. I thought that was interesting. Every time I want to say an animal, like I want to say in a man's act, for some reason, bodily smells. That's gross. Well, that's like from that's musk. Yeah, it's a bodily smell. Well, but then there's musk is its own category too, because it's just so singular. Right, but I mean, like there's also supposedly also, I guess either I don't know if it's a subtype of musk or animalic or whatever, but fecal is another thing too. Yeah. Kelvin Klein's Obsession is among the perfume industry, well known as a very famous fecally perfume. Which one? Obsession. Obsession? Yeah, like a hugely selling, very popular perfume being worn by people. If you walk past someone in the perfume industry, they're going to be like there's some real fecal notes to that one. Well, they said in the top notes, they say sometimes it can be something really nasty just to attract you. I don't know what attract means, but I guess get your attention maybe, but that will wear off the quickest. It's not what lasts on your body. Right. Which we'll get in that in a SEC. Let me just finish this little list here. Okay, sorry. You have the oriental and it's proper usage here. Amber and spice and then a few other ones are categorized by the actual molecules, like phenolic might smell like tar or lactonic, creamy lactose, obviously. Right. Or aldehydec, which is fatty. So those are the main categories. And we will get a little bit more into that chemistry that we teased you with right after this. So, Chuck, we talked about perfume being diluted, like heavily diluted. What a ripoff. It's almost all alcohol. Yeah, it's a rip. The reason why though it's not a rip, I know you would not want the perfume oil, which again is just essential oils or synthetic versions of those oils and fixatives. Or synthetic versions of the fixatives. So it might be essential oil, lavender, some muskrat, anal gland and then solvent, as most of the other stuff. It's unlawful, but it's true. And then, bam, you got a perfume right there. Yeah, but the reason why it's so dissolved and why so much of it is alcohol is because the way that perfumes are designed is so that the different types of molecules, when they interact with the alcohol and the alcohol evaporates, will evaporate in a certain progression of time. Yeah, I thought this is the most interesting part of this whole thing. The alcohol actually makes it possible to separate those notes. Right. And they like this article to hearing all the parts of a symphony at once. Like a lot of pleasing things all at one time is not necessarily a good thing. No. And that's what you would get if you stuck your face in a one ton barrel of perfume oil. Yeah. You might say, man, this is sweet, but you wouldn't pick up on the subtleties of those odors. Yeah, exactly. But what alcohol does is it takes that concentrated form and not only dilute it, but it again spreads it out temporarily. So when you first put it on, you put on a little perfume, right? Sure. The immediate notes, the top notes are what you smell immediately. Right. And they go from anywhere like immediate to maybe a few minutes usually. Yeah. The first one you'll smell and the first one to leave your body. Exactly. That's the top notes. And perfume is designed so that as each set of notes and there are three, there's top, heart and base notes, as each one is leaving, the next one is starting up. So you have this basically flowing transition. Comparing it to a symphony is so app. Sure. Because it's just like this kind of flowing melody of sense that work together by, I guess dissolving evaporating at a certain time at a certain rate. Yeah. And like we said before the break, there a lot of times they will put something unpleasant in that first top note and I guess it will just get your attention in the store. Yes. It's so fecal. Yeah, exactly. What was it? An Anchorman. Oh, the Musk. Yeah, it was like puma musk. Oh, that one puma urine or something. Paul Rudd's cologne. Yeah. I can't remember the exact line, but like 70% of the time it works all the time. What was it? Panther. Yeah, it was Panther or something. Man, that was a funny movie. And then you've got your heart notes next, right? Yeah. How long do they last? They kick in anywhere and last for starting at 2 minutes to about an hour. From what I saw. It can be entirely different. It depends, as we'll see what you're trying to get across. Right. But you could do woody top notes with a vanilla heart note. Sure. So it'll go from wood to vanilla to lemon citrus base note. Right, sure. Or you could do it completely opposite. You can just mix and match like the Oak Ridge boys. It depends. Right. It depends on the type of molecule you use. And as you're making synthetic odorants, you can make a synthetic odorant that's going to stick around as a base note, even though if you had an essential oil of that lemon, it would be just a top note because it's going to go away so quick. Yeah. And as we'll see later when you're making these perfumes, it's a real science and a balancing act of getting exactly what they want because these smells, as you said, are coming and going and it is sort of like composing and symphony again. Man. So the base note, that's the one that's going to stick around the longest though, right? Right. And come out latest. Yeah, it can come out starting usually about 30 minutes after you put it on and can stick around for a day if you're not careful. And then you find something where no perfume is going to smell the same on any two people. Exactly. Right. Not only is it not going to smell the same on any two people, it's going to smell different to any two people. Right, right. Because again, 30% of our odor receptors are different in every single person. Plus also an odorant can activate different kinds of receptors depending on the person. And then lastly, that person is going to encode it differently because scent is definitely its own thing as far as our senses go. And it's the only sense that's directly hardwired to the brain. So the odorant receptors go straight to the brain. Yeah. It doesn't send it to a nerve cell that's nearby first. Right, exactly. So it's like our sense of smell is hardwired to our brain, so it evokes some serious reactions to the brain. And there's also a hypothesis that our brain, the lobes of our brain evolved from olfactory buds. That's what they started out as. That would make sense. And then it just grew and grew and grew. And then we were all like brain stem and ole factory buds. And then the brain grew from that, which would be like hats off to the sense of smell because that's what started it all. Interesting. But the point is that our sense of smell is a big deal, but it's different in each of us. And when you factor in our body chemistry, our skin sure. That's when it genuinely does smell differently on different people. Well, I would think it has to, because everyone has a natural scent, I think, just as a person that's different from one another. Exactly. So you combine it. Yeah, it's got to make a different thing. Right. It's like if I smell like a cherry pie, which you do, throw some Cool Whip on me, which I would gross. I wouldn't do anything. I just throw cool work on me in the form of a pie to the face. Why not that old gag. Yeah, but when you're putting on the perfume, this is all coming around to this point. There are ways to do it supposedly that will get the most out of your perfume. Like you shouldn't put it and rub it in your skin real hard. You don't want to heat it up right away or anything like that. No, because then you break the chains of the top notes and you wear them out before your finger even comes away from your skin. Yeah, dab it on lightly. Yeah, sure. Just did the old lady move. Dab it behind the ear, maybe, or seen the other lady move to do it on the wrist and maybe rub that together a little bit. And then my big trick was to because I liked the Benetton colors, but even back then, didn't want to be super colony. So I did the deal where I spray it in the air, then. Like, walk through it that's even, I think, mentioned in this article. Oh, is it a method? Yeah, that's a method. Okay. I was really on to something at 16. I think even rubbing your wrists together, though, would probably no, because you don't want to generate heat. And one of the reasons why people put it behind their ears or on their wrists stinky behind your ears, for one. That's one. You can also smell it yourself right there. Oh, yeah. But if you put your fingers behind your ears and then put them like, I don't know, on your head or something, you'll see that behind your ears is warm. Yeah, sure. On your wrists is warm. These are pulse points, right? So your hot blood is close to the surface of your skin. So then that heat will start to break up. The alcohol will make it evaporate and will hence make those different notes come out nice. That's all the heat you need. Any friction is too much heat, right? So you say no on the wrist rub. No wrist rub. Okay. I mean, if you want to waste your money and just get heart and bass notes and no top notes, go for it. All right, Josh. So let's say I thought this is all pretty interesting, too, actually. Yeah. Let's say you want to launch Joshness. You work for Polo, and you want to do Joshness. You're in the perfume department, and you say, guys, this is going to be trust me on this one. Be a top seller, right? So you got a Polo, your bosses, and they say, all right, Josh, what we need here is a brief, and the brief is going to outline because, again, you can't say this is a perfume everyone's going to love because they're like, there is no such thing. So write up a brief, tell me who is going to love it, who it's going to appeal to? What do you want it to smell like? Yeah. What do you want this to say? Even so, tom Ford launched one. It became very successful. Called Black orchid. And he said, I want this to smell like a man's crotch. That was one. Can I give you another brief, please? For pure poison from dior, the brief included, what is it like to have something soft and hard at the same time? Oh, I think we all know that. All right. And then here's another one. I don't know what this one was for. That's a Viagra. Yeah. I don't know which one this is, but one brief described what they were after as give us the scent of a warm cloud floating in a fresh spring sky over Sicily, raining titanium raindrops on a woman with emerald eyes. That's what somebody wrote down when they were trying to describe what sent they wanted. Yeah. I mean, those are legit briefs. That's how you're supposed to do it. Describe not just the specific sense that you want. But what do you want it to say? Generally, it's probably more something like classy or prosperous or something like that. Then you want to write out how you're going to sell it, like what form it's going to take. You also want to have a marketing plan. I think we could sell this in South America for the next five years. They're going to go crazy for yeah, exactly. So then after that, it's going to go to a chemist, and it's going to get mailed to what are called fragrance houses. Well, the Polo doesn't make it themselves. They don't come up with it themselves, that is. And the chemist is employed by the fragrance houses, and they send this brief out to a bunch of different fragrance houses and basically start a competition, like who's going to land this account? Basically what we want. See what you can do. So this fragrance house, they do a couple of things. They have the perfumers who they actually are. The chemists who come up with the formula. Yes. They've got all these scents in their head, and they know, like, oh, I know exactly what smells like a woman with emerald eyes. Sure. Super smellers, I would imagine. Yeah. There's an odor tester job out there that's supposed to be great. I don't know if I'd do so hot on that. Yeah. You have to have like just a naturally wonderful nose. Yeah, my nose is not naturally wonderful. It has to make like a curly, too. These fragrance houses also have they don't just write the formulas. They also have the stuff in stock, all these different ingredients and warehouses, or they will work with another company who has it, if they're like, we don't have papaya. Papaya. We need to work with a company who does it will sub that out. And they have these chemists that actually work with gas chromatography mass spectrometry, which we talked about in something, I can't remember what it was. It can be used for other things. Basically, it analyzes odorant molecules. Yeah. To say, here's what it's made of. And here's how you can make a synthetic version of it. Exactly. For cheaper. Right, exactly. So then you have those people, those chemist analysts. Yeah. And then you also have synthetic chemists who take the readouts from the gas chromatography and say, oh, I can build this. And then they build the synthetic molecules. Exactly. And all of this is mind blowing. Yeah, it is mind blowing. Yeah. All of these people are employed by the fragrance houses. That's right. One thing that they do, we did talk earlier about how they have this stuff in stock. A lot of times it can be the actual oils from pressing it and steaming it. But there's another headlock. Exactly. There's another cool thing they have, though, called headspace, and that is when, if they want an odor or a fragrance, they will put like an avocado in a jar and suck out the air every hour or constantly for hours. Right. And then they use gas chromatography to analyze that and analyze that. There you go. And then somebody goes and builds that. Right. And that's what's called the headspace. The head space is basically a synthetic version of an existing natural scent that somebody trademarks. And then all of a sudden, it becomes part of the perfume industry's repertoire. Yeah. I mean, that's the space in the jar. That's the literal head space. That the odor. There's a dude named Christopher Brosius, and he started a company called Demeter, and they're known for making, like, really weird perfumes, like birthday cake, baseball mitt, baby aspirin, just weird stuff like that. But what's neat is they nail it. And one of the ways they nail it is by making head spaces. One of the first ones they did was called Soaked Earth. He took some dirt from his parents farm, put it in a bag, and took it to New York and threw it on the table and said, I want this. Nice. And they analyzed it, and by God, they came up with dirt. The smell of dirt specific to his region. I think Pennsylvania interesting. I guess here we can briefly mention that knockoff colognes and perfumes is a very common thing because your copyright, you can tweak your formula slightly, and it's totally legal to sell. That essentially the same thing that's just slightly different under a different name. Right. It's like the same thing as designer drugs, except with perfumes. Yeah. Remember that like the gas station. If you like Georgia, you'll love whatever we're calling. Sure. What was the knockoff name for Georgio? Georgie. But there was like a whole generic ripoff line called if you like blank, you'll love blank. It's hilarious. So, Chuck, you take all the stuff, you take your head space, you take your existing headspace, you take your essential oils, and you put them all together to create that emerald eye woman who has titanium raindrops raining on her in Sicily on a spring day. Yeah. Well, you do anywhere from ten to 100 of them. Each fragrance house does. Yeah. Then they send them to their odor testers, and the odor tester goes, no, this one's a maybe. No, I like this one. Yeah, no, maybe again, yes, and then no. And then polo at this point has not smelled any joshness yet. No. This is all they're trying to weed out the gunk because they don't want to waste polo's time. Right. They don't want to send them 400 joshness. Exactly. No, they want to send them, like, one, maybe two. And they do. Sure. So polo will then get it, say, I like the second one, but it's a little too strong on this one sent, so that'll go back again. And it's just a process, basically. Maybe they nailed it on the first time. Probably not, but probably not. It's a back and forth, basically. It's just like working with an editor, and they'll swap in ingredients. And as we said earlier, it's a science, basically, of the right combination, in the right order of evaporation. I think it's just super interesting. They put it through product testing, of course, to see what people think of it, because they're not just going to launch it out of the blue. They want it to, like you said, appeal to either the right demographic or the most people possible. Right. And so the one that Polo decides that is Joshness. Yeah. They win that perfume house wins. And so they get a contract to produce x number of tons or gallons of this particular perfume. Well, of the perfume oil. Yeah, exactly. The undiluted stuff. Yeah. Polo actually produces. They take that and produce the perfume. Right. They add the solvent to produce the perfume, the ODI toilet, the ODI cologne, all that stuff. In the different concentrations. They will probably also use it maybe like a deodorant, a body lotion, all that stuff. But they deliver them in, like, one ton drums of the perfume oil that you don't want to smell until it's been diluted. That's right. And then all of a sudden, the Joshua is released into the world, literally, and becomes the number one selling cologne of all time. Well, Anne Polo never knows the exact concoction that makes Joshness either, which I thought was super interesting. Right. It's literally the perfumer knows this little secret. Exactly. Right. So after this, we're going to talk a little bit about the science of scent and whether or not it's something that we're born with or that we learn. All right. So, Chuck, why do people wear perfume? It depends on who you ask. Okay. There's a lady named Rachel Hurts from Brown University. She wrote a book called The Scent of Desire colon discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell. And she postulates that depending on how old you are and what gender you are, you have your different reasons that young men do it to attract women. That's why I did it. Right. Older men do it out of gratitude to the women who gave it to them. Yeah. Honey, you'd smell nice with this on, so sure, I'll wear a deer. Right. Women, depending on how old you are in the 20s, you're more affected by or I guess, inspired by your friends in the media. Beyonce. Sure. She has her own perfume, doesn't she? Yeah. You know who has, like, a surprise runaway smash hit right now is Sarah Jessica Parker. That doesn't surprise me. It does me a little bit. You wouldn't surprise me in, like, 2002, but it is a top seller right now. She's like a goddess to a certain age group of women, though. I guess you're right. But even still, you'd think, like, I don't know, maybe they're right in the perfume wheelhouse. It could be an awesome smelling perfume. I've never smelled it. I was just surprised because you're like Beyonce Derek Jeter. These are the celebrities top selling that have these top selling, like colognes. And then Sarah Jessica Parker. I just don't think of her like that. I like her. She's great. I just don't think of her as that. And I'm happy for her success. Yeah. She's iconic to a certain demographic. Yeah. Not to me. But she's not an icon to you. No, she's an icon to Emily. I think she was a big fan of that show. Women in their 30s, they say, follow no particular pattern. I don't know what they're doing. They don't know what's going on yet. They just like what they like, I think, is what that means. Well, by the time they're 40, they say that's simply because they like it. I just like the way the smells. And I'm 40, so I'm going to just wear it. I see. I don't care what my husband thinks at this point or what my friends think at this point. Right. In their 60s, they say women think of other people's, which is like their friends or loved ones say they like the way it smells. Right. Which is a really nice thing. And then a lot of people choose perfumes, apparently, that their mother wore or in the same scent family, either knowingly or not, but probably knowingly because there's an associative learning theory of smell. You were saying before the break we were going to talk about whether smell is learned or if we're born with it. The idea that smell is learned is called the associative learning hypothesis. That it's learned. Yes. That we come to like smells based on social constructs, based on experience. There's supposedly evidence that smell learning begins in the womb. Even the odorant molecules can be passed along from mother to child. And that the stuff you're exposed to in the womb you can show a preference for later on down the road. Yeah. And Rachel Hurts is a member of that camp. Yeah. And by the way, I want to give a shout out. Rachel Hertz wrote a chapter for the book Neurobiology of Sensation and Reward, which is a gas in general. Right. But she wrote chapter 17, perfume is the title of it, and it's on the NIH website, the NCBI website. Just search for that and it will come up. The whole chapter is right there, and it's really interesting and exhausting. But she is one of the ones who's like, this is a learned behavior and lays out some really great evidence for it. Yeah. One of her points is that babies basically don't think anything smells bad or good. Right. I don't know how they know this. I guess whopping things under a baby's face to see what's exactly the face they make. Including poop? Well, yeah. You never see the baby growing up cleaning. No, I'll wave in poop. I don't care. I'm a baby. Sure. I don't mind the smell. You ever farted right in a baby's face, no reaction, they just blink, nothing. A couple of times they're delighted. Well, plus also other studies of adults, not even babies have shown that the same smell can be preferred or disliked in very similar groups. In the UK the smell of wintergreen in a study after World War II was found to be just generally disliked in the US. Like a decade later the smell of wintergreen was found to be generally preferred. In the US wintergreen is used for candy and gum and it's associated with positive stuff. Sure. In the UK wintergreen was used during World War II for medicines that were used in the field. So there's associations with battle, war, naming disease yeah. So that's what wintergreen is to people in the UK. Whereas in the US the exact same smell is pleasant. Right. And it's not like the Americans and the Brits are the exact same people but they're in the same cohort, very similar cohort, and they showed like opposite preferences which is really great evidence for associative learning hypothesis. Yeah. And it's also a reason why in the early two thousand s the US army was not able to come up with a stink bomb that was universally upsetting to people's noses across cultures. They contracted out the Monal Chemical Senses Center in Philly and they tried to curate a universal stink bomb smell and they said because of cultural specific products and things we had to avoid anything like food related, even if we think it really stinks, some other culture might like it. Right, exactly. So they had to basically go to they focused on stuff with biological origins like vomit and human waste and burnt hair and they made synthetic versions of all these and got some people in Philly and put them in a hood and introduce these poor people. I know, I thought it was funny. That was Philly though, they're probably like, it's not so bad, and introduced they slowly infused it and they said people thought it was the worst thing they ever smell their heads would jerk back, they would contort with revulsion and then basically just try and hold their breath as long as possible or take little shallow breaths. Sounds like a great stink bomb to unleash some people in Philadelphia at least. Yeah, but basically they couldn't come up with anything that was universally hated. Do you remember the Air Force also tried to come up with a gay bomb? Yeah, they used some sort of perfume to turn enemy combatants into gay lovers. So silly. It's a shame though, because the stink bomb is actually really like it's a great idea, it doesn't hurt anyone, it's not like a chemical what do you call it, the sprays? It's irritant. Yes. It's not an irritant in any way, it just stinks and it would keep people out of a sensitive area if they didn't want them there. Well, chemical irritation is a sensation that your nose experiences along with odors. It is technically a stink bomb. Like pepper spray is a stink bomb. Oh, yeah. But it has an actual physical effect on your skin, which is stink bomb wouldn't but the other school of thought, though, is that it comes via evolution, basically. Yeah. That it's innate. Yeah. Which this kind of makes sense. They both make sense to me. I think it might be a mixture of both. But what's his name? Gilbert or Hilbert? One of the two. So if you're in the Gilbert camp, though, you're going to go with the evolution because he points out that when we were evolving, apples smell good because you're meant to eat them and you're meant to spread the seed. So that smell is associated with living and living well. Right. By eating fruits. Conversely, the smell of poop and vomit and urine, which convey disease and bacteria and all the stuff you're not supposed to be with under innate hypothesis. That's why we avoid those, because we need to avoid the substances that carry those obnoxious smells. Makes sense. It totally makes sense. I just think to me, the evidence is more there for associative learning. Yeah, I think it can be both. I don't think it has to be mutual exclusive. Yeah. And I think it can be overwritten by the learning as well. Whatever innate things we have. And I remember we did a bit on a study years ago about people looking for their mates according to having a different immune system, which would in turn make their children immune to more possible things. Yeah. More robust immunity in the case, because you take immunity A and immunity B and put them together, you got immunity C, which is the best of A and B. Right, right. So this is like a whole idea of why or how people select mates is based on that, which is scent based. Right. That's what they think. And apparently this is evidenced by study after study after study that finds consistently that women rate a man sent as the number one factor in attractiveness, more than his appearance, more than wealth, more than anything else. Set is perennially the number one most important thing. They think that's possible. That the reason why is because our senses are attuned. Our scent is attuned so that we can sniff out somebody with a different immune system so we can reproduce more robust kids. The problem is, if you factor in cologne, what you're doing is deceiving that natural drive and all of a sudden you're going to have kids with like zero immune system because the guy was wearing cologne. Yeah. That makes total sense. You don't want to confuse your potential mating mate. It's a pretty good argument against Warren cologne. Yeah. And then there is, of course, the whole does this stuff work anyway as far as being a sexual attraction. Right. And there's zero scientific proof that there was any kind of aphrodisiasic achrodisiac compound that you can concoct that will literally draw someone to you sexually as much as they tried and tried to advertise that. Subtly or not so subtly. We are not pigs who apparently do have mating pheromones that actually work that way. They have something called an accessory olifactory system. And in pigs they have something in their nose called the vaumero nasal organ, which is specifically specialized to pick up on these molecules. And we don't have them as humans. No, we don't have the curly tails either. Or they say we may have them, but it just doesn't work. I don't know which is the case. Who knows? Maybe we just use our normal olfactory senses and it's not pheromones, it just smells. Yeah, sure. Or they say maybe it'll make you think that you're more sexually attractive. So that'll make you more confident. Exactly. And thus make you more sexually attractive. Right. I got one more thing. So you mentioned Georgio. Yeah. Giorgio was a hugely popular, maybe the number one cent of the one thousand nine hundred and eighty s. And it was famously banned from some restaurants. Oh, because it was so stinky. Yes. Wow. Because some restaurants here are like, if you got a couple of people wearing Giorgio in here, it's going to overpower the smell of the food and the taste of the food. So they banned Georgio, which all it did was accelerate sales. Well, there are some people in this building that I wish would be banned from our elevators. I almost never run into that anymore. Oh, boy. I've smelled some stuff. They're not even on the elevator car. It's a fecal. And I step in. I'm like, whoa. Is it like Obsession? No, it's usually like super perfumey lady stuff. Oh, got you. Yeah. You got anything else? No, I mean, there's plenty more. Yeah, but yeah, we got so much time. If you want to know more about perfume, you can type that word in the search bar athowstofworks.com and since I said search bar is time for listener mail. That's right. I'm going to call this a little Nostradamus bit from a Canadian. Hey, guys, I'd like to say how great, first of all, that you make my hour long commutes to work every morning. So thanks. It's a pleasure to listen to the show, especially on Nostradamus. I thought I'd give you another example of what he supposedly said. Quote from the calm morning, the end will come when of the dancing horse, the number of circles will be nine. From Nostradamus. Okay. Talking about circuits, obviously, she says it was said that Notre Dame is predicted to end the world, and was explained as follows korea is the calm morning country pi dancing, as in doing the dancing Horse is Gangham Style. On December 21, that song reached 1 million views on YouTube, 90. In summary, people were claiming that astronomers prediction was the end of the world would be on december 21. So that's it, guys. Keep on doing what you do. You do a great job, and you're always a pleasure. And, oh, the sound effects are awesome. Kudos to Jerry. Way to go, Jerry. That's from Julia K in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Hey, we love Toronto. Aka. Toronto, right? That's right. We love it. Well, let's see. We want to hear from you. Let us know about your perfume preference. You can tweet us your favorite perfume of all time. Or your most hated perfume of all time. Sure, at syskpodcast. You can let us know on Facebook.com stuffyshow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastohousedupworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the Web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com." | ||
3f76f1c2-5461-11e8-b6d0-3772de551c01 | Selects: Why Are So Many Disembodied Feet Washing Ashore In British Columbia? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-why-are-so-many-disembodied-feet-washing-a | Between 2007 and 2016, 17 disembodied feet - still wearing shoes - have washed ashore between Washington and British Columbia. What's behind the sudden influx of Vancouver's mystery feet? Find out in this classic episode. | Between 2007 and 2016, 17 disembodied feet - still wearing shoes - have washed ashore between Washington and British Columbia. What's behind the sudden influx of Vancouver's mystery feet? Find out in this classic episode. | Sat, 13 Feb 2021 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=44, tm_isdst=0) | 35668765 | 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. 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 there, everybody. It's your old pal Josh. And for this week's, SYSK selects I have chosen our episode on Disembodied Feet. Yes. With the great title why are so many Disembodied Feet Washing ashore in British Columbia? We released it back in June of 2016, and it's a cozy little mystery about feet washing ashore, and we don't know why. Still, to this day, I hope you enjoy it. It's a really good episode. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of. iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there. And there are 6ft in this studio right now, and all of them are exactly where they're supposed to be. Attached to their lower legs? Yeah. Below the calf. Yeah. Above the floor, facing forward. Yeah. That's a big one, too, because if it's facing backwards, you got problems. No, you're just going the wrong way all day long. Maybe so. Do you know where they're not supposed to be Chuck? Feet? Yeah. Well, they're not supposed to be on the armrest of the seat in front of you on an airplane. Yes. Or movie theater. Yes, but I know you're not talking about common courtesies. That bug me. No, but I agree with you wholeheartedly. That is so wrong. Yeah. And I meant to tell you, I've come over to your side about taking shoes off on the plane. Oh, good. It's okay if I do it. Okay. But you mean I were flying somewhere and this dude behind us had nasty, stinky feet and he had his shoes off, and we're facing forward, and we could smell his feet below our seats behind us. And I kept turning around, giving him the dirtiest looks, and he was like he had no idea what I was doing. Did you look at his feet and then at his face, and he still didn't get it. Did you look at his feet, his face, and then clamp your nose. I did that still didn't work. I threw up a little bit onto him. He just thought they were sick. Yeah, I know. People disagree with me. People wrote in, we're like, what's it to you? I thought it was to eat your own chuck don't yuck. My yum? Yes, I'm a yum yucker. All right, so I'll tell you a place where feet aren't supposed to be. They're not supposed to be off on their own on a beach somewhere. Not attached to a body. Exactly. No. That's not something that you see every day. No. Unless you're in Vancouver and then it happens, like almost every day, it seems like. Not quite, but sure. There's something very weird going on in Vancouver. You say there's no mystery. I think there's still a bit of a mystery to it, but we'll start at the beginning. Okay. Okay. August 20, 2007 is kind of a cool and drizzly day at a place called Jededa Island Provincial Park up in British Columbia. Right. Near Vancouver. Yeah. Right. Lovely area. Sure. Of course. Beautiful. That's why you would want to say like, go park or camp at this park with your family, which is what a twelve year old girl was doing. I couldn't find this girl's name to save my life. Probably because she's twelve. Yeah. She wouldn't be good to say it. Anyway. She was walking along the beach with her dad and there was a bunch of like flotsam. That's the term for stuff that washes up from the sea, that the sea spits up onto the shores. And she saw a shoe and she picked it up and she untied it and turned it upside down and out fell a sock. And inside the sock was a human foot. Yes. And she was pretty surprised. Size twelve. Yeah. It was a campus brand shoe, which ended up being not, neither here nor there, but it is manufactured in India. Mostly sold in India. Right. And we'll just park that right there for now. Yeah. So the family is like, this is unusual. Sure. They borrowed a radio from somebody else and they alerted the authorities. And in very short order the mountains showed up, the coroner showed up, the Coast Guard showed up. I bet the mountains were all over that foot. So yeah. They said, you know what, we're going to take that foot if that's okay, little girl. And she threw her sobbing tears, said, sure, but just give me a little money. Okay. And they said, we're going to send it off for DNA examination. And did that return nothing? The DNA? As far as I know, yeah. There was no match. So that wasn't like a clue? The DNA? Yes. No. But it was the first thing they tried. Sure. The DNA. They also looked at it to see what was going on with the foot. If there was any kind of signs of what the deal was. Yeah. They held up to their ear and pretended like it was a telephone. And one of the other Mounties said, that's not funny. Yeah, but they were like, oh, it is kind of funny. And they said, Sorry. They just kind of filed it away. It actually didn't make much of a stir outside of the area. No, it was worth talking about. It got a little bit of ink because it was just so weird. But they put the foot away at the coroner's office and everybody went about their lives, right. I would assume so. And then six days later, another foot showed up in the area. Not the same place, but in the same general area. Another right foot. Which means it wasn't the person's other foot. No, that'd be weird. So there's two people missing feet now. Yes. This is a men's reebok, size eleven, I think. And the people who found it said that when they saw it, they immediately knew that there was a foot in there because it looked full. It looked footy is how they put it. Full of foot. Yeah. And they picked it up and smelled it and they're like, yeah, it's a foot. That's right. And the Mounties came in again and they got off their horses, and Corporal Gary Cox said, it is a little weird to find 2ft, especially within six days of one another yes. In the same area. He described it as a million to one odds. I don't think he did the science on it, but it's just something you say. Right. But he said two is pretty crazy. Yeah. And I agree with him. Yeah. So the first foot was in Jedi Island. The second one is on Gabriella Island, which is I couldn't find exactly how far away it was across the water, but it's not that far. They're close, but they're separated by some water. And now all of a sudden, there's 2ft that were found within six days. The media starts to catch drift of this one. Yeah. Right there's. Shoot. Feet washing up on the shores in Vancouver. Right. And at that very time, Robert Pickton was on trial in Vancouver for murdering as many as 49 women. You've heard of him, right? I think so, yeah. He was a notorious pig farmer who would, like, butcher women and feed them to his pigs. And then butcher his pigs and feed pigs to his guest. Yea. One of the only, probably Canadian serial killers. Right. Yeah. And one of the worst of all serial killers. He's a horrible person because he wasn't crazy. You know what I mean? He was just a horrible person. Yeah. And so he's on trial at that time, got, I think, 25 years, which is like the maximum sentence you can get in Canada. What? Come on. Canada? Yeah. 25 years for up to 49 horrible murders. Yeah. So he was on trial. There were also a lot of really high profile missing people in the area, too, that it just vanished without a trace in the four years leading up to that. Yeah. And you point out because you wrote this, right? I did, but actually, I was pointing out that Christopher Solomon pointed something out. Okay, well, the point is, and this is a little strange, but maybe not. I don't know. I was trying to make sense of it british Columbia apparently just has a higher than normal rate of missing persons than other parts of the world. Yes. Which is weird. Yeah. But I mean, like, a lot more. Yeah. More than 2400 people over a 59 year period. And Solomon compared that to Kentucky, which is about the same size and population, or same size population. They only had 515 people missing over that 59 years. That seemed really low to me. Did it? Eight people a year missing in the whole state that remained missing. Okay. Unsolved forever. Yes. Because in Kentucky, they'll just be like, he was Uncle Billy's down the road for a week. Right, exactly. Okay. So the idea is that BC has almost five times the number of unsolved missing persons cases over this 59 period, compared to Kentucky, which has about the same size population. It's a lot more. Yeah. And Solomon might have gone in and selected, like, oh, Kentucky's got the lowest of the same size population. So that'll really point it out. But it does seem that BC has a large amount of missing persons now. I bet it has something to do with the terrain and the wildlife. Probably the abundance of water. Probably that, too. It's not a good thing. A lot of heroin. Yes. Sadly. And I probably go missing in the drug vendor. In addition to the serial killer theory, one of them was that these were, like, people who had either run afoul of the local organized crime syndicates yeah. Or ran a fowl of, like, a fellow heroine addict. Unorganized crime. Exactly. Disorganized. Yeah. Remember that movie? What movie? Disorganized Crime. Was that? A movie? Who's the dude? The blonde dude from La. Law? Courtney Burnson. Yes. Wow. It's actually a good movie. Really? I haven't seen it Mark Harmon in a couple of decades. Hey, summer School is one of the all time great, man. It sounds like that kind of movie, disorganized Crime. A bunch of bumbling criminals, definitely. But I think, like Fred, Gwen was in it. Herman Munster. Oh, yeah. One of his last roles. Wow. All right, so you talked about theories. One of the other theories remember we mentioned India manufactured that first shoe. Some people said, you know what? This is, sadly, just feet of tsunami survivors from the Indian Ocean disaster, december 26, 2004. And just years later, these body parts are washing up onshore, which is sort of plausible. It is. I mean, 250,000 people died in that tsunami. A lot, if not, most of them were never found. Yeah. Also, we had people point out, remember when we said that modern disaster flicks are bad? We had a bunch of people write in and say the Impossible was a great movie. That's the one about tsunami. Yeah. And it was great. It was awesome. But I think that's different because that was about a factual event. Did you categorize it as a disaster? No. See, I don't categorize it as that because it was a real thing that happened, like disaster flicks to me. Or when you invent some crazy disaster. Okay, well, let me ask you this. If it were totally fictionalized, but the exact same movie, would you then consider it as a disaster flick? Yes. Okay, so it's like, on that scale and everything, too. I had the impression it was much more just like a human interest. Well, it became that. But they showed film the tsunami. Amazing how realistic it is. I will check it out then. Very tough movie. Okay. Very hard to watch. Have you seen Twelve Years A Slave yet? Still cannot bring myself to watch that. It's pretty rough. It's just staring at me on my DVR every night. It will be soon. I'll let you know. Okay. I'll just come into work crying. Okay. I'll be like, what did I do now? All right, so the tsunami disaster, they said, might have been one of the reasons, but I think other people said maybe that's not the best explanation. Right? Other people said well, a lot of people just go missing from other things, like plains go down in the Salish Sea, which is the body of water between, I think, Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia, which is where most of these are found. Is it Salish? I think so. But we'll hear from Canadians one way or the other. You say salish. I say salish. Who's. Right? Really? You know? All right, well, we're getting all excited here with these theories, but there were more feet to come, and we'll get back to those feet right after this. Hey, that's the sound of another sale on Shopify, the all in one commerce platform to start run and grow your business, isn't it, Chuck? That's right. Shopify gives entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business, so upstart startups and established businesses alike can sell everywhere, synchronize online and in person sales and effortlessly stay informed. Scaling your business is a journey of endless possibility. You can reach customers online and across social networks with an ever growing suite of channel integrations and apps, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and more. You can synchronize your online and in person sales so you gain insights as you grow with detailed reporting of conversion rates, profit margins, and beyond. It's more than a store. Shopify grows with you. 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But everyone can save up to 25% off their first year by going to LifeLock. comStuff. That's L-I-F-E-L-O-C-K comStuff. For 25% off your first year, LifeLock identity Theft Protection starts here. So, Chuck, when those 1st 2ft were found, within six days made the rounds. People talked about it, and then it just kind of drifted out of the news. Right. Like a foot in the ocean. Exactly. And then a third foot was found and it came roaring back because this is yet another foot, a totally different one. This is a woman's foot, actually. A new balance. Size seven, I think. Yeah. Kirkland island. Same general area. Right. The same 40 miles stretch along that coastal area. And this is within ten months. Now, 5ft. Four people. Yes. So the other New Balance sneaker was found. That was the fifth foot found. And then in between the yeah, they matched the foot to the I don't know if that's good or bad, but they found the guy's other foot. Right. The woman. That was the woman that they found. Oh, they found her 2ft. Yes. Okay. So her feet were number three and number five to turn up. Got you. And then in between, an entirely different person's foot turned up. Men's like size eleven Nike, I think. Wow. So, yeah, within a ten month period, there were 5ft belonging to four different people that turned up on this little stretch. That's right. That's significant. Then there was a six foot the next August. This was in actually in Washington. So I guess it had its papers in order and made its way to the States. And so, like you said, if you're following the story at home as it's going on, you're starting to think, like, if I go to the beach, I'm going to see a foot today. And a lot of people did do that. Yeah, a lot of people around British Columbia started looking for disembodied feet. They were turning up so frequently. And I misspoke you were right. So the 7th foot to turn up was the woman's other foot. That's hard to keep track. It really is. All these disembodied feet. So how many feet in total, sir? I think the last two were found February of this year. Yeah. And they actually belong to the same person, but they were found a week or two or so apart. Yeah. And if they last, I mean, most recent, I'm sure more feet will come. It seems that way. The first foot was found in August 2007. These most recent feet were found in February 2016. The total 17 disembodied feet found within 150 miles, stretch between Tacoma, Washington, and British Columbia. Wow. That's unusual. It seems like it. And there's a lot of theories, but no one can say definitively here's what's going on. Right. And I know we're making a lot of jokes. I realize these feet belong to people who are no longer with us. I just want to throw that out there. Sure. But we do a lot of comedy on the show, so we did a coma episode that had jokes. I mean, come on. Okay, good. Just wanted to see away there. So from the beginning, the cops and the mountains were basically like, this seems really fishy, but we don't think it's murder. We don't think there's someone out there killing people and chopping their feet off. Right. Which is what a lot of people thought. Yeah. Notably, I think, because their feet weren't cut off. And you can tell. Right. They said that they were naturally disarticulated. Right? That's right. So that first foot that that girl found on Jedi Dai Island was identified pretty quickly because the cops released a picture of the shoe to the media, and remember, it was a campus brand which is made in India, sold mostly in India. And so the guy whose foot it was, his family saw it on the news and identified him as somebody who was a longtime sufferer of depression, and he was in a depressed state when his family last saw him. So the cops came to the logical conclusion that he had killed himself. Right. So foot number one has been matched to a missing person case. Close. Right? That's right. So then the New Balance shoes turned up on separate islands. This is the woman, and she was identified as a lady who also was suffering from depression and jumped off a bridge. I think they knew this for sure. Yes. That's where the woman was last seen, was jumping off a bridge. Yeah. And this had been four years previous. So now they're starting to get a pattern here where all right, there was another man, too, the one on Valdez Island. Feet three and five, they determined was either suicide or accident. And then another couple of people who were accidentally killed. And so they see this pattern now of all right, these are people that just happened to die or died by their own hand near enough to the water where their feet were there. Yes. I'm just being vague for now. Right. Yeah. But the weird thing is now all of a sudden, in a very short period of time, relatively short period of time, because one of these guys whose feet turned up was last seen after his boat turned over in 1987. So in a very short period of time, all these people who died at very different periods of time, suddenly their feet were starting to turn up in this area around the Salish Sea. Yes. And the cops had, I guess, kind of a pretty good idea from the outset. But to understand what was going on, or at least what the cops say was going on, you have to understand what happens to a person who dies in the water. Yes. Do you think that people float? Yeah, you kind of think that because in movies, if you're trying to get rid of a body in the water, you always tie cement blocks to a cement shoes. And the old joke. Yeah. You know, joke, somebody turned up like that in New York recently. Like with cement shoes. Yeah. Wow. That's not too many movies. But the idea is that you have to wake the body down. And I suppose if you were going to get rid of a body, that I'd probably do the same thing just out of, you know, just covering my bases, just to be sure. Right. Well, the thing is, if you do use cement shoes on a person, you should never do that. No. But if you did, what you're doing is you're not ensuring that they sync. Right. Then you're ensuring that they don't come back up because that's what happens. That's right. The body that has gone unconscious or has drowned and died sinks pretty quickly. And it usually sinks so quick that if you are looking for a drowning victim, you should look on the bottom pretty close to where they were last seen on the surface. They sink that fast. Man. So a body sinks and it'll sink faster in fresh water than salt water because salt water makes humans a little more buoyant, I guess, overweight people, people with a lot of fat on their bodies sink more slowly than people who are leaner. And then depending on the water temperature as well and how deep the water is, they'll sink faster and faster as they get to the bottom. Yeah. And depending on what you're wearing yeah. Like a coat or shoes or something like that, that'll all weigh you down. Or a backpack, it's definitely going to pull you down. But the point is, once you go under, once you submerge and you're dead or you're dying, you're going to sink pretty quick. Yeah. There's more pressure too. The deeper you get in the body of water. You mentioned the temperature was lower, but there's also more pressure, and that compresses the air in your body, and that's going to make you less floaty as well. Right. So the thing the cool temperature does down there is it kind of preserves you for a little while longer than ordinarily because the bacteria that will eventually consume your body are just going to be slower to do so. They just move more slowly. But that bacteria is eventually going to overcome the sinking of the body because your body is an enclosed system, generally, roughly. I mean, you got a mouth and all that, sure. But as they're eating, they're putting out as a waste product gases like methane and stuff like that. And your body traps that stuff, and it begins to bloat. And everyone knows that once you bloat, you float. That's right. That's the forensics bumper sticker. Yeah. Eventually you're going to rise to the top like a dirigible because of those gases that are trapped in your body. Like a submarine, I guess. Okay. I guess. Do you mean they keep going into the air like a blip? You float off and then your foot will be found on the moon later? Yeah, you're going to float. And that's why whenever people discover, like, a dead body in a lake much later, it's not a pretty thing, they're bloated and puffed out and decomposed. It's not pretty. But if you are trapped, say, like in a vehicle or something like that, and all of this takes place, eventually your body is going to be prevented from floating away. Sure. And it will eventually rupture. And once the rupture happens, all that gas and the buoyancy that's created by it is all released. So you're staying there. You're staying there. Yeah. And I read this article about did you read the article about the Oklahoma guy? Yeah. It was really weird and sad. It is. So, like, there was a guy whose brother went missing in his Camaro, and I think, like, 1970, and he just never knew what happened to him. And he used this boat ramp on this place called Foss Lake, and he found out later, when the cops accidentally discovered the car, that his brother had been submerged in just 12ft of water for 40 years. All those times he was back in his boat into Foss Lake, his brother was right below him. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? And they found him accidentally, and then they found another car that had gone missing, I think the year before, just a few feet away. And the moral of the story is that Foss Lake is really murky. Wow. I mean, 12ft of water, two different cars. A Camaro. Yeah, a Camaro. And I think like a pecker or something like that. Or Buick, man. Unbelievable. All right, well, let's take another little break here, and we'll talk a little bit more about what can happen to a body underwater. And what's the deal with all these feet? Hey, that's the sound of another sale on Shopify, the all in one commerce platform to start run and grow your business, isn't it, Chuck? That's right. Shopify gives entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. So upstart startups and established businesses alike can sell everywhere, synchronize online and in person sales, and effortlessly stay informed. Scaling your business is a journey of endless possibility. You can reach customers online and across social networks with an ever growing suite of channel integrations and apps, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and more. You can synchronize your online and in person sales, so you gain insights as you grow with detailed reporting of conversion rates, profit margins, and beyond. It's more than a store. Shopify grows with you. So just go to shopify. comStuff all lower case for a free 14 day trial, and get full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. Grow your business with Shopify today. Go to Shopify.com stuff right now. 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. Hey, everybody. If you want a great quality website, you want to do it yourself with no must and no fuss. Then there's nowhere else to look in Squarespace. That's right. Squarespace has every single thing that you need to put together an awesome website. Everything from growing and engaging your audience with email campaigns, collecting donations for your cause through Apple, Pay, Stripe, Venmo, PayPal. Plus, you can also make your website optimized for mobile, which is great for your user on the go. That's right. And if you're into selling stuff, square space is everything to sell anything. They have all the tools you need to get your business off the ground. They have ecommerce templates, inventory management, really simple checkout process, and secure payment. So whatever you want to sell, you can sell it on Squarespace. Yeah, don't just take our word for it. Head to Squarespace.com SYSK and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code s YSK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's Squarespace.com SYSK. Squarespace. All right, just this year, there was a study there's some criminologists at Simon Fraser you outside of Vancouver, and there have been a bunch of studies like this over the years where we've talked in our. Body Farm episode where criminologists and forensics experts try to see what happens to bodies under various conditions, including being sunk underwater. So they took a pig carcass, in this case, not a human kid ever. And they sunk it kind of near where? In the Sailors Sea where these feet had been appearing. And these pigs carcasses, they were bones in a matter of days. It was really fast. Yeah, they were really surprising. Surprisingly fast. Because conventional wisdom is that this took weeks, months maybe even. Sure. And the other studies had shown that. Right. And these things, these pigs were like just bones in a few days. They think it's possible that the Sale Sea is an anomaly because this was almost a thousand feet of water. But it's really highly oxygenated. So there's a lot of life down there, a lot more things to eat a body. Exactly. Whereas if you took it to another body of water in 1000ft there might not be as much oxygen. So it might take longer. But for the Sailors Sea it's possible for something to be reduced to bones in a few days. Yeah. Here was my one problem with the way they did this study. Maybe I over thought it, but they trapped it under fencing which presumably means that it was just kind of in one place the whole time. Sure. I would have like, if you're going to simulate a human body I would have maybe shackled a leg and put a long leader 100 so it could move around and see what a body would do. See the site. Yeah. Because a body can move on the bottom a little because there's current Sunday minor gripe. Yeah. But yeah. Did you see the video of it? The time lapse video? Oh, no. It's really something. Now it's gross. Don't need it. So there was another study that I found that really kind of ties all this together. It was from 1992 and it was carried out by the coroner of Kings County, which is where Seattle is. Yes. And he, or she, I think it was he looked at bodies that had been pulled from the water and he took the amount of time they've been in the water submerged and then the amount of body parts that were left or exactly what body parts were left and basically went back and reverse engineered the process by which a body comes apart when it's submerged underwater. Yeah. That's valuable information. It really is. And so what they came up with was that the thinnest areas of skin typically cover, like, joints, like your wrists and ankles. Those get eaten away first, which exposes that soft tissue beneath that holds your hand to your arm or your foot to your leg. And then that gets attacked by scavengers and all the other stuff that's eating it. And so between the things eating that soft tissue holding the bones together and the wave action or the currents at the bottom of the body of water, the hands and then the feet work loose, they disarticulate so they naturally will fall off the body as the body's decomposing, submerged underwater and they are among the first parts to go. That's right. And if you're just a foot and you're not wearing a shoe then chances are that foot will get consumed and you will never see it again. Although one of these feet was a barefoot correct yes. Which seems to be a little bit of an outlier a little bit. But if you've got a shoe on that thing that's tied up nice and tight and you're disarticulated at the ankle, that foot is still inside that shoe going to make it really hard for a scavenger to get in there and it's very possible that that foot will not decompose or at least decompose very slowly right. And not only that will it be protected once it disartulates? If it's wearing a certain kind of shoe, specifically an athletic shoe that's made in the last like 1520 years, it's going to have air injected into the soul and in the case of like remember Nike Air Maxes? They had actual air pockets in between the sole and the bottom of the shoe and that actually creates a buoyant effect that will lift a shoe including one that has a foot still inside to the surface yeah so they started looking at all these cases and they said well. Almost all of these are athletic shoes so that makes sense and it's going to bob upside down because of that rubbery sole so it's going to be protected even more from birds and things right. So what we have here is a case of people that just happened to die and their feet happened to come away from their bodies and be well protected by these awesome running shoes yes. And eventually made their way to shore but a little bit weird that they would happen in this area in such a span of time, I would still say. Right, and we should say that's what you just said, that's the cops position yeah and it has been basically since the outset, since the first foot was found, basically nothing to see here and there's not a lot there to undermine it or attack it. It's a pretty sound position but there is still a mystery to it to me in that why British Columbia? It doesn't make sense and there's a couple of explanations. One is that the Sailors Sea is something like a lagoon to where water flows in from the Pacific Ocean from the south northward into the Sailor Sea and once stuff goes in there it basically recirculates. It doesn't come back out very often. Well when you see the sign that says Sailor Sea, it says feet flow in, they don't flow out. Exactly right. So once you see that sign there's the explanation, the idea is that the Sailor Sea would experience a higher incidence of flotsam of all types, including feet. Which is one explanation. Yeah, it could be. Right. Well, I'm sure that has something to do with it. Sure. The other explanation is one of my favorite things in the world, which is a version of well, there's a couple of names for it. There was a guy named Arnold Zwickey in 2006, a linguistics professor at Stanford who coined the term frequency illusion. And that's one of the cognitive biases where basically if you are looking for something, you're going to find it. All these people saw in the news feet washing up on the shore. So like you said, they all started looking for feet. And every time a foot was found, it just supported the idea that, yes, there's something really weird going on here, which only increased the awareness and the focus on this, which means that people started seeing more and more feed. That's right. So frequency illusion specifically is a mix of selective attention and confirmation bias. So in this case, selective attention unconsciously keeping an eye out for that new thing that you were just told about, which is the feet. And the confirmation bias in this case is reassurance that it's just proof, more and more proof of its omnipresence. More feet. Right. You could see that happening here for sure. Pretty interesting. It's called the bottermine HOF phenomenon too. Yeah. I didn't know where that came from. There was a dude until I looked it up. 1994. It was just a commenter on the Pioneer Press of St. Paul discussion board. And he had heard about the Botter Minehoff terrorist group a couple of times in one day for the first time yes. And just said botter minehoff phenomenon. Right. And it became a meme. Yeah. I thought it was cooler than that. I thought there was some cool explanation that wasn't just some dude online. It definitely sounds cooler than it is. It sounds way cooler than it is. But it's a common thing. And people you talk about 1111 on the clock is a big one for a lot of people say, I see 1111 all the time on the clock. Because you're looking for it. Sure. Frequency illusion. Yeah. It's not actually happening more than it ever was. You're just paying more attention to it now. And this is really unnerving suggestion because it says that feet washing up on the shore is way more common than any of us realizing that if you went over and picked up an athletic shoe on a beach somewhere, there's a good chance that there's going to be a foot inside. We just aren't aware of this as human beings outside of Vancouver. Right. So that makes Vancouver the capital of the disembodied. The disembodied feet capital of the world. I don't know if that necessarily holds up though. I don't think it's been explained. Yeah, because I bet you it's frequency illusion. I disagree. I think it's something else? I think it probably has to do with the hydrology or something about Vancouver or British Columbia. There's this database called name us. And it's like a catalog of unidentified remains. And I did a search for disarticulated foot, and out of, like, 40,000 unidentified remains in the US. 30,000 were from Vancouver. The only three were disarticulated feet, and one was found in the Washington state area. So you could technically kind of include it in that weird Vancouver club. One was in Maryland and one was in Dallas. That was it. Wow. So it does really seem like Vancouver has higher than usual incidents of this articulated feet showing up in its area. Wow. Which is weird. Are you on the case? No, I'm just a fan. Okay. So you got anything else? No, I just realized I've been rotating my feet around and just feeling sure they're there, sort of. If you want to know more about this, you can. Actually, there are three really good articles that I read, in addition to some other ones, but three stood out. One was by Winston Ross of the Daily Beast. One was on Pacific Standard. I didn't see an author. And then Christopher Solomon's outside article. Those are all pretty stand out. And since I said stand out, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Internet roundup. I don't know if people watch, but we have an internet show called Internet Roundup. Several hundred people watch. Yeah, it's like the silliest thing we do. We sit down in the studio on video and we just talk about a couple of things on the internet that we think are neat. Right? So that is the setup. Hey, guys. I was recently on a Delta flight and they show these on delta? Yeah. And this is not an ad for Delta? No. I was recently on a Delta flight from Atlanta, austin. Keeping an eye out for your hat, Chuck? I got very excited when I remembered I could watch your Internet round up show on the plane. To pass the time, we began our descent in Austin, sudden thunderstorms developed. It was quite bumpy, to say the least. If you have never been on a plane that unsuccessfully tried to land in a thunderstorm, I don't recommend it. I just had listened to your how to survive a plane crash episode from 2008 just that week before. And I remember thinking how grateful I was that I was in the back of the plane because Chuck said I had a better chance of surviving that way. It's not much of a chance, but sure. I just thought you would like to know that despite the horrible weather going on, I never lost connection with your show. Watching Internet round up and able to listen and watch, you guys really helped me keep calm until our pilot finally gave up trying to land and diverted the plane to Houston. That's even scarier. Yeah, I'm not going to try anymore. Well, let's go to Houston. Close enough. Yeah. In the end, everyone made it to Austin safely, though, so thanks for everything you guys do. And that is from Lauren Sprouse. Thanks a lot, Lauren. Have you ever watched videos of planes that come in for a landing, but it's too windy, so they have to immediately take back off? No, this never happened. Like, they touch down and take off. If you watch those waiting to get onto a plane, it's a really good way to just poke at your brain. Wow. Yeah. No, thank you. If you want to get in touch with us, you can hit us up on Twitter at SYSK podcast. You can join us on Instagram at syskpodcast two. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffychato. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housetoforce.com. And as always, join us at our home on the Web. Stuffyhudnow.com. Stuffyhadoe 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, but we mean your dog. 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Do men and women have different brains? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/do-men-and-women-have-different-brains | It's a pretty touchy subject because of the possible implications - if you find differences between the brains of men and women, does that mean there are differences in their intellect? Surprisingly, though there are demonstrable differences between male | It's a pretty touchy subject because of the possible implications - if you find differences between the brains of men and women, does that mean there are differences in their intellect? Surprisingly, though there are demonstrable differences between male | Thu, 11 Apr 2013 20:58:36 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=20, tm_min=58, tm_sec=36, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=101, tm_isdst=0) | 22815646 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. This is Charles Chuck Bryant. And this is stuff you should know. Bray. Yes. Chuck. Zombie Chuck. That was it. Tanto, Frankenstein and SNL. Yeah, I know we've talked about this before. I can never remember. Tonto Frankenstein. Oh, man. Why are you doing this to us? There's somebody screaming at their iPad. I know. All right. Kanto Frankenstein. Let's just get on with it. I'll remember as soon as I look it up. Tarzan. Tarzan. Yeah. Boom. That's it. I don't have anything. I just gave it my all. Your little man's brain with all the gray matter. Yeah. Farted out on us. This is a very good this is going to be touchy navigating, this one, because, well, the implications are really huge. Especially not necessarily the scientific implications, but the potential policy implications of misguided people who don't understand what they're hearing. Yeah, but I say this as our general. This is what I gather from this whole thing, is it sounds like men and women's brains are different. And who cares? Men might be better at some things than women. Women might be better at some things than men. Women might process this faster. Men might process this faster. Who cares? That's why we're all here together, to put these brains together to lead us forward into the future. Very nicely done. I don't get all worked up about it. Women seems to be better at some things, and men seems to be better. Like big whoop. Well, and some of them supposedly are very cliched. Sure. Like men supposedly are better at orienting objects and space in their mind, and that means you can read a map better. Supposedly. Women are generally better at language tests, which probably means that they may be better at communicating things. Okay. So I really, really feel, though, we should caveat this with this is a look at the state of a pretty nascent field still comparing the brains of men and women. Like it was only in the Dr. Sandra Whittleson started comparing more than 100 normal men's and women's brains and actually accidentally stumbled upon the fact that they are different in their organization, the makeup. And since then, it's been such a touchy subject that there's still a lot of the field who won't say anything more than that may be true, but there's really no difference or whatever. And there's people out there starting to get louder and louder, and they're saying, no, there are differences. It's not necessarily intelligence, it's not necessarily in cognitive ability. I will even go one better and say, I'm not even willing to say that women don't read maths as well as men. Sure. But there are structural and compositional differences between men's and women's brains. It's been proven. And what are the implications of that? Yeah. And I say, yes, study this, because there are so many benefits you can garner from learning more specifically about everything. Right, exactly. So that's kind of where we're at right now. We're just reporting on the state of this nascent field, and a lot of it's not been proven. But one thing that has been shown, and I really feel like we should kick it off with this if you look at longitudinal studies, huge studies that have been done over the decades, and you compare cognitive abilities, intelligence between boys and girls, the differences are almost negligible overall. Yeah. IQ scores, stuff like that, it's all about the same. Right. And there are differences, say, between math skills sure. Between boys and girls. And we don't even know whether those are culturally bound or what. But we'll get to that. Yeah. Let's talk about how the brain is different because like we said, that has been proven. Men's brains and women's brains do differ in some ways. Yeah. And like you said, this is new. For a while, they've known that they're different, but they used to think it was sort of just in the hypothalamus where sex drive and food intake are controlled. And that seems like such a kind of a cop out. Like their brains are different because men like to eat more and have sex more. Well, that's not true. Structurally, they are different. The superchismatic nucleus is different, and that helps regulate reproductive cycle, circadian rhythm. Sure. There's different patterns of androgen receptors which are responsible for sexual preferences. There's two times more like neurons and cells in certain areas in the hypothalamus of a man than a woman. So they are different. But that's what they thought for a long time. Like that was the only difference in the brain. Yeah. And they've also found out that taking into consideration weight differences and height differences, men's brains are probably a little bigger. But that doesn't equate to intelligent or cognitive abilities. It's just one of those things. Now, remember the myths of the brain episode we did? We were saying, like, humans don't have the biggest brain, a whale does, but it's all about ratio of body size. Well, we missed something. It's about the ratio of neurons to body size more than brain size. Yeah, I think someone pointed out who was it? It was some animal. That kind of disprove was just the size. I don't remember what the analysis? Yeah, one or two people wrote in with that. Okay, so this actually kind of raises a very troubling question I did at first. Well, wait a minute. If a man's brain is bigger than a woman's, and even if you take into account, like, weight and height and all that stuff, it's still larger, then does that mean that men are smarter than women or should be? No. Why? Well, because in 2001, they found that certain parts of men's brains might be larger or smaller, certain parts of women's brains are larger or smaller. And that could balance out the overall difference in the end. That's why you're not going to see any differences on, like, intelligence levels and stuff like that. So parts of the frontal lobe, which is decision making, problem solving, and the Olympic cortex, which is for regulating emotions, are larger than women, whereas in men, the parietal cortex, which is space perception, and the amygdala, which impacts sexual behavior and social behavior, were larger. Certain parts of ours are bigger. Certain parts of the ladies are bigger. Okay. There's another big difference that they found. Men have about six and a half times more gray matter, which is neurons, than women do, but women have about ten times more white matter, which is the connections between those neurons than men do. That's right. And it seems that men actually think with the gray matter and women think with the white matter. And so taking a step back from the outset, it looks like women's brains might be more complicated and how it's set up and how they think. But they may be faster than men. Right. They would work more efficiently. Yeah. So in this sense, if you're looking at this gray matter, that's where the neurons, the thinking cells are, but there's less communication among them. In men, that makes sense, whereas women may have, depending on the part of the brain, fewer neurons, but a more efficient communication system, which is weird, because then that would mean that you could make the case that they would roughly arrive at the same conclusion at about the same time, even though there were these two completely different structures. Yeah. But they also point out that some women might have more neurons as much as 12% more neurons. It depends and I was surprised that sentence was written like that. It depends on the region of the brain. Okay. I think she's a biologist. Physiologist. Sandra Whittleson McMaster in Ontario. Psychologist. Psychologist. Yes, she's the brain lady. She found that there are parts of the cortex in women pretty much across the board, where you're going to find about 12% more neurons packed in there. So in this region, they may have less gray matter overall, but their neurons are more densely packed. But what she found that was interesting was that these areas where they have more neurons were associated with signals coming into and out of the brain. Right. Which means that women would be more efficient at combining information rather than internal calculation. Yes. That makes sense to me, too. When I hear all these things out loud and think about my marriage, I think, yeah, like, Emily's way faster at processing things in a conversation than I am, and I don't know, it all kind of makes sense to me. See, I feel feel like that this is the reason why a lot of people are so whoa. Whoa. Because we're at this point where just in the 90s, Whittleson discovered 12% more neurons in this one thing, we know so little about the brain as it stands, let alone the differences between men and women, that it's. Like, I feel like we need to amass all of the info we can first and then start extrapolating. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, because Emily is way better at reading maps than me, and that goes counter to what usually what people might think. I have the worst direction on the planet. Like, we call it the opposite thing. If I say go right, it's left. Right. And I'll even try and trick myself and say I think it's right, and I'll say go left and it's right. So I'm a wonder of nature, really, and how bad my sense of direction is. I didn't know that. Dude, I've been on road trips and cutting off the highway to get gas and gotten back on and gone right back the way I came from. No way. For miles before I realized it. I feel like I know you a little more. Yeah, I'm really bad when it comes to that stuff. That means you got a lady brain. I do. And I have to hold the map. Like, I have to orient the map to where pointed in the direction to make sense of it. I know what you mean about having to orient the map in that direction, but wow, I had no idea. I'm awful. Okay, so here's another one. This one. This is the most amazing difference to me between a man's brain and a woman's brain. Okay. Back in, I think, the 90s, like 94, 95, right around the turn of that year, some Yale researchers gave, I guess, a language skill test of some sort where basically they said, here, say Germany without the mu. It's like a test of removing phonemes. Germany, Germany, Germany in stupid. I was having trouble with it just now. Oh, really? They did this, though, at the time? Brand spanking new Wonder machine. Oh, yeah, it was new at the time, yeah. And the weird thing that they found was that women and men had the same ability. They did just as good a job in removing phonemes from words, but they use different parts of their brain, whereas men used just one small region of one of the hemispheres. I'm not sure which one. The left. Women used regions in both the left and the right to do the exact same thing. And the researchers pointed this out. They're like, okay, we would get this if what we were testing was something really ancient, like something that had to do with reproduction or acquiring food or defense or fear or something like that. Something really old. Right. But reading is a skill that humans have acquired probably, dude. Within the last few thousand years. It's brand new. And men and women have evolved in just that recent time to use their brains differently to do the same thing. Why? That makes no sense whatsoever. What it suggests is that men and women have different brains. Exactly. It's remarkable. You would think they kind of worked in the same way, but they really don't. Yes, that's staggering to me. It is, because we're human beings. We're the same species. We can mate and produce new versions of our species. The fact that we have different brains just because of the differing sexes, that's just mind boggling to me. I had no idea. Just because of different sexes. Or there's the old nature versus nurture argument. Okay, so who wrote this? Was it Congor? Molly edmonds. Molly Edmonds, formerly of stuff mom never told you. Right. She points out that even if you're, like, super open minded and I really want to just raise my child, not as you're a boy, so you have to play with trucks or you're a girl, you have to play with dolls, there's still probably going to be some of that that the child absorbs. Even among the most, like, gender neutral parents among us, you rarely pick up a little girl by her left ankle and dangle her upside down. Right, exactly. But no matter how hard you try, society is going to impact and shape a child like that in some way. So maybe that plays a part in it. Okay, all right. I'll shoot a hole right into that. That doesn't account for the brain changing, being different in structure. Or does it? Well, sandra Whittleston studied Einstein's brain. We've done a podcast on Einstein's brain. Yeah, it's a good one. The fact that it's sat in a garage for a number of years, like 70 in a jar, but she actually got a piece of it like other people have to study it. And her argument is now our brains are structured at birth. Because look at Einstein's brain. It was actually structurally different. Right. And it had nothing to do with nature at all. I'm sorry, nurture at all. Right. It was just shaped differently in some ways, and that's maybe why he was so smart, and maybe that's why there aren't Einsteins all over the place. And so this is something that we get from birth, and it doesn't matter how you're raised, it's going to be different. But see, the jury's still out on that one. Widowson. That's her belief. Right. There's also another camp that says, well, no, because there's such a thing as brain plasticity. Sure. And you have neural connections that are, remember, the person with just one hemisphere. But binocular vision, your brain goes through the process of pruning, so it gets rid of neural connections. And if everybody's telling a little girl that she's not good at math because she's a girl, her brain may very ruthlessly cut out a lot of those connections. And she may, through this brain version of a self fulfilling prophecy, be the less good at math, and the brain structure would still look the same. Exactly. That's where nurture comes back in. Like you said, if little girls are taught they don't want to do math, maybe there are more boys in class. And then that perpetuates it further to where they did one study where they found that female students who were math and science and engineering majors did not want to sign up for these summer conferences in math and science because they were shown videos where it was a bunch of funny little nerdy boys. Right. I was wondering they were like, I don't want to go to that. Exactly. You'd want to be surrounded by those goons. Right. So these are math and science and engineering majors, and they didn't want to do that because, again, they're just fed that line that now it's just all boys and boys are interested in this kind of thing. And there's been other studies, too, that found, like, girls who are told that a math test generally does show gender differences score more poorly than ones who weren't told that. Yeah. Or if they were told as gender neutral, they improve. Right. And boys are not immune to this kind of thing, too, apparently. They did a study where they told white males taking a math test that their scores were going to be compared to Asian males and they did much more poorly than people like males who weren't told that. Right. So, again, it's that self fulfilling prophecy that we can, I guess, make happen. So the path that we're going down right now when we're saying, well, no, it's just nurture. It's just society. There's a danger to it. It's not necessarily wrong. Right. But there's a danger of following it too far along to where you ignore the fact that there are, for whatever reason, real differences between the male brain and the female brain. And is here where some people there's a guy named Cahill. I can't remember his first name, but he's at UC Irvine. He's one of the louder people to shout, like, no, we need to be paying attention to this differences to understand how to say better treat males and females suffering from the same thing. Yeah, like drugs, for instance. I didn't know this. Apparently most of the studies they do on drugs are done on males and male animals because they don't want a skewed result during the menstrual cycle. And so these drugs, like, they need to study both the female brain and the male brain because they could potentially tailor a drug toward a female brain to act better and be received better than they would for just the standard male brain. And conversely, too, if you take a schizophrenia, that's different. For men, it's different for women, the onset is usually earlier for men. Men usually have worse symptoms. Women usually fare better with schizophrenia, and they think that it's because women respond better to the drugs prescribed to treat schizophrenia than men. That would be because of the differences in the brain. And if we understand the male brain versus the female brain, we could better tailor schizophrenia meds to treat men better and have better outcomes. Yeah. Physical therapy is another good example. In the article, they found that our brains actually work differently. Like when we do simple things like reaching for an object. A woman's brain tackles that differently than a men's, just in the same way that I guess we do when we're reading Germany. Yeah, it is Germany. Don't stop believing. So if physically me reaching for this phone is different than when Jerry comes over and reaches for this phone, then if we're both punched in the brain, we might need different physical therapy techniques. Well, you said it punched in the brain, too. Women, especially in front of lobe injuries, are devastated by those way more than men. They think because there's more neural activity packed into the frontal lobe of women, and that's where they do a lot more of their thinking than men do. Wow. And that's evidenced by people who suffer the exact same kind of brain injury. But a woman will just be zolington. A man will be like, oh, that kind of hurt, but I'm going to get back to walking. Yeah. So I'll go back to the beginning. I stand by it. I say everyone needs to just settle down and start studying this stuff, because it could provide huge medical benefits and physical therapy benefits and things like that if we just accepted the fact that, yeah, our brains are a little different. And that's just the deal. Yeah, our brains are different, but they're also trainable true. Like, if a girl was told that she was bad at math and she decided that she wanted to take a lot of math classes, I guarantee she would excel at math. Yeah. And I could probably train my brain to be more spatially oriented as far as maps and direction goes. Do it. I don't care. Because now I have GPS in Emily. Right. Tell me I'm dumb. Let's see. You got anything else? I don't embrace differences, people. That's what I say. That's very nice, Gary. Snicker. She's behind that. If you want to learn more about embracing differences, specifically with the male and female brain, you can type that into the search bar@howstoughforks.com, and it will bring up this article. And now it's time for Listening to Mail. Right. All right. I'm going to call this stuff you should know. Jingle. Oh, yeah. We got a jingle written for us. I can't wait to start using this. Hey, pals. I play music for a living, mostly up in Canada. On a recent tour down to south by Southwest in Austin, our keyport player, Alex, introduced me to the podcast. And I'd heard that word podcast, but I honestly never knew what it was. Way to go, Alex. I then spent the next two nights listening to Stuff you should know every moment that I could really make the drives go by a lot faster and love that you guys can make any topic very interesting. I have a lot of time to kill, so I listened to nearly 30 episodes in just over a week. Jeez. So anyway, guys, one of the last episodes, I was listening to how commercial jingles work. I think Josh mentioned under his breath that he wished you guys had a jingle. So when I got home, I wrote you a jingle. Awesome. I tried to combine the familiarity of something like the Cheers theme song with the immediacy and simplicity of a commercial jingle. Hope you enjoy it. Glad to discover the show. And I'll be listening as long as you're talking. And this bit of goodness is from Rusty Mathias. M-A-T-Y-A-S. How do you pronounce that? Mathias? Matt from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. North America. Earth, USA. And so we want to play the little jingle right now. Yeah. And we may try and work this in somehow and use this in the show. I think we're absolutely going to like this. Thing is gold. All right, everyone. Yes. Here it is. Here we go. That was pretty awesome. That's great. We got our own jingle. Yeah. Let's do it again. It's even better the second time. It is. So I think that we should start using this. Hopefully, you listeners will hear it pop up. And thank you very much, Rusty. And thank you, Alex, for inadvertently getting us our own jingle. Agreed. Hey, you said something under your breath. Yeah, I did. If you want to send us a song or something or anything, whatever, if you just want to say hi, don't just say hi. It's been done. You can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can join us on Facebook.com. You should know you can send us a good old fashioned email to Stuffpodcast@discovery.com and join us on our good old fashioned website, home of Stuff you should Know, the Animated Series, our blog, tons of other great stuff. You can find that@stuffyoushouldnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com." | ||
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2009/1235160539158hsw-sysk-scared-to-death.mp3 | Can people really die of fright? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/can-people-really-die-of-fright | Can a human being be scared to the point of sudden death? Listen in as Chuck and Josh explore the physiological possibilities behind dying of fright in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Can a human being be scared to the point of sudden death? Listen in as Chuck and Josh explore the physiological possibilities behind dying of fright in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Tue, 24 Feb 2009 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=55, tm_isdst=0) | 17075046 | audio/mpeg | "Are you looking for an escape? An immersive getaway experience? Well, there's a place for all your wildest dreams. Perhaps you enjoy wrapping along the paperboy. Or you believe that blessed be the fruit. Or you dream of one day smashing a glass while stealing. Who's. Ah. Whether you're sworn to Team Kim or you just want a good old fashioned mysterious murder, there's a place that has it all. From Atlanta to only murders in the building, it's all on Hulu. So check into your obsessions. Hulu subscription is required. Terms apply. Visit hulu.com for plan details. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hello. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. That's Chuck. We're all together now. Yeah. The stuff you should know nation as one together but this is special time. It is. I like it. Chuck, have you ever been scared? Like really, truly about to lose your life scared? No, thankfully. But you know who has? Honestly? On multiple occasions, our producer Jerry has been scared to the point, like she's an elevator once that started to fall. No, I think you should describe that a little better. This is in Atlanta. That is an outdoor elevator made of glass. You see everything. And what your 500, 700 stories up? Yes and go ahead, Chuck. Well, and the elevator was dropping and it caught, so she thought she's going to die. Then she's been held up at gunpoint, which scared her to death. And she was in a storm, in a boat one time where she feared for her life. She had a rough quite a lot, and she has to deal with us every week. But at least she's been to the Bahamas before. Yeah, true. Assuming she made it. So I haven't. But Jerry, she teeters on the edge of death constantly. Yeah. So I can tell you that while Jerry she's cool as a cucumber, by the way, to everybody who hasn't met her, but I can tell you there were some things going on with her physiologically, whether she liked it or not. Right, right. Specifically, she was under the iron fist of one of our favorite things in human physiology fight or flight. It's our favorite thing. Chuck, give a brief overview of fight or flight. I know we've talked about it before, but sometimes we have late comers. Well, it's a physical reaction. Your body goes through your adrenaline surges, pupils dilate, breathing fast. That was a high coup right there. Holy cow, you're good. Adrenaline, like I said, pumping through your veins, and all of a sudden, it's literally a physical chemical reaction in your body. What happens, though, is the threat leaves and things calm down. Usually, ideally. Well, one of the ways that all these reactions start happening is through adrenaline. It acts on things like your myocardial tissue, your heart tissue, and basically says, work faster, work harder. It makes your veins constrict to maximize blood flow. And basically adrenaline is flowing throughout your body and it's just got you really jacked up, really keyed up. They're either going to run or fight. Right. As you said. The thing is there is a conception among most lay people that you could conceivably if this happened to you in a sudden enough fashion, you could conceivably be scared to death, right? Scared to death. Not scared half to death. And just as a sidebar, let me say that makes no sense whatsoever. Scared half to death. And I researched to find the background on that and I couldn't find any. But you can't be half dead. Clearly you're alive or you're dead. You're dedicated to your craft and apparently see everything in black and white. So kudos to you. Okay, well, basically what we're talking about is called sudden death, right. Can you be scared to death? Right. Sudden death is basically it doesn't necessarily have to do with just fear only. It could be panic or actually relief too. You can conceivably experience such a sense of relief that you could have organ failure. Usually sudden death, the definition of it is where basically somebody who is otherwise healthy just drops dead most of the time it has to do with heartiac arrest or some sort of infarction. Right, right. And this is not supposed to happen, is the weird thing. I mean, well, to you or I, it makes sense. Like you get scared, you die, right. Medical science doesn't generally take too much for granted. It likes to say, well, yeah, okay, this is related to this, but are the points in between. Right. And there's actually an emerging field, it's called neurocardiology. Have you heard about this? I have not. There is a guy, and his name is Dr. Martin Samuels and he is often called the death Doctor and he is the leading proponent of neurocardiology. He's kind of the father of it. And from what I gather, he doesn't do too much research because the problem is this could very easily become an unethical field. Yeah, it's kind of hard to perform a study and say, all right, we're going to scare you really badly and if you're still alive afterward, we're going to make some notes on that. Right. And if not, then thank you for your time and here's your $25. And even more to Doctor Samuel's credit, he refuses to test on animals for ethical reasons. So basically he's just having to collect anecdotal evidence whenever he can get his hand on a heart from somebody who's experienced sudden death. He likes to do that, I'm quite sure who doesn't. And one of the things that he's found, and this is actually a well known symptom of stress, and that is contraction bands along the heart screaming. They look like little red stripes. And basically what it is, the adrenaline come in in such a concentrated form or in such an amount because of this huge fear response or whatever, that it's just destroyed cells. It's just blown them out. Wow. And so you've got lesions formed along your heart tissue. Not good to have. No. And actually unsurprisingly, this is showing up in cocaine users as well. Right. So you can create contraction bands along your heart from drug abuse or from being scared. The thing is, when you come out of it, you're not like, oh, my heart hurts. You can't tell. And apparently, if this happens enough, over time, the heart becomes weak and stops functioning properly. Interesting. It is interesting. And there's actually, again, we should say neurocardiology is something of an emerging field. Right. So they're still trying to get as much proof as they can. I found another unrelated study that found that the prevalence of contraction bans and accident victims, the degree and the severity of contraction bands actually increases the longer the time between the accident and between death goes by. So your heart is just pumping and your adrenaline is flowing, but then you die. Sure. So if you just die immediately, your body doesn't have time to release that adrenaline, create contraction. So there's a clear link between adrenaline and contraction bands. And we do know that something like fear can release adrenaline, right? Yeah. Like you were saying earlier with this doctor, you can't ethically perform a test like this. No, but what you can do is you can look at statistics and things like that over time. And a couple of people have done this. The one I like. They call it the Baskerville effect. From the famous Hound of Basketball. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Yes. Who is a physician himself. What a mouthful he was. And in The Hound of Basketball, one of the main characters has a heart attack because they were scared by a ghostly dog that haunted the area. I've read that many years ago. I've always been ghostly dog. It's not that scary ghost person. Scary dog. Scary ghost dog. Not scary. Agreed. So the one I liked was China and Japan. Actually, the number four is supposed to be unlucky. Yeah, we've talked about that before. We have indeed, in our terrible Friday the 13th talk. Yet you're being harsh. And apparently, in China and Japan, the number four is unlucky because its pronunciation is similar to the word for death. First of all. Right. And so what they did was they studied some data over the course of pretty expansive data. Yes. 25 years. And they looked at the death certificates of about 200,000 Chinese and Japanese people over that period. And then they had a control group of 47 million white folks like you and I, sure. And what they found was the mortality was indeed higher for the fourth of the month compared to the white control group in China and Japan. Yeah. People with chronic heart disease, they saw a 13% increase in deaths on the fourth of any given month. And for people who are in the hospital with heart problems. There was a 47% increase compared to any the white control group on the fourth of the month. It is interesting. So obviously, as we covered in that terrible Friday the 13th podcast, we said that there's not a lot to it, but that doesn't mean there's no fear associated with it. Right? Right. So it's entirely possible that these people are already suffering from heart problems, but the fourth of the month rolls around, they're a little more jacked up. They're looking at that calendar. Yeah. They're just a little more vulnerable than other days of the month. So it would be kind of self initiated. And Chuck, I know you're hot and heavy for another study about sudden death, aren't you? Yeah, there's a good one. Remember the earthquake in 1994 in Northridge, in Southern California? Yeah. How could I forget? 6.7 on the Richter scale. Was it? Yeah. I didn't even know that. Good for you. 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. On a normal day in La, there's about five sudden deaths, which we talked about when the Northridge earthquake hit, there were 24 sudden deaths that day. Big spike. That is a huge spike. Almost five times. And a few of these, they link to physical exertion, so you can throw those out. But most of these were actually attributed to the tremendous fright caused by the earthquake. Right. And the average age was a little bit high, 68 years old. But only 42% of these people had any kind of heart disease previously in the past. So there was genuine sudden death, even though they're a little bit on the old side. Right? Yeah. Again, pretty clear link. Right. But of course, correlation is not causation. True. And so neurocardiologists like Dr. Martin are going to keep looking into it. And actually, one other thing. All of this is based on something called Voodoo Death. Have you heard about that? I have. Walter Cannon. Yeah. In 42, he wrote a paper and basically he said that there was a lot more prevalence of sudden death in places where voodoo was practiced. Right. And he went on to postulate that this is because people believed in voodoo and that kind of mysticism so much that when they were led to believe that they had just been hexed or should be dead under voodoo practices, they actually did die. Right. In some cases, they died because they wouldn't drink food or water because they thought it was poisoned by village. Right. So they died of that. But some of them also died of sudden death as well. That's actually the basis of all of this. The house of the basketball. Sure. But really, as far as medical science goes, it was Canon who first really started looking at sudden death. And it continues today, and it still will continue because we like to know why we die and we can try to stop it. And Cannon was a Harvard physiologist. So he wasn't some fly by night crying? No, he was definitely one worth listening to. There was another thing I wanted to talk about, too, while I have you here. Yes, sure. Which is, have you ever heard of someone supposedly their hair turning white overnight because of fear? Sure, I have heard. That not quite true. No. That's a bit of an urban myth, from what I could tell. Just send it to us, Chuck. We both did some research here and apparently fear and stress and that kind of emotion can cause your hair to turn white, but there's no way it could happen overnight. It would cause a change in metabolic function, I think, that could turn your hair a different color. True. Or make it lose its color. Right. Yeah. Okay. But there is a way it can turn gray seemingly overnight, but it's not from fear. That's called is diffuse alopecia areata. It's like selective hair loss. Right? Yeah. Basically, that's sudden hair loss, which can happen overnight. But the biochemistry of alopecia isn't that well understood. So if you have a mix of dark and gray hair or white hair, the uncolored hair is less likely to fall out. So theoretically, you could wake up with a lot less hair and the only hair that sticks around is white. It's a bad morning. Yeah. But that's not quite the same thing as being scared white. Right. Also, even if it could change your hair color, which we're not entirely certain it could, it would only do it from the scalp down everything that is out of your head. Like your fingernails? Not fingernails. If you have fingernails growing out of your head, you have much bigger problems than your hair being white. But anything that's coming off of your body, fingernails, your hair, those are dead cells. It's dead. So there's no change that could take place, aside from maybe a flobby going over them. Right. What do you mean? Scalp down. Now the scalp toward your skull. Okay. Under the skin. Subdermal. Got you. Yeah. Head of a cat. So this entire podcast is based on one of my favorite articles on the site right now. It's called? Can you really Scare Someone to death? It was written by our esteemed colleague Molly Edmunds. Molly, who not only has this article to be proud of, she and another colleague of ours, who we love very much, Kristen Conger, just launched their own podcast. They called stuff mom never told you. You can find that on itunes alongside ours and a bunch of other How Stuff Works podcast at our homepage on itunes. You can just type in How Stuff Works is one word in the itunes search bar at the little room. And you can also type all sorts of cool things into the search bar howstep works.com, including Can You Really Scare Someone's Death? But now, Josh, it's still not over. There's no more goodness in the form of, you people aren't going anywhere. It's listener mail time. Listener mail. So, listener mail. I've got quite a few today. These are things that we titled Stuff We Should Know, not necessarily corrections, although some are. We did the podcast on Comas, which we got a lot of good response from. Yeah, we were kind of worried about that, if I remember correctly. Yeah, we didn't want to treat it lightly. And we actually had people who had family members in Comas, and they thought we were respectful, which went a really long way, too. That was huge, actually. But in that podcast, we mentioned the film Diving Bell and Butterfly, and I had seen the movie, and I said something about the main character was able to I think I said he used to be so bobby. Yeah. That he used a computer and looked at the keys of the computer to write his memoir. Yeah. Not true at all. No. What he did was he blinked the letters to someone who transcribed this book for him. Yes. And it was really basically the main part of the film, and I can't explain why I didn't remember that. It's okay. Brain freezing all of ice cream for a while. So we need to thank Kendra Walpy of Philadelphia and Tita of Montreal, Canada. I especially would like to thank whoever sent the computer device in quotes, which apparently we called it, and then sent us the Wikipedia link, which great. Thank you. And Jesse Aidan of Vienna, Austria sent that in. Sweet. So another quickie hypoallergenic. Cats. Josh, you goofed up and said that created a new species. Not true. Not true. It's not a new species. It was a new breed. And we got quite a few people. Philip Bath, Scott Rudig, matt Weibo of Boston, j. Scott Brunig, who is from Princeton University, jamie Van Derrot of Saskatchewan, Canada, and actually put this in the form of a haiku, which is ain't speciation because they can interbreed. Still, I learned a lot. Beautiful. And we love our IQs. Nice. And I'm sorry, a quick one just came in before you recorded Keyshore Bellodi. Okay, thanks. Two more quickies. I'm sorry, one more quickie. Okay. Yea. Yeast is a fungus. From our Moonshine podcast, I think you said something about yeast plant, and all of our biology friends said, no, it's a fungus. And West Civic. Brian Ray, Sam S and John Selter told us all that it was, in fact, a fungus. Fantastic fungus. Thank you to all of you. We'll try to not screw up quite as much, but if not, what would you have to write to us about? So keep them coming, right? Yes. Keep us diligent. And if you want to learn a little more about Friday the 13th right, other Superstitions urban legends, you got a great article on that. Right? There's a lot more on the Friday the 13th article, though. Yes, there is. You just go on to our handy search bar, start randomly typing letters, or you could make a more specific search and type in Friday 13th or Urban Legend, something like that, and you can do that@houseutworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means schools out, the sun shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. 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." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-01-12-sysk-watersheds.mp3 | How Watersheds Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-watersheds-work | Unless you happen to be standing on a hilltop or swimming in the ocean right now, you are on a watershed. These unsung wonders of topography and hydrology are an important contributor to the rain cycle and yet we humans tend to abuse them. | Unless you happen to be standing on a hilltop or swimming in the ocean right now, you are on a watershed. These unsung wonders of topography and hydrology are an important contributor to the rain cycle and yet we humans tend to abuse them. | Thu, 12 Jan 2017 08:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=8, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=12, tm_isdst=0) | 27625083 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. Hey, friends. Dating is a journey with ups and downs for sure, but all the effort is worth it when you meet someone special, right? And when you decide it's time to find a meaningful relationship, eharmony is here for you. Eharmony. Is passionate about creating real love for all. Rooted in compatibility, Eharmony's process reveals truths about yourself, like, I don't know what you want in a relationship, and it helps you connect with a uniquely compatible partner who is right for you. Don't believe it? See for yourself. So start for free today, because every 14 minutes, someone finds love on Eharmony. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Jack Bryant. And there's guest producer Noel Who. Frankly, I think he's done enough times. We should just be like our other producer, Noel. Yeah. And then if we're in France, I would say our other producer, Noel. So just removing the interim tag. The guest tag. I think he's earned it, don't you? Yeah. What is with you and these snacks? All right, everyone, you should know Josh has a large cup. This is not large. It's a small tumbler at best. A tumbler full of jelly beans and animal crackers as if you are a four year old. Four year old should not be eating that stuff. Weird. I don't like jelly beans. Well, whatever. Do you put them in your mouth at the same time? Is that the idea? Because they're all mixed in there together. Yeah, I guess. Really? You're eating an animal cracker at the same time as a jelly bean? No. Okay. No, I see what you mean. I thought you meant the different flavors of jelly beans. Got you. Are those the weird jelly beans are like, hey, this is fart. This is snake oil. Yeah. They're not supposed to be, though. I think they termed it was supposed to be just lying snake oil. That's a good one. So I've been singing the Indigo Girl song in my head all day because of watersheds. Just want to throw that out there. Is that one of their songs I knew was one of their restaurants? Yeah. I didn't know it was named after a song. Yeah, up on the watershed is how it goes. Yeah, it's a good restaurant. It's Emily from the indigo girls? It was I'm not sure if it still is, but yeah, I think it still is. She named watershed after song. She named her song after the actual hydrological unit of watersheds? Yeah. I think she thought that naming a song kid fears would be weird. Oh, is that the song? No, watershed is the song, but I was just making a joke about another one of their songs. Okay. I thought, yeah. This is the most confusing indigo girls conversation I've ever had, including the famous indigo girls conversation of OT three. This is more confusing. This is the worst intro we've ever had in our lives. All right, well, let's continue then. All right, so, Chuck, watershed well, I already kind of gave it away a little bit by saying it's a hydrological unit. Yes. Okay. So watershed is basically it's even easier to say what's not a watershed. Not a watershed is a ridge line or a hilltop or a large body of water, like a lake or an ocean or a bay. Wow. Everything else is basically a watershed. Yeah. Which is to say a place where water sheds rain water, water comes down upon the earth and then eventually finds its way to a larger body of water via watersheds. That's right. I just saw that there was this cool thing. I can't remember the exact name of it, but a thing that you can do here in Georgia where you can follow the water from Atlanta all the way to sapalo island. Oh, that's neat. And it's a tour. I think you like canoe part of it, and you just sort of follow its path. It's like a little eco. Oh, I see. I thought you meant, like, online. No, you actually do it. Forget it. Yeah, it does sound pretty cool. Yeah. Neat. I saw somewhere that one drop of water this is on a kid's website, but one drop of water stays in a lake for about 100 years really? Before it moves along. Is that why you're eating the jelly beans and animal crackers? Because I was on a kid's website. Nice. All right, so we know what watersheds are and are not, if you want the strict definition from the EPA, they said it's any body of land that flows downhill into a waterway. Yeah. So they can be very big. They can be very small. I saw somewhere that made reference to something the size of a footprint could conceivably constitute a watershed. I saw that, too. Right. So basically, anything that's defined by some sort of higher elevation that moves water on a downward slope toward some sort of flowing water that goes into a larger body of water, again, that's a watershed. You put these things together, and one little watershed that feeds water to a tiny little trickling stream that leads to a larger stream that leads to a river, that's one little watershed. But it's a part of the larger watershed. For that one big river. That little stream feeding it is just one of many streams feeding it. And each of those streams has its own little watershed. So it's a weird little patchwork quilt or jigsaw puzzle that overlays any bit of land. Those are all watersheds. And when you put them all together, they all form one cohesive hole. And the boundaries are defined by elevation. Because, as this article puts it, if you live on a ridge and your neighbor lives on the other side of the ridge, you live in two different watershed and your mortal enemies. Right? Exactly. If you're a halffield and you're a McCoy, our own article had a nice little analogy with the umbrellas. Like, if you turn over, let's say, five or six umbrellas at varying heights on top of one another, and they all had holes at the bottom, any water, let's say it started raining, it would just collect at various different parts of the umbrella and it would all flow down and eventually exit that bottom and maybe go into another umbrella. Right. But that would eventually, eventually get down to that main umbrella, which would be whatever main body of water it flows into. Right. Ocean or a lake or whatever. Yeah. And then each watershed is defined by the headwater of the water it goes into, correct? Right. Well, you have three things as far as flowing water goes. Right. You got the headwater where, say, like, the river begins. Yes. And snow melt and rain all flows downhill to this thing to form the beginning of the river. And there it goes. There it's off. Yes. Headwaters release. And then with that, flowing water hits another stream of some sort. You've got a confluence. Yeah, confluence. Where they end, say, like they go into a bay or something like that. Big river empties out like the Mississippi empties into the Gulf of Mexico. Where it empties into the Gulf of Mexico. That's the mouth. That's right. And all of this water moves downhill or uphill. It moves toward the equator. The bulge in the earth attracts the water like crazy. Yeah. It can't move uphill, though, can it? To us, we would think it was uphill because we're looking down onto the southern hemisphere. For the southern hemisphere, it'd be downhill to them. It's just wacky. I will say that one time I was in a rainstorm in the desert that was so bad that there was water running uphill briefly. Wow. And it was freaky looking, I bet. Like, it's just something your brain doesn't know how to process. And you see a definite grade in the land and water going the way that it shouldn't be going. I don't know what caused it. Or maybe it was the drugs. Just kidding. It was an intense storm in the desert. Storms, actually. This leads right into this part nicely. Desert storms are amazing because of how the water runs off compared to what I was used to growing up in the Southeast. But there are a lot of different things that can happen to the water once it rains or once it snow melts. It's not going to all end up in the mighty Mississippi or that ocean. Right. And here they are. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff that can happen to it along the way. That's right. Infiltration is one of the big ones. The rain falls on the dry ground. Obviously water is going to soak in, get in that soil or infiltrate it. Some of it will remain there in that shallow layer and then that's going to move downhill through that soil still into, let's say an Aquifer or something. Okay. Yeah. That's Infiltration, right? Yeah. And sometimes it goes a long way or remains stored for a long period of time before it comes back to the surface. Sometimes it doesn't. Right. But it's just how much is infiltrating the ground. Yeah. And those underwater rivers are pretty interesting. You've got ones that are like in a car system, like a limestone system where it actually is like a river underground, like a cave. But you also have underground rivers that aren't part of car systems and that are actually rivers underneath rivers. Right. So you have a river bed. All of the sediment and soil and dirt and sand and gravel that make up a river bed is porous, but it's also saturated, which is why there's a river on top of it. Right, but because that river bed is porous, water actually flows through it as well. So that's one of the other ways that water can kind of flow invisibly to us underneath a river through the ground. Yeah. And that infiltration and how that water flows, it depends a lot on the soil characteristics, whether or not it's clay or sandy, like you were saying. And then also, as you mentioned, it's just like a sponge that soil saturation can only get so saturated and then you get that lovely river. Right. And then of course, the land cover has a big impact too. If you've got what humans have done is created a lot of they pay paradise and put up a parking lot. You don't like that song? Really? Alright. You seem shy about admitting that. I don't like to put things down. Okay, you don't want to yuck a yum. I do like that song though. That's great. So anyway, what we've done is paved a lot of things and then that creates what's called a fast lane for rainfall. And that is not the only reason why, but that's one of the big reasons why we have floods is that this water that normally would take a more lazy route and a more natural route. Yeah, water is super lazy if it hits that pavement and all. Then you get water running much faster and in ways you maybe didn't predict. Yeah. The geological service calls impermeable surfaces a fast lane for rainwater storm water, right? Yeah, and it is true. And the built environment definitely alters the way water moves through it. So not just human intervention or obstruction, but also human use, too. Like when we draw water out of an aquifer that prevents it from ultimately going to its destination or delays it, I should say, depending on what we do with that water. Yeah, like if we drink it, tinkle it out into a stream, we actually make it go there faster. Are you encouraging that? There's nothing wrong with that, man. All right, well, let's take a quick break and we'll talk a little bit more about some of the other things that can happen to water once it hits the ground. A summer is here, my friend, which means school is out, the sun is shining bright, the days are longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. Yes. Whether you're road tripping or you're relaxing by the pool, you can tune into the podcast here. It's on Amazon Music. That's so good? It's criminal. Morbid. That's right. It's part true crime and part comedy. Morbid takes you on a journey through murderous mysteries and major laughs, all in the same week. Yeah. From the paranormal to the pretty spooky and everything in between. Hosts Selena Erkhart and Ash Kelly cover it all. And with two episodes released each week, you'll be hooked on this chart topping series before you know it. You can listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. 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. Sure. All right. So we teased everyone that other things can happen to water. It can turn into wine, if you believe the Bible. It can evaporate and then turn into rain. Part of the rain cycle. Yeah. Well, that's a big one. Do we do one on evaporation or just clouds that's probably already covered that? Clouds. Fluffy clouds or something? Little fluffy clouds, like orb songs. But when rainfall does come down on the ground, a lot of it does go back up into the atmosphere through evaporation. And that depends on how hot it is. Temperature, wind, atmospheric pressure, a lot of other things. Right. Then there's also transpiration. This is my favorite. Is it? Yeah, we'll take it away. Basically, when you have plants, they're also taking in water themselves, putting it to good use, breaking it down, creating chlorophyll, not borophil chlorophyll, and just generally making things pretty unhappy. That's transpiration. Yeah. And that will slow the run off, obviously, because taking a more circuitous route well, locks it up, and then eventually it should evaporate from the water or from the plants and enter the rain cycle again. Yeah. And then, of course, other man made things like water storage. Like, if you build a dam or something, you're literally in control of the release of that water. Yeah. That's a huge threat to the health and vitality of wetlands, is dam building. Like, it helps us. We have basically a huge store of drinking water that we can create electricity from. But for the downstream ecosystems, dams are not good. Plus they can cause earthquakes, if you'll remember correctly. Yes, that's right. I remember that. You remember? Hold on. I have to say, I was thinking the other day about those shorts for the Uninitiated. We used to do 1 minute shorts that appeared on the Science Channel. They were, like, the precursor to our actual show. Yes. Do you remember those shorts? Yeah, they were fun. So I thought of one the other day that remember the one we were playing racquetball? That was, I think, the pinnacle of all of them. Just the setup. Yeah, just the whole thing. It was just perfect. I just thought it was great. It just popped in my head the other day. I was like, I totally forgot we even did those things. And then I was thinking about it. I thought it was hilarious. Yeah. The gag in that one was that I was wearing, like, a full basketball uniform and sweatband. Goggles, goggles. And you were wearing, like, an oxford and jeans, and we were playing racquetball. That was as funny as that. Yeah. I just thought it was great. Surprise. It never took off. Well, it did. It got us a TV show. Yes, that's true. It was the TV show that didn't take off. We had a couple of dozen of those shorts. Right. Those are all fun. Start posting some of those again. Well, this is my passive aggressive way of asking you to okay, so watersheds are keeping them clean is a big deal. It really matters because there's a domino effect that can happen when they're polluted. Oh, yeah. So water is great for transporting things. Right. We put barges on them, jet skis on them, sailboats. Sure. It's also really good for transporting other stuff. Like, anything that's a pollutant is really easily moved along through water, right? Yes. And the whole point of a watershed is moving water across land into larger bodies of water. Well, the stuff that's in the way of that water gets picked up and carried in along with it, too. Right? Yeah. So the pollutants that we just leave lying around, everything from dog poop to freeze ends up in the water because it's in the watershed, so it ends up in the body of water. And since we use these bodies of water for all sorts of different things. It's a big problem and it's something that I think more people need to be aware of. Because you think, I'll just leave my dog poop there on the ground. Right. You don't think about how it's going to rain and flush that dog poop in there and create a California bacteria bloom that's going to kill a bunch of fish or give them salmonella. Yeah. I've seen certain cities on their storm drains have little signs that say things like, just reminders of what goes in this thing will end up in some larger body of water and have a big impact. Yes. That's good stuff. I found the thing that said the leading cause of pollution are sediments and a lot of times bacteria like E. Coli. Right. And dog poop. Yeah. And even excess nutrients can be bad. Yeah. Because those form algae blooms. Right? Yeah. So algae blooms are where a type of algae is already present in a body of water, but then all of a sudden there's a bunch of agricultural runoff, say. So there's a huge introduction of nitrogen and phosphorus, which are fertilizers. Well, algae is a plant and algae blooms as a result, and they can block sunlight for other plants in the body of water. When they die off, the bacteria that eats them and decomposes them uses up tons of oxygen so it chokes the life out of the fish that are in the body of water. It can make things quite smelly. It's just not good for anybody. And the reason why these algae blooms happen is because of the fertilizer runoff that's being introduced into the bodies of water. All right, well, let's take another break and more depressing news right after this. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but we're pretty excited about summer. I mean, what's not to like? School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's right. And that's where True crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. Yeah. And with so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. Prepare to go deep and become your own detective in the world of serial crimes and unsolved mysteries. Get lost hearing spooky stories with a combination of detailed research and lighthearted analysis. Whether you're a lifetime fan of True Crime or you just feel like being entertained while doing the dishes at night, there's a podcast out there for you to download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalanche of demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa lined jackets? You called IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now, your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes, and you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It systems that rule up their own sleeves. IBM. Let's create. Learn more@ibm.com. It automation. All right, Charles, where's the silver lining here? Well, here's some more bad news, okay? I was hoping to change that. In the United States, 40% to 50% of our waters are impaired or threatened. And impaired means that it doesn't support one or more of its intended uses. Impaired means it's drunk. It is drunk. Lake drunk with pollution. Yeah. So one or more of its intended uses could mean you can't swim in it, you can't drink it. It's always scary. It's like, yeah, he's good fishing over there. Just don't eat them. Right. That's always like, oh, wow, yeah, that's bad. But it could be anything. It could be from there's high levels of mercury in there. There's toxins. I'm sorry. Bacteria that can kill you. Flush eating bacteria lives in bodies of water. Yeah. There's a lot of reasons and a lot of stuff. You just take that's the natural state of that body of water. That's absolutely not true. Yeah. And like, you're pointing out here that it's all interconnected. The EPA has a paper called Sustaining Healthy Freshwater Ecosystems, and they really try to drive home the point that these are not isolated bodies of water. It's all very much tightly linked to one another. And the human impact has this domino effect that you throw that cigarette out of your car and you don't think it's a big deal. That's going to end up either in a bird's nest or a body of water. Just two places, right. Can't you see a little baby bird being like, what is that? Why did you bring that home? Just nuzzling up against it, rubbing its little baby bird head. Where else around the world? This is obviously a big problem. It's not just the United States, right? And the Amazon base and the Amazon river dolphin is threatened with extinction because of the domino effect of watershed runoff pollution. Well, you said it earlier. You said human activity. Basically. Yeah. And it's not just us polluting. Like, say you pour out your antifreeze and just go in yuck. Into yourself about how great that was changed. I just dumped it down the storm drain. Yes. You're not supposed to do that. That's not good. Right? Not good. It goes beyond that. Like our activity. Like, say if you tear up some trees along a stream bed. Yeah. Well, tree roots have a really great effect of holding soil in place. And without the roots to hold the soil in place as the stream passes by and maybe floods a little bit after a big rainfall, it takes a lot of sediment with it. Well, you say, So long, river bank. Who cares that sediment can go clog the gills of fish downstream and kill them all. Because you just couldn't live with the tree in your backyard. Yeah. Or because you just had to build your river house that you visit three times a year. But still, even if you did build that, you would want to keep a buffer of trees along the riverbank. Sure. Like, there's just some steps you want to take. Right. And it's easy to overlook a lot of the activity that we do that has these negative effects on water bodies because we're doing them elsewhere. But in the watershed, that's still connected to the body of water, I don't know if we've driven that home enough yet. That the activities we do on the watershed affect the bodies of water in the end. That's right. But people are taking action. The first Watershed Protection and Flood Prevention Act came about 1954. That was a little bit more about coordinating flood efforts, or flood prevention efforts, rather. And then in 1972, they added some more conservation efforts to that. And then in I think they made it friendlier to get loans for groups carrying out measures that would help promote watershed management. Sure. Financial loans. Yeah. And there's like, a lot of ways that you can get involved. The EPA is big time into putting you in touch with people who are already trying to protect your local watershed. There's stuff you can do if you're a loaner. If you have a leaky faucet, fix it. It wastes water. It also increases the potential for pollution. That's one thing. What else can you do? You can fix that septic tank. Yeah, that, too. That can increase pollution. The things leaking poop out all over your yard. Take care of it. Yeah. Because it spreads disease. Your fecal material. What else? Add plants and trees instead of removing them. Right. That's a good one. If you have an asphalt driveway, tear it up and put down pavers. Now, what does that mean? Well, pavers have joints between the pavers so the water can trickle through them. Got you. It's a permeable surface rather than impermeable. You know what I kind of like, and this has got to be slightly better instead of the solid driveway, just the two strips where your tires go. Oh, yeah. That's Grandma's house right there. Yeah. Then having either the grass strip or pebbles or something in between. Yes. It's kind of nice. Yes. Or what about the ever popular neglected strip of rocks with the grass growing up through them? Which is what mine would end up looking like, invariably. Or have you ever seen the ones where it's like a steep driveway, but they basically put tiny steps in the center of them that you walk up? I always thought that was in jeans. Love those. Totally love those. I went by you may not know, but there's a street what's the name of the street leading up to our office where there's a row of houses where the drive? The yard. It's one of the steepest things I've ever seen. What's the direction you're coming from? Going back up towards Glen. Iris there's a cut through street off of north and it might as well be a cliff, but it's all covered in grass and every time I pass it, I think, how in the world do they cut that? Oh, yeah, it's a machete. I don't know. I'm just going to hang out and wait next summer until someone goes to cut the grass. In the meantime, you should clean up the watershed that that little grass cliff feeds. Oh, man, they're run off. Must be amazing. Yeah, it flows like a waterfall. You got anything else? I don't. Okay, well, let's end this one, huh? Sure. If you want to know more about watersheds. Well, go figure out where your watershed is and help clean it up. Yeah, there's websites where you can do that. Type in your like find your watershed. Yeah, that's one. Surf Your Watershed. Surf Your Watershed is the EPA's one where they're more than happy to put you in touch with anybody who can help you figure out how to keep your watershed. You want to help you the watershed. Great. Did you mention the watershed challenge? No. So every March 22, there's a world Water monitoring challenge where you can get like a water monitoring thing and monitor the water quality of the water in your watershed. Send in the results. There's a lot of stuff you can do anyway. Go search all of that stuff. And in the meantime, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Kitty Genevieve follow up. Hey guys. Recently listened to that episode and had a few observations. I've read much about the case before and have read Abe Rosenthal's 38 Witnesses account. It never occurred to me that I knew basically nothing about Ms. Genovese other than how she died. Like you guys were saying, you made that point and then made an effort to add some color in her life to her life. I appreciated that. Inspired me to watch The Witness, which you recommend. The documentary was heartrending. Knowing more about Ms. Genevieve, seeing the footage of her dancing in the park with her friends made me really sad. But like Josh, I struggled to see any common understanding between Ms. Genovese's brother and Winston Mosely son, though it was certainly a fascinating interaction to watch. Honestly though, the final scene with the screaming actress, remember we were talking about that? Yeah, man, I thought it was going to be corny and ended up moving me. She was not moved. Oh, really? This is Chris. Don't know if it's a lady or dude. It could go either way. But honestly though, the final scene with the screaming actress left a very bitter taste in my mouth. Left me feeling that a good documentary had been finished with a tasteless hacky stunt that. Achieved nothing. Yeah, I could see I could be taken that way. I guess so. That's from Chris Downing in Sydney, Australia. PS. I will balance my commendation of that episode. I love that. I'll balance my commendation above with the observation that Evil Knievil was not a man worthy of a double episode. But I forgave you immediately for that. Yeah, it was crazy. I remember the look on our faces when we decided to make it to you. Yeah. I just couldn't believe it. But we plowed ahead. Yeah. I'll always say Isaac Newton got one evil and Evil got two. Says a lot about us. Yes, we have worked out. We still did one on Isaac Newton. They'll get off our back. Yeah. Maybe we'll do a part two one day on that. Okay. Even score if you want to get in touch with us like Chris did. Thanks. By the way, Chris, you can tweet to us. I'm at Josh Clark on Twitter. And you can also reach us at S YSK podcast on Twitter. You can reach Chuck at Charlesw chuck Bryant on Facebook or Stuff You Should Know on Facebook. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstofworks.com. As always, join us at our home on the Web stuffyshonow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder, and Smalltown Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You know you're 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. We're of the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com." | |
How Electricity Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-electricity-works | It is literally all around you (and even inside you) - electricity makes up the basis of modern life. But what exactly is electricity and how does it work? Josh and Chuck chase away the darkness and explain electricity in their usual electrifying way. | It is literally all around you (and even inside you) - electricity makes up the basis of modern life. But what exactly is electricity and how does it work? Josh and Chuck chase away the darkness and explain electricity in their usual electrifying way. | Thu, 20 Mar 2014 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=79, tm_isdst=0) | 41830263 | 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. Jerry's over there. Chuck's wearing his Last Chance garage hat, which means that all is right with the world. Yeah. If Chuck's not wearing that hat, who knows what's going on? Yeah. I thought I lost this thing once. Yeah, I think I vaguely remember that freaking Delta and everything. I was like, oh, here it is on my head in your back pocket with Bruce Springsteen. That's right. How are you doing? Great. Chuck. Yes. I think you knew this, but I'm not sure everybody listening does. If you like, not you, Chuck, but people out there. I'm speaking to you now. Yes. If you like, hanging out with us on the podcast, you can hang out with us outside of the podcast, too. Some people are like, can you release a podcast every day? No, we can't, but we do hang out on Twitter, Facebook, that kind of thing. Every day? Yes, we do. Every day. Yeah. Our Twitter handle is S yskpodcast Facebook. Comstepychannelo. Yeah. We're trying to get up over 100,000 likes on Facebook. So close. So if you could like us and then just hide us if you don't like us, I don't even think you need to hide us. Like, I think 18% of people get any given post. It varies. Something like that, though, right? Yeah. So, I mean, I think you will seek us out, though, rather than hiding us, because it's an entertaining page. Yeah. We like to deliver the goods. Yes. And then, of course, you can hang out with us on our website, Stuffychnow.com, where we have blogs, slideshows. We post our podcasts. There videos. It's like the Josh and Chuck video network. Agreed. Okay, so there all right, now let's talk about electricity. Electricity. I've had the Talking Heads song in my head. Which one? Electricity. Okay. Where all these are little dots. I thought you can say once in a lifetime. No. What is that called? Once in a lifetime. Yeah. I've been singing the Schoolhouse Rock electricity song over and over in my head. What about the electric company theme song? I haven't been singing that. But do you remember it? Yeah, that was electric. Company over Sesame Street, even. Oh, yeah. I didn't think there had to be like I didn't know it was, like, the Stones or the Beetles. No, it's in the correct answer there's. The who, by the way. What do you mean? Like that's? The who. The who. Is that right? No. Yeah. I love the who, but I'm with you. I don't see the need to rank things like that. Well, plus the Electric Company came on after Sesame Street, I think. Yeah, it skewed slightly older. I think Sesame Street to me felt like six, seven, eight year olds. Electric companies were like, 8910. Twelve. And then even younger than Sesame Street was Pinwheel, if I remember correctly. That was after your time. Okay. Pinwheel is pretty cute. It was like little kids, and the Sesame Street was like little kids. And then Electric company was like, cool. Yeah. And Romperim was kind of pre Sesame Street, even. So was that the one with Reggie, Anne and Andy? I don't remember. I just remember it was very immature. Yeah. It's very childish. I think Reggae Anne and Andy were in that. Well, at any rate, we've angered enough people now. I know. I have an intro for this one. Great. Okay, you ready? About 13.8 billion years ago, a little something called the Big Bang happened, and the universe was created. So says you. So there's a lot of people. Yeah. We weren't around. Nobody saw it, but it's been detected, and it's strongly suspected by scientists that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and that it came from something called the Big Bang, which, by the way, I would love to do an episode on. Yeah, let's do it. Okay. And under the auspices of the Big Bang Theory not the TV show, but the actual theory yeah. At that moment, all of the energy in the entire universe was created. Right. Then. Boom, boom. Ever since that point, no more energy has been created, and none of that energy has been destroyed. But it changes states. It changes shapes. It can be locked up in different places. It can be transferred from one place to another via some natural ways, like convection, conduction, radiation. And like I said, it can be stored in stuff like it can be stored in your body. Right. Fat is potential energy that can be burned and used for energy to carry out work, which is all we're looking to do, is work. That's right. We use energy to carry out work. Whether it's digging a shovel or lighting a light bulb. That's what energy does. It produces work. Right. Yeah. Okay. We figured out along the way that we don't have to wait around for radiation or convection or conduction to do its thing to provide energy, because we'd have a lot of waiting to do. We wouldn't be in the computer age right now if it weren't for something called electricity, which is basically how humans have figured out how to harness converting energy from one type of another and then transmitting it a very long distance. Because electricity isn't a primary energy source, like the sun or solar radiation or nuclear energy or even the flow of water. Kinetic energy. No, it's created yeah. It's a secondary energy source. It's a carrier. That's right. So electricity carries energy from one point to another. And if you understand that, you understand the very basis of what we're going to talk about today. Yeah. Like, we've figured out how to generate electricity to carry energy to produce work down the line. That's right. That's my answer. Which is usually mechanical energy is what's produced right. By machine. Yeah. So think about this. If you capture mechanical energy, like water spinning a turbine, which we'll talk about in Niagara Falls, that's not going to do anything to light your light bulb 200 miles away. No, not by itself. No. Unless you connect it to you send the work, produce the energy captured in Niagara Falls down to your light bulb. And that's what we do using electricity. That's right. Yeah. It's pretty simple, actually. It seems complicated, but it's not. No. Just electrons moving around. Yeah. Let's talk about electrons, then. Let's talk about the atom. What should we talk about? The history of this stuff. Yes. Back in the olden days, in ancient times, there were dudes messing around with energy and static electricity without even knowing what they were doing. Right. They didn't understand. It doesn't mean that they weren't playing around with it. No. And getting zapped because they're messing with static electricity. That's right. Which will explain all that later, too. But there was one dude called Dallas of Melitz. He was a philosopher in Greece, and in 600 BC. He is thought to have been the first dude to mess around with electrostatic static electricity by rubbing amber with fur. And he noticed that dust and feathers and things were attracted to it. He didn't know what the heck was going on, but he knew something was up. Right. And the amber plays a pretty big role. It's actually amber, the Latin or I'm sorry, is it Greek? The Greek word for amber is electron with a K. Yeah, that was like way heavy metal. Our word electricity is derived from the Greek word for amber. From that first experiment with static electricity. Yeah. And it was actually coined by a dude named William Gilbert. He was an Englishman, a physician, and he was studying sort of the same things with static electricity that Melitz was. And he was the first person to say it's electric. And he saw these forces at work with an exclamation point and his finger in the airpleas to see it. We should probably differentiate. There's a couple of types of electricity. There's static electricity and then there's current electricity. Right. And current electricity is what we are able to generate. Artificially static electricity exists in nature just naturally. Yes, that was the first experiments carried out. Then there's other types of current electricity, like lightning. But at this time, when these people are messing with electric or static electricity or saying it's electric for the first time, the concept of electricity was that it was fluid. Well, it was fluid. He was on the right track. Something is flowing. But they thought it was literally a fluid, which in those days was called a humor. And he said it leaves what he called then an Effluvium. Right. Which is atmosphere around it. When you create this rubbing action, it removes that fluid. Right. But it wasn't fluid. They were not dummies back then, but they were just figuring it all out. No, they weren't dummies, because even Ben Franklin thought it was a fluid. It was the prevailing idea concept of electricity. And Ben Franklin and a couple of his contemporaries, including a guy named Thomas Francois Dalibard, were studying electricity big time. And it was when they really investigated lightning that our understanding of current electricity started to take shape. Yeah. The old story of Ben Franklin flying his kite may or may not have happened. There are some people that think that didn't happen. Now, if he didn't do it, other people did. There were guys who died carrying out that experiment. Yeah, it was definitely carried out. I don't know if Ben Franklin did or not. Yes. That's sort of the story that he flew the kite with the key. And some people think it either didn't go down like that or didn't go down with him at all. Right. But it's a great story either way. Yeah. And I think he at least proposed it, the experiment. Oh, yeah. And he was the first guy to say that electricity has a positive and negative charge and that it flows from positive to negative. He's a smart guy. Very smart. He's a polyman. Then there was another smart dude named Coulomb, charles Augustine de Coulomb. And he is the one that wrote Coulomb's law. And he said, charges like charges repel, opposite, charges attract. And that's kind of like the basis for it all. Yeah. And the force of these charges is proportional to their product. So if you multiply the charges, they are going to be very strong. Or cancel one another out or push one another away. Yeah. He basically said, you can now calculate this, right, because of my handy dandy little law. Yeah. With a boom. He said boom, not bang. Okay. That came earlier. Later on, a guy named JJ. Thompson in 1897 said at a science conference, hey, I found something smaller than the atom. And everyone said, Silly man, atoms are invisible. It even means invisible, you liar. And he said, no, I promise there's something smaller. It's got a negative charge, and I'm going to call it a core puzzle. No, he didn't. Yeah, it's Latin for small bodies. And then I think, I don't know who later said, let's change it to electron. Yeah, it sounds way cooler. But the discovery of the electron was basically the birth of what we know is electricity today. Yeah. The understanding of the electron is what it's all about. And would you say, like, 1897? Yes. So before that time, I guess he didn't understand the electron, but he understood electricity. A guy named Michael Faraday was working on the case. Stud. Yeah. Basically everybody's like Ben Franklin, electricity hand in hand. Really? It's Michael Faraday, who's British, who really came to lay the foundation for electrifying the world. He created the first dynamo, which is a generator, which we'll talk about first. Electric motor. Yeah. He got electricity and he explained it to other people very well. Can you even fathom how smart these people were to be that in the dark and figuring all this subatomic stuff out back then? Top, hats off to these guys. Last chance, garage, hat off and back on. I have trouble understanding it now when it's explained through Kids for Science website. We're not inventing this figuring this stuff out for the first time. Right, exactly. And it's a pretty dangerous field to try to figure out blind, too. Yeah. I mean, more than one scientist got a shock from a laden jar. Oh, yeah. And you can make those? Do you make those in science class? Yeah, you can make those. Well, we should say a laden jar is a very primitive capacitor. You use a metal rod in a jar that's sunk into, like, some water, and it can store a charge. Yeah. And I think Ben Franklin's kite experiment attached the kite or a rod or something to a laden jar to store the charge, too, if that happened. Right. But again, he did make the proposal. It's whether or not he carried it out is that question. All right, I guess now we can get to Adams finally. Atoms are very tiny, and they make up molecules, and molecules make up everything, you see? Yeah. Atoms are the building block of matter. That's right. Remember, we're always talking about nature loves homeostasis. Oh, man. Does it? You've got a balance that nature always seeks, tries to achieve it. Same with atoms. Or atoms are no exception, I should say. Within an atom, you have a nucleus which is made up of protons and neutrons. Protons are positively charged particles. Neutrons are neutral. And then orbiting that nucleus, making the cool atom symbol, are electrons, and they're negatively charged. And when you have an equal number of protons to electrons, you have a neutral atom. Yeah. There's no potential energy there. It's just in balance. And a lot of stuff is like that. A lot of stuff is in balance, some stuff is not. Well, some stuff falls out of balance easier than other stuff. Well, yeah, the electrons, sometimes they're super tightly bound to the atom, and they don't want to leave the house. They want to stick around. Sometimes they're crazy teenagers, and the slightest energy and movement makes them jump off from the atom and just say, I want to go attach myself to something else. They go on rum. Springer yeah. And it depends on the material. And those types of material that have either tightly connected or loosely connected items either end up conducting electricity very well or don't conduct electricity very well. So they act as either electrical conductors or electrical insulators. Yeah. Like if you pick up a stick off the ground, it's electrons, like staying close to home. So it's not going to conduct electricity if you pick up a metal rod. Those electrons are crazy loose, and they like to go off and do those things that teenage electrons do, and therefore it does conduct electricity. Right. Very well. Under normal circumstances, when you pick up that rod or you pick up that stick, the electrons are staying put no matter what. But we figured out along the way, thanks to the work of all of the people, from the Greeks to Faraday to Ben Franklin to your guy with the core puzzle idea yeah. JJ corpuscle, I think it was. Thompson so thanks to the work of all of these people, we figured out how to knock electrons loose. And it's ingenious and simple, but it's also very complex, and it involves the relationship between magnetism and electricity. And we'll talk about that right after this message. So, Chuck yes. We're talking about knocking electrons loose, which is ultimately the basis of producing electricity. Yeah. When you were a kid in elementary school, you probably did a little balloon trick where you make static electricity and make the balloon stick to your sweater. Right. All you're doing is you're rubbing that balloon on your sweater, and electrons are jumping from that balloon onto your sweater. And now there are two different charges going on. Because you're overcharged, the balloon is now undercharged. And because opposite charges attract, it sticks to your sweater. Right. And that's static electricity. And static, you have static and dynamic. And dynamic indicates motion. Static indicates staying still. And they use that to describe this type of electricity because the electrons don't flow. They just sit there and wait for a connection. Like when you touch something that's charged, like a doorknob after you've shuffled with your feet in socks over carpet, when you touch that doorknob, you're forming that connection, and all of a sudden, the balance is achieved once more, and the electrons flow like you're literally a conductor of electricity in that moment. Right. So with current electricity, those electrons move. They move along a conductive material, say, like copper wire or something like that. That's a hot one. Right. So let's talk about how you produce an electrical current. Right, okay. Let's talk about generators and turbines and all that awesome stuff. It sounds like you need to generate that electricity with a generator. Right. I think that's what generators are called. That's why they're called that. Yeah. It's funny just how basic some of these things are. Like, you say a computer, right, but you've heard it so many times, you take it for granted, it loses its meaning. It's like looking at a word too frequently. Yeah, I think a lot of these words are like that like a generator or a cord puzzle or what's it called when you stop down the electricity, which will get to transformer. Yeah, it transforms something. But you say them so much, you're like, what's the transformer do? Right. Anyway, I've been reading too much science for dummies, I think. All right, so generators well, I guess it all comes down to magnetism. Yes. In the case of generators. And if you want to listen to two shows, lightning and magnetism before this one, it might help you understand electricity a little bit more. All right, so just go listen to it. We'll wait to do that right now. We'll wait 2 hours. I think Faraday figured out was that because of this relationship between a magnet and electricity, you can take a magnet and you can move electrons in a conductive material. You can knock the electrons loose, basically, using a magnet. Yes. It's like what happens when you attract a paperclip to a magnet. It's just the transfer of electrons right. Jumping around. And you create a flow by flipping the polarity. And you can do this by rotating metal, right? Yeah. Say, like, a coiled copper within the two poles of a large magnet. And when you do this, you're reversing polarity all of a sudden, and you are knocking the electrons loose in those coils. And the way that you spin the coils very quickly is by hooking the coils to, say, a shaft. Yeah. We kind of did this backwards. Let's start at the beginning. You want to okay, let's go to Niagara Falls. Okay. Back in 95, George Westinghouse, who is Nicola Tesla's boss, which, by the way, if you want to listen to another really good podcast, go listen to that one. The Nikola Tesla one. Yes. Remember, it was all about the AC DC war between Tesla and Edison. Yeah. Good episode. Killed shocking animals to eat. Yeah, it's pretty awful. What a jerk. But in 1895, George Westinghouse set up a hydroelectric power plant along the Niagara Falls. And what he did was he had a means of taking the movement of water, which is kinetic energy. The water at the top of the falls has potential energy, and then once it falls over, that potential turns to kinetic energy. Well, Westinghouse set up a turbine to catch this movement of water right. Which is actual energy, and have that movement spin a turbine, a propeller or a fan. Yeah. It's the same concept as an old gristmill. Right. Except it's not creating energy. It's just moving the stones that grind the wheat or corn. Right. The gristmill is yes. In this case, it's capturing that energy by or it's transferring it, we should say, by converting the kinetic energy from the water into mechanical energy, spinning the turbine. The turbine is connected to that shaft I was talking about, where we suddenly changed course. And at the end of that shaft, which is now spinning, thanks to the turbine, thanks to the movement of the water, is some coiled copper, and that coiled copper is spinning within those two magnets. Yeah. That's the key. Right. And because of that, the electrons are being knocked loose. You have a power line leading from the coil, copper out, and all of a sudden, you have an electric current. Yeah. And if you've ever been to the Hoover Dam or something. You don't have to have a waterfall or a river to make this thing work. That's why they build dams. You stop up the water, and then at the base of the dam, you have the means to release that water, and then it becomes that flowing water. Right. And then also for thermal power plants, they use nuclear power to create a nuclear reaction to produce heat, or they burn coal to produce heat, and then they use that heat to heat water, and then they use that water to create steam. And that steam turns a turbine. And these are all just different methods, whether it's solar or steam or nuclear. I almost said it, which is weird, because I definitely don't say it that way. You're very excited. I think I said it enough as a joke, right. That it slips in. But anyway, all those are just means to turn that turbine, right. And all it is, is you're using that stored energy or that kinetic energy, like over here, to create electricity so that you can transfer it into work down the line. That's right. It's so cool. Yeah. And this article, we used a few different articles for this one, like we said, including some science for kids websites, which, by the way, I highly recommend, if you don't get something yeah. It's a great place to go visit. Are these kids websites because they break it down, like super simply. Right? Because kids are dumb. But in our article, it describes a generator as if it was a water and a pump, which made a lot of sense to me. The generator is the pump, but instead of pushing water through a pipe, it's pushing electrons down power line. And that whole, like, using water as an analogy for electricity fits very well. Yeah, but you need something to push it. It's not a self pusher. So you need that force. And that force is voltage. Right. Yeah. Electro motive force. It's the same with water. Like, you have water pressure that forces the water down the line. Right. And with electricity, you have a force that moves electricity in its voltage, like you said. Measured in volts. Yeah. And the electrical current is measured in amps. And the amps represent the total number of electrons flowing through any one point of a circuit every second. And there's a lot of them. And if you have voltage and you add that to current, which is amps, you get power, which is watts. Right. I think it's multiplied by it. Oh, really? Yeah, it is. Okay. I wasn't even thinking of it as a math formula. But it is a math formula. And the reason why it's a math formula is because they're related. Like, you can flip flop them, you can adjust them. And that's the whole basis of industrial power transmission, which we'll get to later. Yeah. And I know it sounds a little confusing, with volts, amps and watts, but they are all different. Like if you said that guy was shocked he had 120 volts coursing through his body, that's not true at all, because the volt is the force. He's got amps coursing through his body. Yeah. But you'd be a huge kick to point that out to someone said that. And a good rule of thumb is the higher the volts, the more dangerous the shock. Which is why in America, most outlets and homes are 120 volts, where if you touch it, you're going to feel it, but it's probably not going to kill you. In the United States, it's 120, but it's different in other countries. Right. Which is why European appliance can be plugged into an American appliance, because you got to get those adapters. Yes. You were talking about current, which is the number of electrons flowing through a circuit. You have the volts, which is the force of pressure that's pushing them down the line, and then you have those two multiplied by one another to create watts, which is power. There's another factor to electrical currents, and that is resistance. Oh, yeah. We didn't talk about that. We acted like it was all either an insulator or conductor. But you can be a resistor. Well, I mean, everything has a certain level of resistance. Yeah, but if you're an official resistor, that means current moves. It just doesn't move, like, as fast as it might end metal. Right. Or not at all than wood. Yeah. Or glass is another good resistor. Insulator. And so is rubber. Yes. But even something as, like, conductive as copper wire has a certain amount of resistance, and again, that water flowing analogy comes into place. Like, if you pump some water really hard, try to get a lot of water through a very small pipe, it's still not going to come out very high, very fast, because you're trying to force too much water through that little pipe. Right. So in the exact same way, a thin wire, where you're trying to push a lot, a lot of amps through and a lot of volts through, it's going to resist. And when you have resistance in an electrical circuit, you lose some of those electrons that are flowing in the form of heat, which is produced by electrons bumping up against other atoms that aren't sharing their electrons. And that's the result of friction. Yeah. And resistance is measured in ohms, right. Should we talk about circuits? Yeah. Are you there? I think so. All this is well and good. You can supply power, and we'll talk about this more in detail to homes from a power plant, but you can also have a little battery supplying that electrical energy to an iPhone, let's say. Right. And in that case, you need something called a circuit, which is basically just a closed loop that allows the electrons to travel. And in most electronics, it's like you said, like copper wire, maybe, and it travels from there's a switch that turns it on and off, which is why a circuit is called a circuit breaker. Like if you break that circuit by turning switch off or if the wire snaps or something, no more electrons are going to be flowing. Right. Because the reason they're not going to be flowing any longer is because the positive pole and the negative pole from that circuit are no longer connected. That's right. Another way to look at voltage is that it is the difference between electrons on one side and electrons on another side of a circuit. And remember we talked about nature always wanting balance. Yeah. Electrons flow from negative to positive, right? That's right. And as they flow, the reason they're flowing, the whole reason they're moving at all is because there are not as many electrons on the positive side as there are on the negative side. Yeah. So they want to leave the negative side to go achieve balance on the positive side and ultimately make whatever circuit is traveling neutral. You stick something in that circuit and as those electrons are moving from the negative side to the positive side, because, again, electricity is just the flow of electrons, you can convert that movement into productive work. Yeah. Mechanical energy. Right. And anything you attach onto a circuit to exploit that flow of electrons for work is called a load. Yeah. It could be a light bulb or whatever. Whatever mechanical energy you're trying to create is your load. Right. And there's all sorts of things you can do by attaching a load to a circuit. Like a light bulb. A light bulb basically uses that electricity flow to flow into a resistant filament, very thin wire that purposely resists that flow of electricity, generating heat and in turn heating up to produce light. That's how light bulb works. Yeah. You can also recharge batteries which go in and force electrons back into the negative position so that the battery is recharged and those electrons are ready to flow again once you connect the circuit. Yeah. There's also appliances that use resistors to produce heat, like a hairdryer or a toaster. There's all sorts of stuff you can do to connect into the circuit, but it's all the same, whether it's a battery or a toaster or a whole house. If you want to look at it that way. You're plugging a load onto an electrical circuit and exploiting the flow of electrons. Yeah. And I kind of misspoke a minute ago when I said it's creating the mechanical energy. You need a motor to actually do that. So if you have an electric drill, that's great that you have electrons flowing, but it's not going to turn anything unless you have that motor. And electric motor is basically just a cylinder stuffed with magnets around the edge. And if you've ever used an electric drill and you fire it up, when you look and see the. Vents, you can actually see sparks. It's pretty cool. It's very cool. It's like those little guns you used to get at the circus when you're yes, I love those. So it's packed with those magnets around the edge, and in the middle you've got your core, which is like an iron wire, and it's wrapped around the coppers, wrapped around the edges. So electricity flows to that core, creates magnetism, and then that pushes against the outer cylinder and makes that motor spin around. And then that's where you get your mechanical energy. Right. And an electric motor is probably the best example of how you're converting energy from one form to another and then reconverting it, because an electric motor is basically a generator in reverse. And so you use that mechanical energy, the spinning of the turbine down the line, and convert it in your electric drill back into mechanical energy to spin the drill. And in between is that flow of electrons that's causing the whole thing, or that's carrying that energy from point A to point B. Corpuscles there's one other thing. If you look at a plug that you're plugging an appliance into, because again, you're just attaching a load to that flow of electrons and diverting it through your appliance, and then it goes back on its merry way. Right? Yeah. If you look at a plug, sometimes you'll see three prongs, and the third prong, the one on the bottom, seems different from the other ones. It's round. And that is actually a grounding wire. Yeah. Very important. Very important, because as awesome as we've gotten with producing and directing electricity, we can't control the amount of electrons that flow through an outlet to down to a single electron. Right. And so there's such a thing as leakage of electrons, which is crazy. And there's also electrical build up that can happen where if you're not using all of the amps through an appliance, the residual amps can build up and they charge the appliance. And again, as a static electricity, a charge is just sitting there waiting to be neutralized, sometimes through you, which can make it very dangerous to prevent this, they connect the appliance through either that third prong in a plug or through an actual grounding wire to a copper wire that's driven into the ground. And that's where the word comes from, ground. You're actually transferring that residual electric energy to the ground, which is basically an infinite reservoir for charge dispersal to Earth. Yeah. So. Like when you look at a power line and you see that bare wire coming down from the power line and driven into the ground by a stake. That is the ground. And it goes down like six or 10ft. Or if you look at every house. You're going to see near the meter. The electrical meter. You're going to see probably a copper rod driven into the ground. And that's your house's ground. Right, exactly. Same thing with a lightning rod. It's a ground for your entire house so that the lightning doesn't go through your house, it goes through the lightning rod. And the point of all of those is that the Earth can take it. Go ahead, give it as many electrical shocks as you want. It's going to be fine. So we think and it's very good at just dispersing those charges. So that's what grounding comes from. Very important stuff. Yeah. And we mentioned transformers earlier, power plants create massive amounts of electricity, and you can't just shoot that down a power line and straight into a house because it will blow up everything in your home immediately. But they do need that kind of juice in order to transfer, like, hundreds of miles away from the power plant. If you don't live close, it's still got to get to you. So the way they do that is, through transformers, they transmit the power with a lot of voltage. So more force, less amperage, less resistance. Less resistance, which means you lose less. And then once they stop, it down along the way, and by the time it gets to your home, it's transformed down to here in the United States. 120 volts. Yeah. More elsewhere. Nice and safe. Right. And then you just plug your appliance into it, and all of a sudden, that electrical energy transmits to your toaster strudel being warmed, your Hot Pocket with painted meats. Wow. Did you hear about that? Yeah. Remember that whole horse meat thing with Ikea last couple of years? It wasn't just Ikea, but they were definitely called out, maybe most strongly for, I think, the Hot Pockets, too. They called it unsound meat, which is just a word that sounds weird in front of meat. Yeah, unsound. It's not you don't want to go near it. Unsound unclean. It's biblical. All right, so now I think, even though we've covered it in the Tesla podcast, we do need to go over AC DC a little bit. Seriously, go listen to that podcast. That's a great one. Best episode. Best Australian band of all time. They were good. They are good. Are they still around? Yeah, man. David Bowie played a pretty mean Tesla. No, I'm not doing my Tesla. My act. Okay. Yeah, Tesla is all right. Sure. And they're not around. That's why I was really confused. I was more confused about that than I was by any aspect of electricity. I'm like, yeah, man, of course they're around. They're Australian. Yeah. No, AC DC is great. And they're still around, huh? Yeah, I think you're putting an album together right now. Good for them. I'll bet it sounds exactly like all the rest. It's still rocks. Blues based rock in volor velvet. Yes. So there was a battle being waged between Tesla and Edison, and Tesla was all about the AC current, alternating current. Edison, as we know, said, no, that's far too dangerous. And I'll prove this to you by electrocuting animals and dogs and cats and even an elephant named Topsy. And he was alleged to have helped botch the first electrician by electric chair by estate. Yeah, I don't remember the details of that, but it's definitely in our episode exploded the guy. Yeah, he was a real jerk, remember? Yeah, and I think I remember talking about there should be a movie, too, about that battle. Yes. I can't believe there's not. It sounds super nerdy, but it would actually be interesting. It go over well these days. Agreed. So batteries these days use direct current power, DC power, and that means the positive and negative terminals are always positive and negative. And electricity always flows in the same direction, from negative to positive. Yeah. It does not alternate. Yeah. Just think about it this way. Negative, an electron is negative. So in any terminal, that's where all the negative charges. Bad vibes. And then positive is where the electrons want to be because they're seeking to balance it out and create neutral. So there's no pole. Good vibes. Yeah. Or at the very least, so so vibes. Yeah, true. But not negative vibes. No. And then you have alternating current or AC, which means the current reverses 60 times per second here in the US. 50 times per second in Europe. So it's just reversing back and forth, alternating that current, I guess. So who went out in the end? Tesla. On a large scale. Well, yeah, I mean, that's what power generation does. Yeah. Edison has his batteries. I guess they could throw it. Tesla, which are pretty important, too. But yeah, I think we kind of came out in the same way on that episode. They both kind of won, but Tesla was the cooler dude. Although Tesla died penniless in New York in the 1940s and Edison died of rich fat guy. He died of consumption and gout. No. Ben Franklin. I guess we can finish with if you get your power bill and you're amazed and you wonder how they calculate this stuff, it's pretty easy. Like we said, here in the US, we deliver electricity into your home at 120 volts. So you got to remember that one, too. It's important. Our article uses space heater as an example, which I think is pretty good. You plug in that space heater, let's say it's the only thing going in your house, which is not realistic, but go with me. You plug in the space heater and it comes out to ten amps. So you multiply that ten times 120 because that's your voltage. And you've got 1200 watts of heat, or 1.2 kw. Yes. Because that's how the power company is going to measure it. Right. Because they deal in big chunks. And if you leave that heater on for an hour, you just use 1.2 kilowatt hours, which is how you're billed. Yeah. And if they charge you a dime per kilowatt hour, it's going to cost you $0.12 an hour to run that space heater. Right. Pretty simple and neat. And that's why when you go to buy an appliance, you should look at that little tag that says how many kilowatt hours you're going to be burning. That's right. The lower the better. So, electricity, you got anything else? No. Don't play around with it. No, don't. Yes. Always wear rubber sold shoes. Because rubber is an insulator. It is? Why? Because it hangs on to its electrons. That's right. The atoms that make up rubber. It's just that simple. If you want to know more about electricity, you can type that word in the search barhouseofworks.com. You can also go on all sorts of kids science sites and find out more about it, too. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this rare birthday shout out. Hey, guys. My name is Pearl, and I just wanted to tell you how much a fan I am of your show. I was introduced to the podcast by my best friend, Molly. We've been best friends for twelve years, and many of our conversations begin by commenting on the podcast. For example, we could not stop laughing at your 1920s voice. Toward the end of the underground tunnels episode, we laughed over and over. That is a good voice. I think she's talking about this one. See that one? Yes. Electricity. Tesla Edison killing animals. All right, that was for you, Molly and Pearl. Whenever we're in the car together, we find a podcast of yours to listen to so we can enjoy it together. I was wondering if you could help her out. Molly's 26th birthday is April 9. I think it would be totally awesome birthday gift if you would send her a shout out during listener mail. I would be forever in your debt. Thanks for doing the podcast. I'm a middle school teacher who always listens during my prep periods, and so happy birthday, Molly. Happy 26th. It should be close. Yes. Happy birthday to April 9. That was very nice of us, Chuck, and thank you, Pearl Webb in Chicago. And your friendship means a lot to us. Your friendship with one another. Yeah. And then conversely, through us altogether in their car. Well, if you want to get some sort of shout out sometimes, Chuck Danes, too. He's very nice. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffystonew, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyoushow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstep works.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." | ||
a62205be-5462-11e8-b449-5b1d9e62327e | Narwhals: Unicorns of the Sea | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/narwhals-unicorns-of-the-sea | Narwhals are the unicorns of the sea. They're also whales with tusks. The tusks are really long tooths. Are you confused? Let us guide you! | Narwhals are the unicorns of the sea. They're also whales with tusks. The tusks are really long tooths. Are you confused? Let us guide you! | Thu, 28 Jun 2018 13:35:54 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=13, tm_min=35, tm_sec=54, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=179, tm_isdst=0) | 34396031 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everyone. We're coming to Salt Lake City, Utah and Phoenix, Arizona this fall. Yeah. October 23, we're going to be at Salt Lake City's. Grand Theater. And then the next night, October 24 will be in Phoenix. And we added a second show to our Melbourne Burn Show, right? That's right, a second, earlier show in Melbourne. So you can get all the information for all of these shows@sysklive.com. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant, and we're alone again, naturally, but we're talking about narwhals. So things aren't all that bad because they're pretty interesting. Yeah, I think I wanted to do this a long time ago, and it just sort of fell off my radar, and then it popped back up on my radar. That is a heck of a story, Chuck. And this was written. I want to shout out former colleague Katie Lambert. And, Katie, even though you do not listen, perhaps a friend of yours might. Congratulations, because Katie just got married. Oh, hey, congratulations. Katie. Pretty good. I got married to looks like a really good guy. And they're now traveling. And wish Katie all the best. Yes. Congratulations, dudes. And thank you for writing this article, which was seemingly intended for elementary school students. I was not going to say anything. It's adorably written, let's just say that. Well, if I remember correctly, she really liked narwhals. I think so. I think she lobbied to write this one, in fact. So narwhal is defined as follows. I'm kidding. Narwhals, whale with a horn. Pretty much. Actually, there are a lot of similarities here between wall versus which we did and narwhals, but they're not very closely related, if at all. Am I correct? Walruses have nothing to do with whales. And a narwhal is a type of whale much the same as, like, a beluga whale, right? I believe so, yeah. They're small. They're pretty fast. Well, comparatively small, I should say. Pretty fast. They live in extremely cold waters. But the thing about the narwhal, the thing that everybody knows about dinner wall, the thing that makes the narwhal so unique is that it has a tusk, a unicorn horn, basically, that is frequently well over half the length of its body. Yeah. I mean, some of those so they can grow up to 9ft. That's crazy. Yeah, because a male narwhal gets up to 15ft. So you got the 15ft of the small, fast whale and then another 9ft of unicorn tusks sticking out. And it's a pretty interesting appendage, frankly. Yeah, which we'll save that for the third act. Fine. You know what they say, you introduce a unicorn horn in the first act, it has to kill somebody in the third. Is that right? Well, that's the old saying about a gun in a movie, okay? If you see a gun in the first act, it will kill someone in the third. I always thought things just appeared randomly in movies. Is that not the case? Materialized. Yeah. There's no thought behind it. Right. No reason, no rhyme. So the narwhal throughout history has been very, I guess, not misunderstood, but fascinating to people because it just looks so strange. If you've seen regular seafaring creatures, which already look a lot of them look very strange. But imagine back in the Vikings days, when they see a narwhal stick that thing out, it really would get people's attention. And so it was written about in literature at some point that people thought that there was a land equivalent to every marine animal. So if there was something at sea, there was a land version. Do you remember we did, like, a sea monsters episode, and we talked about that. Yeah. So the idea here is that there may be a unicorn, a horse unicorn, because there is one in the sea. Yeah. And even if you found the narwhal in the sea, it wouldn't disprove unicorns. It would actually probably back it up at the time. Yes. So there was this widespread belief that there was such a thing as unicorn. And then the fact that the Vikings were going around trading with the Inuit up north, around Greenland and getting narwhal tusks and bringing them back, and people were buying them as unicorn horns, it was like evidence. There you go. There's such a thing as unicorns. We've never seen one. But I got the tusk right here in my chalice to counteract any poison somebody may have tried to give me. Right. That was one of the things that was used for interesting. Yeah. And let's see. I got two more. Are you ready for these? Yeah. Hold your socks on because I'm about to knock them off. I'm holding the Habsburg dynasty. Their scepter had a narwhal tusk handle. Oh, wow. Ivan the Terrible staff. I guess he had a walking stick made of narwhal tusk. Okay. And if you look on the royal coat of arms for pharmacists in England, you will see a unicorn. All of those are narwhal tusks, or references to narwhal tusks and how magical they were thought at the time, because people bought and sold and used them as unicorn horns. Wow. Yeah. The more you know right. It's half the battle. So let's talk about this funny, fascinating creature. Okay. You want to go to Canada, perhaps, to view them, maybe Greenland, maybe Svalbard. Throw some seeds in there while you're at it. And they mainly try and navigate what are called how do you pronounce that? Poly? NIA? Polynes. Polynes. I think so. I like NIAS. I actually prefer that, too, to tell you the truth. Polynas, which Katie described as the equivalent of an oasis in the Arctic, there are these open water pools where otherwise there is ice and there is a lot of good feeding. It's like a buffet table in those things. Yeah. Because we're talking like, little oasis in ice. And when we say ice, we mean ice forever and ever. Yeah, because narwhals live in some of the coldest waters imaginable on planet Earth, and they're whales, which means they have to breathe air like we humans. Right. So they have to travel from these things to these things, and they do so under ice. So they basically just navigate Polynes or Polynes, from place to place, follow their food that way. Yeah. Another name that you might have heard is corpse whale, and this came from there. The adults have this kind of modeled black or dark gray and white coloring, and some people might say it looks like they're dead. Right. Like liver mortise. Do you remember that? Where the blood just pools and collects, like, in the skin of the corpse? Yeah. So corpse whale is a nickname. Kind of. Very nice one. Well, no, actually, the word narwhal means corpse whale in Dutch and Danish. Oh, really? Yeah. Nar is like the old Norse term for corpse and wall or val is whale. Like, narwhal literally means corpse whale because up close, they look like a dead body. Oh, interesting. Yeah, and kind of gross. So they don't have a dorsal fin, but they do have a dorsal ridge. Dorsal fin. They may have had one at one point, but it bumps into that ice. Yeah. So now it's a dorsal ridge. Well, I say now, it might have always been, but I'm just speculating. No, I think you're right that natural selection might have taken care of that. Yeah, because not only does it allow them to swim under ice and follow their food, it keeps them from being attacked by orcas orcas have a full dorsal fin, so they can't get under ice or as close to ice as narwhals can, so they can escape their predators and chase their food, which is, like, two things that natural selection would definitely be all about. All right, well, let's stay and buy it, then. Yeah, I think you should. They hang out in groups a lot of times, 20 to 30, but when they migrate, there can be hundreds or even thousands of them together. And the ladies are a little bit smaller, about \u00a32200 and ten to 13ft. The dudes get up to about \u00a33500 and up to 15ft. Yeah, that's not small, but for a whale, it's not big at all now. And they are fast, man. They're fast. And I also read I read this really great article in Smithsonian. Let me see if I can find the name of it. In search of the mysterious narwhal. And they talk about these two biologists who are dedicated to tracking and trapping and tagging keeping up with narwhals to try to estimate the population, because no one has any idea how many narwhals there are. And so you don't know if they're dying off quickly or if there's a lot more than we know. Who knows? But they were talking about how hard it is to capture these whales, to tag them, and how hard it is even to hunt them, too, because they're so fast. They're fast and they're real skittish. Like, they'll take off at the drop of a hat. They're fast and furious. Too fast. Too furious. They're Tokyo drift. So this is one of the interesting creatures whose scientific name is all wrong. The scientific name is monoden. Monoceros, which means one tooth, one horn. Yes. And if you're going to come up with, like, a cleric for your DN D game, you could do worse than that. One tooth horn, one orange. I like that. Monoda and monoceros. I take your bag of plenty. Is it Jerry Lewis? No, it sounded like it's. Literally the only thing I remember from the two times I played DND take your bag of plenty, which you probably can't even do. People are going to say you can't take a bag of plenty. Oh, yeah, we'll get the mail on that. But that's actually not true. One tooth, one horn is not true at all. They have no horns and they have two teeth. That tusk, which we'll talk about later again in the third act. That is a tooth. It is. Which we can't say anything more about it, apparently, but just believe us, it's a tooth. What do you eat? What do they eat? They eat cold, cold loving fish. Sounds pretty delicious to me. So these are some of my favorite fish. Prepare for this. Cod. Yum. Salmon. Yum. Which, I mean, like, it doesn't even have to be dead yet, and I'll eat the salmon. God, dude, raw salmon is about as good as it gets. Yeah, but you got to bite into a live fish. Yes, I would. Herring, which is great. Especially pickled halibut. Wonderful. Anyway, shrimp and squid. I'm not huge on squid these days, but all the other ones I'd be very happy with. Weren't you big on squid? Because it's squid and awesome. I'm just not big on squid. I don't know the last time I had it, but I remember I think I've just had too much rubbery. Squid is what it is. Yeah, it's tough. Or it can be tough. Yeah, I hear you. So the problem is this, Chuck. Well, it's not really a problem. It's a problem for you and me if we're trying to track in our walls. But a lot of those fish, especially depending on the season, they live on the bottom of the ocean. Right. So that means that if you are in our wall, you got to get down to those fish. Yeah. And these things have actually been tracked diving a mile down. Yeah. That's a long way. A mile down. So some of the early trackers that they put on these narwhals, before they realized how deep they dove, the tracking device would break. It just smash under the pressure. Wow. But the narwhals is going down, eating some cod and coming back up and then going down and eating some cod a mile under the surface. It's crazy to me. I'm impressed by that. Yes. And Katy talked a lot about the diving patterns not being understood. It sounds to me, when reading through them is that they're not random, but there are so many different reasons to dive and depending on the time of year and where the fish are, I don't know that there is a pattern. We just don't know yet. Yeah, exactly. So you want to take a break? Yes. All right, we're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to resume speaking about narrows. Chuck. All right, Chuck. So you said there doesn't seem to be a pattern or we don't understand the pattern. With diving, there's a lot we don't understand about narwhals. But what's interesting is that it seems like it might not just be because we have so little access to them, because they live in these extraordinarily remote climbs that are really hard for humans to survive in. It's not just that, it's that they are also supposedly very smart as well. Like dolphin level smart. Yeah. They said that they do some things that only apes do, like recognize themselves in a mirror. And she said understand abstract ideas. Yes. What does that mean? So the closest thing I could see is that with understanding abstract ideas. So how we encapsulate two in the written number two, that two is an abstract concept. It doesn't actually mean to, but it does to us because we've all agreed on it. Apparently, Odonto setes, which is the tooth whale that they belong to, they've been shown to understand abstract concepts like that. They've been also found to be able to pass this stuff along from one generation to the next. Interesting. Which means that they have actual culture. Their culture survives. They have an actual culture. It's not just their genes driving them to find more fish, go have sex with that other narwhal, nothing like that. They're actually thinking and passing on, like, the stuff and the tricks that they learn to the younger generation. So they're exceedingly smart, too. Yeah. And Odonta seat, that is a toothed whale with danto, I guess, being the tooth part. Right. Like orthodontist is it a Dante? I said a Dante sette, like machete. I think it's a Dante seat, but yeah, you're probably right. Who knows? They echolocate, which is interesting, like bats do. So what they do is it's very dark down there where they swim the mile down and they still need to find these fish so they produce the sound. They don't have vocal cords like we do. They think, although they don't know. As you said, there's been so little study because they're hard to catch and track and trace, but they think they might make sounds to their nasal passages and then focus that in this fatty structure called the melon and then beam it out. And then, of course, because echo location, it travels as a sound wave bounces back after it hits, like a salmon, back to their skull, they think the lower jaw or directly into the skull, depending on the frequency. And then they go, that's a salmon. Let me go. Spirit. Yes. Will the least spirit no, they don't. They do, probably, yeah. They go after it with their mouths. Okay. And save it for me because I picture 9ft of a big sushi shish kebab. Right. But think about it. Like, if they just spear salmon on the end of this thing, they're like, oh, I hadn't thought this through. I can't really actually get to this now. Let me scrape it off on the ice and then hop up there with my mouth, and there you go. It seems like a lot of problems, you know? Yeah. Like they'd find a dead Norwegian with, like twelve fish spear. Right. It's like the saddest thing ever. So you talked about the echolocation. Did you say that fatty deposits is called the melon? Yeah, the melon. So weird. Isn't it great? But it's understandable that they would echolocate because they're diving down into some areas where there's no light whatsoever. But they think that in addition to finding food like salmon or whatever, they use echolocation for communication to just basically, simply to move through the water. And either depending on the species or species are capable of multiple frequencies. If they're trying to reach something from a long distance, they'll use a low wavelength echo. If they're trying to find something nearby, they'll use a high frequency echo. It's pretty interesting. And supposedly their brains started to grow based on the fossil record around the time they would have started to echolocate. Does that make sense? Yes, it does, because they're getting that much more information and they need to handle it and process it. Hence they need a bigger brain. Supposedly, their brain is second only to ours oh, wow. In size relative to body mass. Okay. Relative to body mass. Right. All right. That makes sense, because when I first read that, yeah, that makes total sense. So they think that they don't know how long they can live, but there are some studies that indicate that they could live to be over 100 years old. There's one study on the eyes, on Narwhal eyes, which is sort of a creepy way to figure this out, but 115 years old, and they aren't sure how many there are. But in Baffin Bay, apparently they found over 30,000 of them in Baffin Bay alone, which sounds like a lot, but when you look at the scope of animal populations, it's not. No, I mean, they honestly have no idea that's what these marine biologists are doing is trying to figure out how many there are so that they can say, well, this is how many you should hunt. This is the maximum number that should be hunted a year, because there are, and we'll talk about it later, but there is legal narwhal hunting, but it's from the work of these people who are trying to track them to make sure that the population that we're not inadvertently ruining this population, that's one of the main reasons that they're doing it, in addition to just studying them. Sure. And they found a lot of stuff out already, like they mate. Remember those polyneyas? Another way to put it is there cracks in extensive sea ice. Right, yeah. And that's where they mate. Another way to put it is their sex pools. They are there are sex pools, Polynes. And so they'll mate in there, but they'll also frequently die in there, too, because the areas that they inhabit are so cold. Chuck, like, negative 60 deg in some areas. Right. That's the wind temperature of the surface. So it is really cold. Yeah. The ice will form quickly, and if you're a narwhal and you get stuck in there, you're toast, you're dead. Or if the polynos ice over and there's not another one nearby, again, you're dead, because you have to breathe, so you're going to drown before you make it to the next polyna. So they actually live in a really dangerous, like, right on the edge of survivability in a lot of ways, and they think that they are very genetically homogeneous and they think that the reason why is that back in bread? Yes, basically, which is surprising for how smart they are, but they think they're genetically homogenous and they think the reason why is that there were multiple die offs of narwhals getting trapped in these frozen over Polynes, so much so that it had a major impact on the diversity of their population. They faced an evolutionary bottleneck at one point, and then once the ice agenda, they started to expand again, but they were a little dim as a result. That should be a new T shirt. I'm not inbred. I'm genetically homogenous. Right. Nice. Shall we take another break? Sure, let's, man. Because I think, if I'm not mistaken, we're going to come back and talk about the tusk. Right. The tusk in act three is going to kill somebody. Will it be you? All right, Josh. Everyone has been speared by tusk. It was me. I'm going to have to carry on alone for the next ten years. It's really just a flesh wound. No, you're dead. I feel better. So Katie makes a point to talk about human teeth for a second. We won't go down that rabbit hole too much, except to say that human teeth are hard on the outside to protect the soft pulp and nerves and blood on the inside. And that is very important distinction, because the narwhal is the opposite of that, which is really interesting. Was that a rabbit hole with the teeth? No, not Chuck's version. Okay, I see what you're saying, because you sort of truncated it. I think you did a great job. Thanks. But yeah, you set it up perfectly. Chuck. The narwhal has the opposite of that. Like, this sensitive part is on the outside and the hard part is on the inside, which is insane. Yeah, it's really interesting. There are 10 million tiny little holes on the surface of that tusk, and even though human teeth have these same holes, they're covered with enamel. Right. But there are different theories on why the tusk would need to be sensitive, and they sound pretty good to me. Like that it's the sensor. Yeah. Basically, it's detecting things like salinity water temperature, currents, maybe. Sure. Or it might be able to detect atmospheric pressure above or barometric pressure above the water. See where the weather is changing. There's all sorts of things that it could be or it could do, and maybe it does multiple things. However, Katie points out, rightfully, that very few females have these tusks at all. So how important could it be to their survival if most of the females don't even have them? Right, so that led Darwin, and apparently his hypothesis is still the most widely held one. That is a secondary sex characteristic, like moose antlers or something like that. Or how dear male deer have horns. Like, check out the size of my tusk, lady. That but also, it's like, hey, I'm a dude. You don't have these you're a lady kind of thing. Right. Why would the females have them at all, then? I don't know. That's the weird thing, because something like 15% of female narwhals have these tusks. Yeah. I mean, some people have said that they use them to duel with one another, but there hasn't been a lot of evidence to point to that. No. And plus, now that we know that they're actually sensitive on the outside, that just undermines that even more. Yeah. But sometimes still say they might use it as a way to establish dominance, at least. Maybe that's different than fighting. Right. And they do touch tusks, but supposedly it's gently, and it's a behavior called tusking. It's not hostile or aggressive. It's something else. And we're not quite sure what it is. But they don't think it's fighting sometimes, they've said, and there's no evidence for this, that they use the tusks for breaking through ice or spearing prey, like I said earlier. But I don't know if those hold water. No, I think it's probably most likely that it has developed into some sort of antenna, basically. But we didn't even talk about what the tusk actually is. Yeah, well, I said it's a tooth early on, but it's a little bit more than it's a super tooth. It is a super tooth. Again, it's like a nine foot long tooth that starts out in the narwhal's mouth and just grows upward and punctures its lip and just starts growing out. Corkscrews out. Yeah, it does. It corkscrews out. It's a spiral. It's one of the only spiral teeth in the animal kingdom. Yeah, and the only straight one, which is really interesting, because when you think of walrus or elephants and all that ivory has got that curved tusk, and this one is straight like a unicorn, which is what makes it look so interesting, I think, for sure. Yeah. Straight and spiraled, that's a unicorn right there. And there can be two of them, too, right? Yeah. So remember you said the Latin name of the narwhal is incorrect, because they don't just have one tooth, they actually have two teeth. It's just one of them turns into a tusk. Well, sometimes, I guess, their genes can get all messed up because, again, remember, they have that evolutionary bottleneck, and the other tooth can start growing, too. So they might have two tusks that are actually not symmetrical. They actually are just basically two versions of the same thing. Yeah, but it's pretty rare when that happens. Allegedly. Yeah. And here's the fact of the show for me, that we haven't done a fact of the show in a while, actually. No, we haven't. You drank the tusk is flexible. When I see that thing, it looks like a broadsword, but this thing can actually bend up to a foot in any direction without breaking. Isn't that crazy? Did you think they were stiff? No, I didn't really give much thought to it. Yes, I think I did assume they were stiff, but then once I heard that they were flexible, I'm like, yeah, of course, they'd have to be, right? It would hurt to just have that thing brittle and break off at the drop of a hat. Do you mean you haven't been going around in life wondering about the narwhal test and the rigidity? But think about that, man. If you bend it almost a foot back, I'll bet that would feel like bending your fingernail back to the degree you think it would be worse. Even if that thing is as sensitive as it is supposed to be. Well, and it can break, so that's just like, oh, man. Yeah, but I wonder if the thing is not essential for survival. Is a narwhal without a tusk fine after it's broken off? Or maybe they're like, thank God, right now I can eat like a normal whale. That thing's getting in the way. I felt so self conscious about it. The narwhal is under threat because, like you mentioned, inuit hunters are allowed to hunt them because it's something that they've done since time immemorial, and so they are allowed to still hunt them in certain numbers. Sometimes they do this with the old fashioned way, with harpoons, and sometimes they have rifles. And I'm not sure how often this happens, but Katie does say sometimes they will shoot in our wall only to have it sink dead to the ocean floor or escape wounded. I'm sure that with all hunting, that is a possibility. Yes. And I think they found very recently there was like a bunch of slaughtered narwhal who had just had their tusks carved out, but the rest was just left to rot. So it's just a total waste by poachers. Yes. And they've done a pretty good job of cutting down the illegal narwhal trade, ivory trade. It's considered that. But I guess in the United States you can still sell it if it was in the country prior to the ban. And I'm sure that probably extends to all ivory. I think some, like, narwhal tusk sold for like 1200 bucks. It was like a double tusk or something. It's actually down a lot because it used to be a lot more back, especially in the medieval age. Yeah. Well, if you meet someone at a party and they brag about their brooch made of narwhal ivory, punch them in the face, you get them. Tell them Chuck. The Inuits, though, too, they do actually eat that top layer of skin and blubber. They're not the poachers that we're talking about. No, that stuff is called moktak or moktak and it's extraordinarily essential for the native Inuit survival up there because they don't get a lot of sunlight, not a lot of limes growing around, and it's an excellent source of vitamin C and they actually are able to survive up there by eating this stuff. So, yeah, there's a lot of good reason for them to hunt, let alone just the cultural stuff. But yeah, the poaching is unjustifiable no matter who's doing it. Yeah. And then that's the human side of things. There's also polar bears, walrus, orcas. They will all try. If they can catch those fast dudes and ladies swimming under the water, they will definitely dine on them if given the opportunity. Right. Which again, the orca has that dorsal ridge, not a fin, so they can conceivably get away from orcas. Here's the thing. What happens when the climate changes and the sea ice starts to melt a little bit? All of a sudden those orcas have been waiting. They're like, I've been waiting a thousand years for this minute. And they go get you and you're a narwhal and you're in trouble. That's actually a big threat against narwhals right now. They were voted the mammal. Yeah, the marine mammal least likely to survive melting ice flows. Well, because they're so dependent on them. Wherever the ice is, that's where the narwhals are at any given point in the year. That's where their food is, that's where they procreate, that's where they live. And if there's not ice flows, they're in trouble. Sad. Well, it wouldn't be a Stephen no episode if we didn't end it on a bummer. That's right. If you want to know more about narwhals, you can type that word into the search bar@housetofworks.com. And since I said while it's time for listener mail, I'm going to call this interesting follow up from a long time ago. Hey, guys, I'm from a Doncaster England, which, who knows, maybe that's pronounced Daunter, as far as I know. Denny's, he's from Denny's. It's in the north of the country. He says, I work for my local council as a repair and maintenance man. Do a lot of driving around, so your show really breaks up my day. In the folklore episode, he spoke about swearing and the English, who's sticking two fingers up like we shoot the bird, and they stick the two fingers up like an inverted peace sign or backwards peace sign, and he says, I have the reason for you right here. This salute dates back to the English longbowman who fought the French during the 100 Years War, which is not 100 years, by the way. The French hated the English archers who use the longbow with such devastating effect. Any English archers who were caught by the French had their index and middle finger chopped off from their right hand. The terrible penalty for an archer. Yes, Daniel, it surely is. Yes. I love how he put that. It's the worst penalty for an archer. This led to the practice of the English archers, especially in siege situations, taunting the French enemy with their continued presence by raising two fingers and the two fingered salute. Meaning, you haven't cut off my fingers. Haha fingers. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, I love that one. I hadn't heard that one before. That's what he says. And he says, by the way, guys, have a son. I'm to have a son on the 10 September. Oh, nice. You've got it all scheduled out, I guess. So if you read it on the air, shout out to Unborn Reggie Joshua Halifax. Great middle name, by the way, actually. Great name all around. And that's from Daniel Blue Halifax. Nice. Thanks a lot, Daniel. That was a great letter. It was not from Halifax. No, but his last name is Halifax, so he probably could get a free house there, right? Yeah, that's how it works. That's a good dumb joke. Thank you. If you want to get in touch with us, like Daniel did, you can tweet to us. I'm at Josh Clark. There's also S-Y-S-K podcast. Chucks at moviecrushpod on Twitter too. I'm on Instagram at Joshua Clarke as well. There's Facebook plenty. Chuck at moviecrushpod on Facebook, right? Yes. Snapchat us, do whatever. I'm not done. There's facebook. Comwshanelle. There's Facebook.com Charleswchuckbryant. It's a Facebook bonanza. You can also send us an email to stuffpodcast@housetofworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshiono.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. A summer school's out. The sun is shining, the daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Erkart and hairstylist Ash. Kelly Vista heart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
What's the deal with totem poles? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-the-deal-with-totem-poles | If you've ever wondered where the expression "low man on the totem pole" comes from, this episode of Stuff You Should Know is a must-listen. Tune in as Josh and Chuck take a look at the origins, symbolism and history of totem poles. | If you've ever wondered where the expression "low man on the totem pole" comes from, this episode of Stuff You Should Know is a must-listen. Tune in as Josh and Chuck take a look at the origins, symbolism and history of totem poles. | Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:43:44 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=15, tm_min=43, tm_sec=44, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=321, tm_isdst=0) | 19986209 | 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 brought to you by The Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is Charles W. Chuckers Bryant. Thank you. And Jerry, of course. Hi, Jerry. She's waving in omnipresent. Jerry and Omniscient scarily. Josh, before we get going, can I just mention a little TV show coming up? I thought we were already going. No, we're not quite going. Oh. There's a TV show that our parent company Discovery, specifically the Science Channel, has about a great fall tradition in Delaware where they chunk pumpkins pumpkin chunkin pumpkin chunkin. And they actually hurl these things through the air with a catapult. And it's fun. And they've done a TV show on it and it's on. They did two TV shows, buddy. Two? Yeah. Say the names. Well, at 08:00 on the Science Channel, it's Eastern time, there's going to be the road to punk and chunkin. And where does that road lead? To punk and chunkin itself? Yes. At nine. And that is Thanksgiving night on the Science Channel and Science Channel HD. Yes. And we just wanted to say watch it. Yeah. Because we like chunkin pumpkin pumpkin chunkin. And now we're going to talk about whatever you're going to cleverly set it up as are you ready? Yes. Hey, Chuck. Hey, Josh. Have you ever heard the phrase the low man on the totem pole? I have. And you know what? Go ahead. So it's usually somebody who's the grunt. They're at the bottom. It's us. Okay, there you go. Low man on the totem pole. Not true. If you're suggesting that you and I are at the bottom of the heap true. I had no idea. I know what you mean. It's actually on totem poles. The lower carvings were actually of the most high esteem. Right. I have no idea what you do now. And I do, too, because we read an article called how totem Poles Work, by the way, I think we should start using the correct version of that just to confuse people. Like get on the elevator and like, how's work? I'm the low man on the totem pole. They're like, sorry, are you talking about in the VP? Right. Yeah, things are great. Right. Or when one of the higher ups walks by, go, there goes the low man on the totem pole. Exactly. Give me some skiing. What happened? Did they get fired? Yeah. Okay, well, Chuck and I are going to start confusing people after this, but let's talk about totem poles first. Okay, let's do. I learned a lot of stuff in this one that I didn't know everything I read in here, I learned because I knew nothing about totem poles. Really? Have you ever seen them? Well, I've seen them, but I didn't know anything aside from it's a poll. All right, well, let's talk about let's share this information that we've learned. Let's impart it. So one of the things I learned, besides low man on the totem pole being actually important, is that the Native Americans actually had socioeconomic strata. Yeah, strata. I didn't know that either. Strata one of the two. Yes, I did. And I know what you're talking about here, because totem poles were typically commissioned by people of esteem and people who had money. Right. People who wanted to show off, basically. And what they would do would be to commission a totem carver yes. Who was a person of very high authority, low man on the totem pole, I might say. And the head carver would basically be treated with tons of esteem and respect and was housed at the home of the person who had commissioned the total. Yeah. And basically retreated like royalty because I guess this guy could be like, once you've commissioned this, I'm going to do it. And if you mistreat me or I am not amused at any point in time, I'm going to carve you naked on this and you have to put it up. Yeah. I got this law of the Pacific Northwest. I got this from the totem pole. Carvers were like many temperamental artists. It's kind of funny how they had that same attitude. It's cross cultural. If you don't make me happy, I'm going to ruin your commission work and shame you with a shame pole. Right, Chuck? Just for sure. The other thing I learned is that I'm just going to introduce every point with that for this whole pocket. Another thing I learned is that total post haven't been around that long. No, I did not know that either. And I will say that at the end of every time you mention that, that I didn't realize it. They have just started in the 1700s, late 1700, and when the Europeans came over is when they really started booming. They think the Haida tribe, H-A-I-D-A tribe of southeastern Alaska, were the first to start carving totem poles. And I guess it was kind of slow going at first, but really picked up once settlers colonists started hitting the Pacific Northwest and more and more numbers because they brought with them tools. But they were a little frightened by them. They were. Which is funny, because from what I understand, european settlers were among the most superstitious, easily frightened and most suspicious people ever to populate. Seriously? Yeah. So they saw totem poles. And I think Captain James Cook had a famous quote. Right? Yeah. He said that they were truly monstrous figures. Yes. And he was wrong. And then you also have the superstition or myth that totem poles were used to ward off or worship evil spirits, depending on how you felt toward your native neighbors. Not true. Now, what is totem pole, Chuck? Well, totem pole and totem, by the way, is an Ojibwa word. Is it really? Josh actually winked at me, by the way. Just said, for reals? A totem pole, Josh, many times, is used to commemorate an event. Like, I looked some of these up. What? It might commemorate a funeral, sometimes childbirth, marriage, and even monarchy. No. Yes. No. Yes, I read that. That is true. And they could range in size initially, and I didn't know this either. They could be as small as, like, a walking cane. Yeah, way smaller than I thought. I thought they were all, like, extremely large. No, they definitely vary in size. I've seen some that are, like, knee high to a grasshopper, as you like to say. And then there's others that are 170ft tall. Right. Which we'll get into the world records here shortly, too. And no jackass can come along and carve some wood up and say, I just made me a totem pole. There are some very specific, I guess, details that have to be followed for a totem pole to truly be considered a totem pole. Yeah. To be authentic, Josh, it needs to be the work of a trained Pacific Coast carver. Pacific. Northwest Pacific. North Pacific. And no San Diego. Carvers up there. Forget them. It must be raised according to the specific American Indian traditions and ceremonies. There's a ceremony that goes along with it right. Which we'll get to, and it must be blessed by natives of the Northwest Pacific Coast. Plus, also, it doesn't hurt your case if you want to prove that you have an authentic totem pole, that it'd be made from red or yellow cedar. Well, sure, you can't use power tools or chainsaws. Well, they do now, but if you do, you just wasted your time if you were trying to make an authentic totem pole. Right. And there are certain colors they're traditionally followed red, black, yellow, blue, green, white, which I find to be an unappealing color combination. Those four or five. Yeah. It said they did not need to be painted. And I've never seen a natural totem pole, but I think that would be my preference. Yes. And you can't preserve it in any way. Yeah, I didn't know that either. Which means that totem poles aren't going to be around all that long. An authentic totem pole has a lifespan of about 100 years. Right. Especially in the Pacific Northwest, where it's wet, rainy, muggy, not good on carved wood. Yeah, that's not bad, though. 100 years is pretty good. Did I also say it has to be from one single piece? Oh, no, you didn't say that. It's important, too. Yeah, of course. Okay, so, Chuck, basically, we've established that totem poles, there's authentic and there's inauthentic ones. You can't just be some jackass with a chainsaw. They are the bar or BOP mitzvah of the Native American culture with the ceremony. Sure. And that they are commissioned usually by a wealthy Native American, by a head carver. Right. So you've got the head carver, he's got a couple of junior carvers, and they get to work. Right. And here we reach why the low man on the totem pole is actually the most prominent figure I know. Why? Because the head carver carves the lower part to the totem pole. Yeah. The first 10ft. And I would say and it's just a guess, but I would say probably because they don't want to stand on whatever you need to stand on that's part of it. That's also the most visible and scrutinizable. Yeah, good point. Okay. So the carver finishes and probably some of the stuff that he's put on there, basically he'll say, tell me about your family history. Yeah. What kind of birds are you fond of? Do you have any ancestor who has ever shaped, shifted into an animal? Right. And the car was going to take all this into account. The person who commissioned it will probably have some ideas, and then they combine them and you have things like eagles, thunderbirds, bears, owls, wolves, ravens, frogs, and each one kind of has a different meaning in Native American culture. Sure. Should we go over those briefly? Sure. Well, the ego obviously flies higher than any other bird. It's high and it can spot trouble, so that's a good thing. Sure. And the thunderbird is a mythological creature, and it can create lightning and thunder by beating its wings and blinking, which is why it's mythological. Yeah. Bear obviously teaches natives certain things like how to hunt salmon and how to forge for berries. So that's probably good luck to have on your pole. Owls represent souls of the deceased. So that might be a mortuary pole. Oh, actually, no. That is when the ashes are actually in the pole. Correct. Right. That's a type of pole. There's an entryway totem pole. Right. Which is kind of like a coat of arms. And that's what a lot of the early settlers of the Pacific Northwest took these as a coat of arms, family coat of arms. So you've got entryway totem poles, mortuary poles, which actually do have a hollow cavity to put the ashes of a dead person in. Yeah. It's like an earn, basically. Yeah. A very cool earn, a very tall earn. And then there's ridicule or shame poles, like you mentioned. Right. I want to bring back the shame pole. Okay. So, Chuck, talk about the most famous when, the Lincoln pole in Sacrament, Alaska. Yeah. This is when and I didn't know this year. Here's another thing I learned. Native Americans had slaves. The Lincoln poll was actually to shame the US. Government because of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. And many members of the is that Lingot? Is that how it's pronounced, the Lingot tribe? Lingit. I think the team might be silent. Okay. But their slaves were freed. I didn't know that Native Americans had slaves. I know. That's what I just said. Neither did I. And so they got all mad and said, you know what? We're going to do a Lincoln poll, and it's going to shame President Lincoln for the Emancipation Proclamation. Actually, that's not true. I guess I did know that they would capture other people in battle and force them into slavery. I didn't know that. Okay, so, Chuck, we've got the type of poll established. We know what's on the pole, and it has to be raised now. Well, this is when the fun starts. The rowdy fun. Yeah. We're talking about the potlatch. And a pot latch is basically a big whopping party that you raise the pole, obviously, you put it near the ground and you have the ropes, and you pull it up and sink it into the ground. Right. And then it sounds like, from what I research on pot latches, it's just a big friggin party. So now we've reached the Native American equivalent of a Botnetzvah and an Amish barn raising put together. Oh, did they do the same thing? Well, the Amish raised barn is a big communal event. Have you ever seen Witness? Yeah, but they have a big party. Yeah. Well, an Amish party. Everyone eats sandwiches and drinks lemonade. Sure. And the reason we can get away with that is because no Amish person will ever hear this podcast. That's right. And if you write in and say you're offended because you're Amish, then you're a liar. Liar. All right. So, Chuck, they have a great party, and apparently it does get rowdy, as I alluded to before, because the Canadian government actually banned potlatches I know. At some point in time. And that had a really deleteous effect on the number of totem poles that were carved and raised in North America in the 20th century. Because a totem pole without a potlatch is like a doughnut without a hole. Very much so. It's like a jelly donut. Yeah. And that's not the only reason that totem pole carving declined in the 20th century. And actually, it came very close to the point of extinction. The Native American children were not being educated in traditional means any longer in the traditional ways. Yeah, sure. So they were losing that knowledge of how to carve a decent thunderbird. There weren't a lot of head carvers that were being trained any longer. Atari. Atari is generally pointed to as one of the biggest reasons the total poll raising declined. And there was also a ton of theft by museums and private people. I didn't hear about that. But just go steal totem poles for their own collections. How do you hide a totem pole? I don't think you're really trying to. You just say, you've been exploited by my people a really long time. I'll just take this and get away with it. It was so rampant, in fact, that in 1990, president George H. W. Bush herbert Walker. Yeah, herbert, right. Bush signed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and it basically said, if you've ever stolen a totem pole, take it back. And people did. And as a result of this kind of renewed enthusiasm for totem poles, we lost our puritanical fear of them. People started carving them again. You know what else is in that, Bill? What? wiretappings. They try to sneak auto pulls back and talk openly on your phone. Right. Okay. So there's a resurgence in totem pole creation, right? Yes, indeed. In Native and non native. Right. So let's say, Chuck, I'm like, I want an authentic totem pole to talk about my daughter's monarchy. Well, then, like anything else, Josh, you would get on the Internet and search totem pole carving, and you would find some people that do that for a living. Right. Some Native and some non Native. Yeah. Depending on so if I wanted an authentic one, how much am I going to shell out, Josh? You would have to pay about 25 grand to 100 grand for authentic. Outrageous. Yeah, I won't pay more than $10,000 for that totem pole. You saw Charlotteson monarchy and no monarchy. I think, like $750 is the low end of a non authentic three foot pole. Right. And about 15 grand for 20 footer. Right. Non authentic. Non authentic. Right. Who knows? No one knows. Yeah. Josh, you want to talk about the records? Yes. This is stat heavy, Chuck, and stat heavy. Everything that comes out of Chuck's mouth right now is a statistic. Right. Chuck Richard in South Korea. Good luck here, buddy. Albert Bay, british Columbia has 173 foot tall totem It's got to be the world's tallest totem pole, right? No, think again, sir, because there was one that the Guinness Book certified at 185ft. It's got to be the world's tallest total, victoria, British Columbia. But you know what? It was torn down because of controversy. The town evidently got really upset about all the grief about the Guinness Book record and was it authentic and was it the really the tallest one? So an angry mob, from what I gather, led by motorbikeda, tear down this totem pole and cut it up into pieces and burn it. The record holder. There goes the grief. I mean, how much grief could it have cost? I don't know. Yeah, I've been to Victoria. It's not exactly like a rough and tumble town. It's pretty peaceful. So I imagine there must have been a tremendous amount of grief. I guess so. Or they hadn't put their chainsaws to use lately. And we're looking betty was hungry. Right. But the thickest pole, Josh, is not disputed. That is in British Columbia as well, and that was carved by Richard Hunt in 1988, and it has a diameter of 6ft. That is one thick pole. Yeah. And I'd like to say Richard Hunt. If you listen to this podcast, I would like to see a picture of your totem pole. Yeah, seriously. So email it. I can find a picture of it. We'll give the email address at the end right now. Is that the end? I think so. You got any more on totem poles? I got nothing else. I like the ones with the wings. I'll just say that like a thunderbird with the wings coming off the side. It makes sense to have them at the top, but that's the least important. Well, if you want to know more about totem poles, and I kid you not, chuck and I learned a lot of surprising facts that we're just kind of in between the lines of this article. It happens a lot on how stuff works.com. You can type totem polls into the handy search bar of our Venerated site, and I guess it's time for listener mail, right? Yes, Josh. I'm just going to call this. I like to read these funny emails from time to time, okay? This guy is really funny. He's a good writer, he's clever. So he gets on the air. This says, hey, guys, I've been traveling backwards in time, and I'm writing you from February 2009 where Haiku Theater ends abruptly with refrigerator insanes like the Germans compass head and it's a Ponzi scheme haven't even been uttered yet by some strange quirk. When I load your podcast into my ipod, they play back in reverse chronological order, giving me side effects, like hearing listener mail for episodes that haven't even mentioned or haven't happened yet. Weird. However, unless I start tattooing myself like the guy memo, I'll probably just keep things the same as it makes listening even more fun. And we've heard this before. If people listen out of order and they like that better. I'm no stranger to self imposed odd circumstance. For instance, I purposely use my mouth left handed. Even though I'm right handed. I sometimes reason things out while I'm dreaming. I often balance on one leg while brushing my teeth. I like this guy. I learned to read things upside down. And he has also run into some groovy things, like when I was in the army, I knew a guy who saw things upside down and backwards, and he learned to cope by riding things upside down and forwards. Or I guess, right side up. Oh, no. Upside down, right side up. I once dated a girl whose mother would eat the same thing for every meal for a period of time. Two weeks of hard boiled eggs for every meal, black licorice for three days straight, etc. Or and I once worked with a guy who owned a car that wouldn't make left hand turn. My favorite dude. And basically he's leading up to a request. All of this makes me wonder if you should do a podcast on something like How Living Strangely Works, an explanation of odd things that people choose to do, which may or may not actually provide tangible benefit to their lives, we'll get forward to pitch it. Maybe. So. That is from Michael MC. You're not going to say my last name on the air anyway. Kraken from Colorado. Nice. Thank you, Michael. Yeah, very funny. Yeah. If you have a funny email you'd like to send, chuck and I, they're our favorite. You can send it to a wait. Or if your name is Richard Hunt and you've created the world's thickest totem pole, you can send it to stuffpodcast@housetofworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Want more housestuffworks? Check out our blog on the Housetofworks.com homepage, brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun's shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgueref and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | ||
2a5dcf58-3b0f-11eb-a672-97dfb3ec48b5 | Ants! Part 1! | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/ants-part-1 | Ants are pretty much amazing. So we're gonna spend two episodes talking all about them. Please enjoy! | Ants are pretty much amazing. So we're gonna spend two episodes talking all about them. Please enjoy! | Tue, 04 Jan 2022 14:10:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=14, tm_min=10, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=4, tm_isdst=0) | 42293772 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, chuck here real quick with some bad news and sad news. Sketchfest this year in San Francisco, which is where we were going to have our first live show in two years here in a couple of weeks has been postponed. Believe there are looking to postpone to buy a whole year and kind of rebook the whole festival, ideally, but with what's going on around the country with omakaron, they didn't feel like they could press forward. And as bummed as we are, we think it's the right move as well. So if you have tickets, just stay tuned for an announcement. I think you will either probably be able to well, I'm not exactly sure what's going to happen with them. Maybe a refund, maybe if you hold onto them, they're good for next year because we're probably going to book in the same theater. But list it up for announcements soon. And again, all apologies. We're super sad about it. We are really looking forward to getting back out there again. But until further notice, five shows are still on hold. All right, now here we go with the show. 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 Brian over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know, one that I'm super excited about and didn't realize I would be this excited about Chuck because this is a Chuck pick and pass. Off to you, sir. I'm surprised that had you just never really thought about ants much? Yeah, I mean, I've looked at them before, but I've never really researched them. I guess I've seen documentaries and then of course, the animated cartoon Ants years ago kind of got me into it. And I feel like every time I've watched a nature documentary about ants, I'm just like, continually amazed. Yeah, I mean, they are, like, amazing. And I knew they were amazing. I just had no idea how amazing they were. So much so that we could conceivably do a spin off podcast on just ants, if you ask me. I'm willing to do that. I'm just putting it out there right now. Hey, you have fun and knock yourself out. No, it has to be both. I'll be the first one to subscribe. It has to be both of us. I'm afraid. We do need to thank the original inspiration for this, though. Joey from Tucson. Oh, nice. You remember that? Yeah. Was that a listener mail that came in? No, this was during our co ed. Oh, yes. Our friends at Coed auctioned off a zoom with Josh and I, and some people were kind enough to donate some money and we had a zoom and we hung out with everyone and shot the s. And Joey and his mom were on there from Tucson, and Joey said, why don't you do one on Ants? And I said, all right, Joey, we'll do one on ants. Yeah, this is going to be a good one because Joey is going to get his money's worth on this. But we're doing joey not just one part on ants, we're doing a two parter on ants. That's how cool they are. It's a dubble, because ants, like you said, we could do a four parter. Yeah. So just to kind of start, like, people, I think, can very easily take ants for granted. They're very small. They kind of typically mind their own business unless you step in one of their nests. And they happen to be imported red fire ants, which you do not want to mess with. So they're just kind of easy to overlook. But when you start to kind of dig into things like the number of ants on Earth or the kind of things they're responsible for on Earth, you come to realize, like, ants actually pretty much dominate the terrestrial ecosystems they're apparently found everywhere except for Antarctica. Despite the name. Yeah. They're very hearty little creatures. They're 130,000,000 years old from the Cretaceous period, so they actually survived the Cretaceous Tertiary Extinction event. And, you know, they've been around forever. They will be around forever. Some parts of the world, they make up about half. And these are places where there are lots and lots of insects and they make up, in some places, half of the insects. Wow. So, like, if you just took all the insects in one ecosystem and spread them all out, half of them would be ants, half of them would be ants. Don't step on them. We said it before. Don't kick over those ant hills, kids. Don't torture them with lighters and hairspray cans. You need to leave those ant hills alone. Right. One other surprising thing about their evolutionary history that I was not hip to until recently is that ants are closely related to wasps. In fact, they think that they are evolved from wasps, and one of their closest relatives is the muddaugher wasp. Yeah. I mean, if you look at a wasp, it's it looks like an intimidating flying ant. And ants have stingers. A lot of them have venom. So it's not like you just couldn't possibly accept that fact. That's right. And that is a bit of a misnomer because I still say bitten by an ant, I got an ant bite, but that's not what's going on. You're actually getting stung. The stinger on an ant is a modified ovipositor. And the little worker ants we're going to talk all about this later, but worker ants are sterile females. They can't produce eggs, so they're ovipositors are stingers, and the male ants don't have stingers. And as you'll see, like, if you're at all familiar with our B episode or wasp episode, like, a lot of this stuff is going to seem really familiar again, because their answer kind of pretty closely related to those things. They're in the same order. Hyman up, terra, as we'll see but they do all sorts of amazing things and we're going to get into all of this. But ants are they turn the soil, they move materials and energy up and down underground. They turn over more soil than the Earthworm. They're extremely important little animals running around on Earth. So the next time you see an ant, especially after you hear these two episodes, hopefully you'll salute them or at least step over them or do something to show a little bit of respect. How many answer are there? Dave Ruse helped us out with this one. The number he came up with, I've seen pretty much almost everywhere, which is something on the order of ten to the 15th power adult ants on Earth right now. So about a quadrillion, which is not just a number, four year old says no, it's 1000 trillion, to be precise. That sounds more like a number that a four year old says. Right. If you think about it, how many humans do we have on Earth right now? Something like seven, 8 billion, I believe. Sure. This is 1000 trillion ants. And there's a lot of debate, also, Chuck, about which one weighs more. Calculating the biomass, it's all over the place. One of the figures I've seen bandied about is that ants, if you weighed everything, every living thing on Earth, ants would make up somewhere between 15% to 25% of that weight, which is a lot. But a lot of people say, well, that just completely dwarfs the biomass of humans, and that's not necessarily true. So it's kind of up in the air. Yeah. Let's put it this way. If all of the ants got together and they decided they wanted to go to war with humanity, it would be a pretty intimidating fight. I'm not sure who would win, but humans would probably lay waste to themselves to lay waste to the ants, you know what I mean? Well, yeah. And also some ants, especially those red fire ants, they eat flesh. Like ants are not all just herbivores. They're generally omnivores, which means that they eat flesh as well, which means they'll eat human flesh. If you'll stand still long enough and let them devour you. Yeah. What's that? Fire ant. They can strip a frog in 12 hours. To the bone. To the bone, yeah. It's pretty amazing. So the thing we have going for us, our legs are much longer than an ant's leg, so we can outrun them very quickly and just get away from an ant. And then by the time we're out of it, it's purview, it forgot we ever existed, probably. Right. Unless there's another colony of 3 million ants waiting for you yeah. On the other side, depending on what part of Europe you're in there. Very well, maybe too, as we'll see. Right. So this is going to follow the order of kind of our usual animal insect, the episodes, except I think this one's going to have even more just sort of random, amazing facts inserted along the way. Right. Yeah. I don't think we'll be able to help that. All right, so I guess let's talk. Let's go ahead and start off with some of these amazing ant things. If you study ants, you're a mermaid. Nice. And it feels like we said that recently, but I think I might be thinking of something else, too. You're thinking of Eugene Merman. That's what I'm thinking of. Oh, man. I love that guy. Yeah, he's a very lovable guy. What a good dude. I'm so glad of his Bobs Burger success. Oh, yeah. Good to happen to a nicer guy, but he's not an ant specialist. Maybe let's just start off with these ant rafts. Yeah. Well, that's one of the amazing things that people have figured out about ants, is if you drop especially red imported fire ants, they're just called fire ants in their native South America. But here in North America, they really are honestly called red imported fire ants. And if you drop them into water as, like, a ball, they'll spread out, and they will flatten themselves into a raft that is actually a pretty great, well made raft. And they do this just kind of without even thinking about it. Yeah. So these things can be large. They can be about as big as a dinner plate. We're talking hundreds of thousands of ants. And what they've learned there was this researcher in particular at Georgia Tech that you dug up I mean, not literally dug up. Yeah. He was dead when I met him. I re animated him yeah. And said Mr. David who? What do you have to say? I think he's from Georgia Tech. And he focused on these rafts because it's such an amazing thing. And what they learned, or one of the things he learned was that when these ants are building out this raft, they're, like, basically walking over the other ants until they get to the edge, and then they're like, oh, well, I guess they communicate to each other, and we'll get to how they communicate later, but they communicate to each other only when they get to that edge. Hey, you got to get down here with us and make this thing larger. Yeah. And they basically weave themselves into an interlocking pattern to where they lay down perpendicular to the ant that is, the part of the edge of the raft, then and then they become the part of the raft sticking out like a lattice. Right. Yeah, exactly. And they connect themselves to their fellow ants with multiple places with their interlocking arms. They also push away at the same time, which allows a lot of air in there. And these rafts can float because there's something like 75% air. But the weave is also so tight that the raft is waterproof so that even the ants on the bottom of the raft chuck. Will survive when they eventually hit dry land again. Yeah, I think they kind of likened it to gorectx, basically. Yeah. So that is one thing that one species of ants can do, and they do this here's the thing. Like, you might say, well, that's really neat. That's amazing. Ants don't have brains that can hold plans in their heads like you and I do. Like, they can't read a schematic. There's no schematics there for them. And in fact, ants don't even technically have a leader. They just all do these jobs and perform this work somehow. We humans have still yet to figure it out. But as each little ant performs its own job, and you've got hundreds of thousands and millions of ants all doing this job, following the same system, these really amazing, larger, more complex patterns emerge. And that's how you get things like ant colonies and ant rafts. And they do it again without a leader and without a brain that could hold a plan in their head. Yeah, it's 130,000,000 years of hard coding, basically. It makes me wonder if 130,000,000 years ago, the ants were, like, lucky to survive that tertiary extinction. And we're like, we got to get our act together, guys. Yeah. We need to figure out how to make wraps quick. If we can't make rafts, we can't do anything. Ants individually can swim. Some species can. They can float, and they basically do, like, a little ant paddle. They liken to do a dog paddle. I don't think they can swim at great distances. But if an ant if some species of ant happened to accidentally fall into water, it's not necessarily the end of them. No, they're not a garner. They don't need to be reanimated yet. They don't. Should we take a break? Sure. Already? Yeah, I think we can. I mean, it's a two parter. We can do whatever we want. All right, we'll take a break and we'll talk about not wraps, but bridges right after this. Okay, Chuck. You teased Bridges. What about bridges? What do bridges have to do with ants? Well, I mean, first of all, all this stuff, you should look up images and videos of when you can, because talking about it is one thing, but when you really see this stuff happening, when you see an ant raft or an ant bridge, it's pretty remarkable. But army ants, they're a species of ant that we're going to talk more about as well later, but they are nomadic. Usually ants kind of root down in one place, but these ants like to travel, and when they're traveling through the forest, if they come across, if they're, like, walking up a leaf and then they want to get across to another leaf, they will form a little almost a human bridge. They form a little ant bridge all the way across and can support it's just tens of centimeters, which doesn't sound like much, but when you're an ant, it's remarkable. Yeah. So there's something going on here, you'll start to notice, like, there's something about an ant when it says, okay, I'm in water and I'm on a ball of other ants in water. Now that I've reached the edge of water, I need to interlock with my partner. Same thing when they reach an end in the road, a gap between the road or the bridge or whatever they're walking on, they have some sort of encoded instinct to lay down and interlock with whoever's part of the bridge behind them to form their own part of their bridge. And then even more astounding than that kind of behavior is the fact that they can support the weight of the ants crawling over them, using them as a bridge. And then once the traffic dies down, they climb back up, like in the opposite direction. They disassemble the bridge on the other way and then go along their merry way on the forest floor. Yeah, that's when they say socialism doesn't work. But I was wondering how they so I saw an ant bridge spanning between two leaves, so it was off the ground. And the only thing I could figure, like, how do they all get across to the other side at the end of this whole thing? I don't know. Because you'd think it'd be like one of those road bridges where you cut one in and it goes up. Right? Well, I think that might be what happens, but this is just a guess. But I have a feeling at the end of that bridge, they all just go really fast after it disattaches to get to. And if they're strong enough to hold each other across the span, then I guess they're strong enough to hold that last few centimeters as it dangles. Right. Yeah. They seem to make pretern, naturally intelligent use of things like physics and forces and loads and all sorts of stuff. Yeah. To be honest, I don't feel like a jackass for not knowing the answer to what you're saying, because we do not understand ants very well. It's more like we humans are in the GWiz phase of studying ants. We can see what they're doing, but we can't really explain how they're doing it in a lot of cases, which makes them even more fascinating to me. But, Chuck, I suspect, and once we fully understand ants, it will revolutionize our own behavior in the way that we see the world and the way that we act ourselves, because we're going to learn a lot from them. Yeah, but the problem is humans won't work together like that because it's a selfless society that works in concert to accomplish a greater goal. Maybe we'll figure out how to use them to more efficiently deliver packages from Ecommerce for us. Right. That's not flying them and dropping them from a drone. Right. Even more efficient than that. All right, so that's just a bit of a tease of some of the amazing things some species of ants can do. I think we need to get down to kind of the basics like we do with all of our insect friends and animal friends and just talk about the makeup of these little guys. Yeah, so they're insects, like I said earlier, they're from the order Hymen Up Terra. So there's bees, wasps, ants, they're all pretty much in the same little group right there. But there's at least 10,000 species of ants. Apparently some botanists who don't know what they're talking about will say, 14,000, and then some entomologists will say, yeah, the botanist is right. 14,000 is how many species of ants there are. Botanists are like, Why? They keep cutting my leaves? Yeah. Can you please ask your ants to stop doing that with the botanist thing? If we're talking and again, since we're not starting our own side podcast all about ants, we're going to talk about a few different species. Ant rent, by the way, ant rant, not ant rind, ant rant, featuring the works of Iran instead of listener mail, who is the opposite of ants, actually, but we're going to talk about the main ones you might find here in North America. One, of course, is the odorous house ant, aka the sugar ant or the coconut ant. These are I love ants, but these are the problem ants in my life occasionally. Yeah. These are the little black ants that if you have something out on your counter, can come in to your house and a nice little single file line, and we'll talk about those lines later. And they will eat whatever you have sitting out on the counter if it's a little crumb of a Twinkie, which makes me really want to eat a Twinkie, I haven't done that in years, probably since her Twinkie episode. Sure. But they will send a lot of ants after it. And they're called odorous because apparently I've never really noticed a smell, but if you kill them, they smell like a rotten coconut or like a blue cheesy odor. Yes, and I'm like, rotten coconut doesn't help at all. I don't understand what a rotten coconut smells like. Blue cheese. I understand more. I get that's not a good smell, but I have never, ever smelled an ant that smelled like blue cheese or even rotten coconut. I haven't either. And I try not to kill any ants, but invading sugar ants can be a problem. I got you. Yeah, sugar ants. That's what I've always heard them called, too. So that's the odorous house ant is the same thing as a sugar ant. Yeah, right, okay. Because we're not like, very bourgeois. We keep our sugar just on a mound on the kitchen counter, and we have a big problem with those ants, too. Yeah. What about your next favorite? The pavement ant. Yeah, the malcomus. If only they are the ones that you find, like, on the sidewalk mainly, maybe under rocks. And I don't think they're a whole lot different than the odorous house ant are they? I honestly don't know. I think maybe they don't come in your house. They're more like they just hang out outside on the sidewalk. Okay. I like that. Yeah, I think what that describes is, like, where you'll find them, like, under stones and sidewalks and all that. Because a lot of ants like more than just the pavement ant, make their nest under concrete. I'm not sure why. Maybe just for protection or whatever from the elements. But there are plenty of ants that seem to appreciate concrete slabs for nesting. You got your carpenter ant, which are those big daddies, they will bore into wood. I don't know if they're as big a problem as termites. I haven't really found them to be in mind. They're not own life, but yeah, no, those are the ones I grew up with. The big black ones? Yes. They're enormous ants, but they're almost like, friendly. They don't sting you. I think they might be stingerless. They're certainly not venomous. They'll crawl on your finger and just kind of explore, and you almost can make friends with them. Weirdly. But they're the friendliest ants I've ever encountered. Yeah, I'll do that. If I see a carpenter ant, I'll put my finger down and see if it wants to come up and say hi. You know, I've never seen one down here. I've only seen them in Ohio. I didn't even know they were down here. Oh, really? Yeah, we got carpenter. The ones I did know were down here. I found out the hard way. Right after we moved down here, I realized that I was standing in a pile of carpenter ants, and that was my introduction to them. Like, maybe a month or two after we moved down to the south. No carpenter ants or fire ants? Fire ants? Did I say carpenter? Yeah. No, I mean fire ants. Yes. Those are no good. Again, I'm not going to try and kill their nest or anything like that. You just avoid them, basically. It's true. It is true. But like you say, if you happen to step on one, they can be pretty aggressive, though. They'll come out man. They'll just keep going after you. And again, it looks like they're biting you because it hurts and it stings, and they're biting their mandibles. But you can't feel whatever bite they're giving you with their mandibles because they're too small. It's that stinger that's getting you in the venom that they produce inside. That's right. No good. Very painful. Leave little red bumps. Yeah, to say the least. And then the itch and then you can't help but scratch them. And you scratch whatever little welt grows up after them. You scratch that off. It's not good. Did you get stung a lot when you were standing in one? Yeah, it was really bad. Momo got the same treatment, too, when she was a little puppy. Oh, no. She made the worst sound I've ever heard in my life. And luckily, Yuumi had just done some research on fire ants and found that if you are ever covered in fire ants, do not wash them off, because I think those might be the kind that swim, but also that will make them cling even further to whatever they can on your body. Just stand there and take the pain. You brush them off until they're done. Yeah, right, exactly. Just eat the pain. Right. It won't last long, but you brush them off with your hand. Do not use water because it actually makes them like it's one of those things where they're like, oh, douse with water. Hang on even tighter, like they're making a wrap with your leg and then they're biting even worse. So luckily you may have told me that like a week before. And my instincts, I was walking mow near this pond, my instinct was to basically just donker in this pond or else get a bunch of pond water on it to rinse it off, and I stopped myself and just brushed them off, but it would have made it so much worse. But Moe doesn't like fire ants either. Now Moe probably doesn't like being tucked to the pond either, just like on a nice walk. You were going to do what to me when I was yeah, I guess we should talk about we got to talk about mouth parts as part of stuff you should know. If we're going to talk about the ant's body, we'll go from the head backward. The head has those two antennae, and we're going to say things like smell and hear with quotation marks, with air quotes, scare quotes. I like air quotes. Okay, but the antennae is what they use to smell, or their version of smelling and pheromones and stuff like that, which we'll get to in greater detail later on. Yeah, which seemed to be basically the way that they communicate. They communicate a few other ways, which we'll talk about, but those pheromones are aces as far as ant communication goes, it's pretty cool. Sometimes they'll have multiple kinds of eyes. Some ants have compound eyes, which have tons of different lenses, and the image on each lens is kind of combined into an image in the ant's brain. Or other ones have much more symbolize called ocelli or cellli, which they just basically sense light. And then some ants have both, but the ones who just have a cellar are almost blind. But don't feel bad for the ants because they can sense other things, like pheromones with their antennae. That's right. We've talked about the mandibles a little bit, but those are the little pincers at the front. And boy, some of the mandibles and some of these species of ants are really large and scary looking. Yeah, I can't remember which one, but I saw one picture. It may have been the Australian one that just will kill you. Basically, the bulldog ant. It might have been the bulldog ant. Yes, I saw that picture, too, where it actually uses its mandibles to clamp on to you at the same time it's stinging you, too, and it has taken at least three lives in Australia, that's been documented. The bulldog ant just another Australian thing that can kill you. So as bad as the bulldog ant is, apparently the bullet ant has the worst sting, not just of any ant, but of anything you could possibly be stung by in the world. Now, what's the deal with that one? So there's something called the Schmidt Pain Scale that was developed by a guy named Justin Schmidt, and he basically just let himself get stung and then rated it and described this stuff. That's what he did. We're going to do a short stuff on it someday. I was about to say that we have to, but he gave the bullet ant the level four rating on his four, which is the highest, as bad as it gets. But he described it as like walking over flaming charcoal with a three inch nail embedded in your heel. That's what a bullet ant thing feels like. And it's apparently other people who have if you go on YouTube, like survivalist and outdoor people, they'll find out what's the most painful sting you can get and then they'll go purposely get stung by it and then describe it. It's kind of like people eating like ghost peppers on YouTube videos, but with insects. And apparently most people who have been stung by a bullet ant degree, like, it's as bad as it gets. Jeez, I found this one aunt, if we're talking mandibles, supposedly has the fastest bike in the world, the Latin American trap jaw ant. And it uses its mandible to jump. So if you look at videos, they basically thought this is what was happening, but they weren't sure because these things can really leap like three or four inches across the room. And they filmed it with a super slow mo up close camera. And their bite is so fast, it accelerates 100,000 times the force of gravity, 145 mph with a force equaling 500 times its body weight. Wow. I think it just pinches down in the ground so fast it shoots the ant back out of harm's way or whatever. Okay, so that's what I was trying to figure out. If it does like a cartwheel or somersault so it bites and propels itself backward. Yeah, and they will somersault, because I don't think they have control after there's so much force and speed. I saw slowmo videos of them. Like if they're falling down in a little hole in the sand or something, they'll snap that jaw and they will just slow mo back flip like four or five inches out of that thing. And it makes sense. It should. It's pretty amazing. The trap giant. That is amazing. So that's all in the head. Right. You got your eyes, your mandibles, your mouth. There's a little mouth that the ant has to eat and everything. Yes. They don't have ears. No, we should point out if we're talking about the head, but they do hear by way of vibration. I think there's an organ below the knee that senses vibration. Below the knee. I didn't see that one. Yeah. And it just keeps getting better and better. Okay, so you move a little further back on the ant, and what you'll find is the next little segment of the body called the Mesoma, which is not particularly interesting other than the fact that this is where the ants, three pairs of legs, it's six legs come together on the ant. So it's super muscular because this is how the ant propels itself forward and does all sorts of neat things, climbing hand to hand combat, carrying all sorts of stuff. So it's very muscular. Part of the ant, the Mesoma. Yes. Very muscly. You have the Pettyle, which is basically the waste of the ant between the Mesoma and the gaster. But you can see an ant kind of stand up at the waist where it's little front legs are off the ground. It's bending there at the pettyole. Yeah. It's kind of like, you know those busses that are like two buses, but they're connected by some weird membrane and when they turn a corner, you're like, oh, God. But then they pull it off somehow. That, to me, is like the Pettylee for the ant. I've never ridden on one of those buses. It's not it doesn't look like it's held together any better when you're inside the bus. Yeah, it looks like a lot of city buses. I will say, though, travelers tip emily knights. I think I've said this before. We took a bus in Manhattan one time, which we had never done before. We were always on the subway or in a cab or something, and we happened to be somewhere and we needed to get somewhere else. And we saw the bus and I said, I think we can just get on this thing and it'll take us where we want to go. And it felt like a tourist bus. It's a great way to see the city. Well, it was a sightseeing bus. No, I was like it was red and I sat on the roof. They didn't have a roof on the top? No, it was a regular city bus. But that's my point. For very little money. I see. The only difference is there's not some dummy with a microphone telling you about everything I got you, but a knowledgeable bus driver will tell you where some of the stars live. Yes. Or at least where you're stopping next. Sure. Sit down and shut up. That's what they say. I think the patio. We didn't mention that some of them have two of these wastes. Yeah, the Post Petiole if you want to show off as an ant, you might have two of them. I can go two different ways at once. Watch me go. And then you have the gaster and that's that rear part. That's where the organs are housed. That's where the heart is. Although it does not pump blood, it has a colorless liquid. There are no lungs, isn't that right? Yeah. They basically just do oxygen exchange. Oxygen, carbon dioxide exchange. Little holes that they have all over their body called sphericals. That's right. And those are connected through a network of tubes. And I think just the ants movement is what makes that air exchange happen. That is so cool. That's very cool. Yeah. The gaster makes the Mesoma feel really inadequate as far as wise go. No, just importance in the stuff that it's doing. Okay. Because it has so much important stuff in it. Well, it's got the heart. It's got that stinger the reproductive organs. Some ants can spray formic acid from their gaster. If you come up to an ant in your ant size, it will just spray in your face with acid and say, get back. Wow. And then what if it's a would you say a trapdoorant? It'll just spring away completely out of sight in the blink of an eye. In the blink of a compound eye, yeah. I like trapdoor, though. I bet there's a trap door in what's it called? The trap jaw ant. Oh, I call the trapdoor ant. Yeah. But I guarantee you there's a trap doorant. I was thinking of Castlevania just then. They have two stomachs generally, and one is for eating and digesting their own food, but they also will share food. And that's what that second stomach is for because they practice trophylaxis is when they exchange food. Like if you go out and forage but the other answer back. They're working on taking care of the queen or whatever they got to eat. So they'll bring back food in their second stomach and then transfer it either mouth to mouth or mouth to anus is pretty nice. Pretty nice. That is very kind, if you think about it. It really is. So one of the things we talked about earlier, I think, when we were talking about ant bridges and how they can support so much weight partially, it's because they have, like most insects, chitin exoskeleton can withstand forces like 3000 times greater than the ant's body weight. So that's how you let ants walk all over you if you're another ant without even batting an eyelash. That's right. And they are super strong. I know there are a lot of insects that can do whatever X times their body weight, but it's tough to beat the ant. As a general rule, some of them can carry up to 50 times their own body weight. And apparently it's due to their small size. And the reading I got from this was that their muscles are just dense. They have a greater cross sectional area relative to their body size compared to other kind of all other animals. So I think that's just like a really dense muscle. That's pretty cool. So they're muscular and they have a strong exoskeleton. They're just tough. That's right. And like you said, they could be found everywhere. So I say we take our second break now and then come back and talk a little bit about what aunt eat. What aunt eat. We'll be right back. Okay, Chuck. So we came back to talk about what ant eat. And I think I said earlier, the ants are omnivorous, right? So that means they'll eat flesh. Like, don't fool yourself. Given a chance, if you lay still long enough, or if somebody stakes you to the ground and slathers you in honey around some red fire ants, they will eat your body. So will your dog. Your dog would, too. Don't be mad at your dog. Your dog is just trying to stay alive. And it's always just been curious what you tasted like. Oh, man. Any time you hear those stories, it's just so disturbing. Really? Yes. Like the dog that eats the person that was just like in a bad drunk or whatever. Oh, wow. No, it's like passed out. No, I'm not going to tell it, but I know someone personally who their dog ate part of their not there, but someone they lived their roommate's foot because the roommate's foot was asleep and they were passed out, like down to the close to the bone. Wow. I know, it's disturbing. Wow. And you know somebody yes. I'm not going to get into all that, but it's somebody I know, but it's not like somebody, you know, from the snowboards or something like that. No, it's just a personal okay. A personal human who told me this happened to them and their roommate. Wow. It's not friend of a friend of a friend kind of thing. What happens to the dog after that? Do they keep the dog? Yeah, it's the whole thing. I tell you off air afterwards. All right. Good Lord. The dog is fine. But I'll tell you okay, I did not see this counting at all. I didn't either, because we're talking again about ants, and ants, like I said, are omnivorous. Right. I don't even know how I got on this. I think if you lay still long enough and we'll eat you down to the bone is what we're talking about. So will your friend's roommate talk? Well, it's actually my friend's dog, but that's a different oh, man, that makes it even worse. Wait, your friend's dog ate your friend's roommate's foot? How do you apologize for that? I don't know, man. It's a weird scene over at this place. There's no cookie cake that they make for that one. Oh, boy. The cookie cake might help, but it'll help. Sure, but you just have to get a generic one. Maybe one of those milk bar chest pies. That might do it. Really? Anything from milk bar would work. I agree. Honeydew. Let's talk about honeydew. I think that's how we can get back on track. Okay, let's talk about it. Have you ever tried to grow a citrus producing tree? No. I want a lime tree or a lemon tree, but we don't currently have one. Okay. So one of the worst things that's going to happen to you when you start growing that lime tree are aphids. And you're going to know you have aphids, not because you see a bunch of aphids on there, but because all of a sudden there's like sticky stuff running all over your leads, all over your branches, all over the trunk of your little lime tree that you're trying to grow and never did anything to anybody. But now all of a sudden, it's really suffering. And what you will know is that you have an affid infestation one of the other dead giveaways chuck that you have an AFID infestation on your future hypothetical lime tree is that it will be covered with ants. And those ants are not just there eating that sticky stuff. They're actually what some entomologists refer to as raising these aphids as basically livestock. Yeah. So the honeydew, I hope I'm not getting this wrong, it sounds like what they do is the acid pierces the flow ducks, and then this stuff goes straight through them, the SAP, and goes in their mouth, comes out their butt as honeydew. And that's what those ants are. That's their delicious nectar, right? Yes. I don't understand why the ants can't just go to where the aphids just were and lick the honeydew that's coming out of there. So it must have something to do with the aphid. Like it's transformed by the aphid physiology. I guess it's a transformative experience. Yes. I see the raw ingredient there is coming out of the tree, but I can only I'm all about the stuff that's coming out of this aphid little bottom. That's what I want to lap up. I guess you want that soft serve right out of the machine. I guess so. But they are crazy for this stuff. So much so that, again, they take care of these guys. They do. So they will herd aphids to different parts of the plant to say, okay, here, bite into this, and I'm just going to position my mouth right behind you while you do, and just let it flow right in my face. They will move them around the plant like herds at night or when it gets cold. They will actually herd the aphids into their own little nests and protect them and defend them. Ladybugs love to eat aphids. So ants defend aphids against ladybugs. And then if they want an aphid to produce honeydew, they will actually stroke the aphid to be like, go ahead, let it go. And then they eat the honeydew that comes out of the aphid. But the fact is this to me is one of 50 facts of the podcast. They heard and treat and raise and protect Aphids just like humans do livestock, like cattle and pigs and things that we depend on for food. Yeah, those little supposedly brainless little insects. All in the name of that sweet, sweet butt juice. That's right. Honeydew. That is unbelievable. Yeah, I think that might top off at least this episode's. Fact of the podcast, that's better than rafts, if you ask me. I think you might be right, dude. So not only do they like honeydew chuck, because Anthony omnivorous, I'm not sure if I said that yet, they will eat all sorts of other stuff too. Nectar, other insects. They're apparently one of the largest predators of invertebrates wherever they live now. Will they eat each other? Sure. Pretty well, yeah, they'll actually cannibalize eggs, so their line will succeed over like a nest mate line in some cases. I also saw this thing, and maybe this is a decent fact to sort of finish on that. Some ants are called slave makers and they practice slave rating. So if you're a slavemaker ant, you are specialized to another kind of species that's really close to your own and you basically capture them and force them to work in your colony. What is going on? And they do it. They just go over there and they work in their colony like it was their own. And all the slave makers, all they do is go and replenish that labor force with more enslaved ants. That is crazy. You have to just stop researching at a certain point. I do, that's what I'm saying. Ant ran. Otherwise it's 18 hours long. Ant ran is coming in 2022. Truck from us. Is that good for part one? I think so. That was a great one to finish on. Nice work. And then as it's custom, we don't typically do listener mail for part one of a part two. Right. And we'll see you guys Thursday, I guess for part two of Ants, if I'm not mistaken. And if you want to get in touch with us, you can send us an email, send it off to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts myheartradio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, you." | |
c47a11ca-5460-11e8-b38c-2fff4a62c639 | SYSK Selects: How a Flea Circus Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-a-flea-circus-works | If you've ever seen a flea circus, then count yourself among the few. It's a dying art, but back in the day they thrilled and delighted young and old alike. Learn all about the tiny big tops in this classic episode. | If you've ever seen a flea circus, then count yourself among the few. It's a dying art, but back in the day they thrilled and delighted young and old alike. Learn all about the tiny big tops in this classic episode. | Sat, 18 Jul 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=200, tm_isdst=0) | 42895657 | audio/mpeg | "Hi, everyone. Its Josh. And for this week's SYSK selects I've chosen how flea circuses work. It's actually one of my all time favorite episodes. By the time we recorded it, there was a chance is that I still didn't know whether flea circuses are actually real or illusions, tricks of the imagination. It was a thrilling experience, to say the least. I hope you enjoyed this episode, because it was a fun one to do. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry Rowland. And that makes this stuff? You should know the podcast. Yeah. Who would have ever thought that we could do more than one podcast on fleas? Had I thought about flea circuses, I would have thought that, yeah, we covered it a tiny little bit. I went back and looked just to make sure we weren't being too redundant. Right. And we just sort of mentioned it briefly. But how delightful to dig in even further. Yeah. I mean, like, there's no way that we really got into it, because it's one of the least documented aspects of popular culture I've ever come across. Man, and there's so much misinformation. And you run across people who act like they know exactly what they're talking about, and then you do more research, and you find out they really are wrong in a lot of it. It was crazy. It was a crazy research. Yeah. And you go to web pages that are solid green with white letters. Seriously, turn back the clock to punctuation. What's that? Yes, it was a little weird, but if people take us to task on the accuracy of this one, then we'll be like, you go do better. So I think we kind of gave it away. The cats out of the bag, and so it's fleas. We're doing flea circuses. We're talking about flea circuses. I think of flea circus is fairly old timing, but I usually think of them as, like, the 20s or 30s, maybe even the 40s from that old tech savory flea circus cartoon. Sure. But they go way further back than that. Or even the concept of training fleas in some way, shape or form goes even further back than that. Yeah. Which we'll get to it. But training them is a bit of a misnomer. Yes. That's a stretch, for sure. It's sort of like tying and gluing things to fleas and just let them be fleas. Yeah. Basically, as you will probably come to the same conclusion, flea circuses are really mean. Yes, they're cruel, no matter how you feel about fleas. Yeah. They're cruel acts of barbarity. I think that's how they used to build it, actually. Yes. Tiny, cruel acts of barbarity. Come see Professor Long Hair and it's fleece circus witchy torments. But they're small, so who cares? Right. So 1570s is if this is accurate, we're all going to go all the way back to a man named Mark Scaliat, who did not have a flee circus, but he was supposedly in London, one of the first people, or perhaps the first person to use a flea as a prop of some sort. Yeah. To basically show off his skills. As what? As he was a blacksmith. Yeah, he was a smithy. And he made, like, this really tiny, intricate collar that he put around a flea. And he said, check this out. I guess because apparently other people, like, watchmakers and stuff would make little tiny watches as well as gimmicks. But I guess the thing they were trying to show is the only thing I can think of is if I can make something this tiny that works, imagine what a real sized human watch would look like. It would work even better. But he got kind of famous from it, from what I understand. And the idea of using fleas caught on well, it took a couple of hundred years. Sure. But if you look into fleas and flea circuses, I just took them for granted. I never stopped and thought, why fleas? But there's actually really good reasons why fleas. And it has to do with for one, fleas used to be everywhere. No matter where you lived in the world, you shared your living space with fleas. Yes. Which must have been pretty awful, but apparently it was just a fact of life. So that's one thing. They are ubiquitous. They're easy to come by. The other one is that fleas are really good at jumping, and that actually makes them, under the right circumstances, really good for this flea circus idea. Yeah. And if you really want to itch yourself, go to listen to the flea episode. Yeah. But they come in a couple of thousand varieties, and the ones apparently for circuses are the little flat, reddish brown ones, about 2.5 mm in length. And they can jump, though. 2.5 mm. They can jump sometimes as high as eight, nine inches in the air. I saw up to ten. Where are you getting your fleas? That was from the Royal Air Force Experimental Station. They apparently set up some equipment in the we're photographing fleas jumping. Oh, yeah. I see here that they said that at the start of a jump, a flea jump, they experience forces greater than 140 times out of gravity. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. They have these little what are called elastic cuticles in their legs, and they can store a tremendous amount of potential energy in it. And when they release them and they jump, that potential energy turns into kinetic energy. And since it's basically this elastic connector that's really storing the energy, they're not having to use up a lot of their own. So they can jump like this, like thousands of times in an hour. And apparently when they jump I'm sure we said something somewhat contradictory in the actual fleas episode, but the relation of their jumps to their body size compared to humans. It'd be like us jumping over the Statue of Liberty or something along those lines. Yes. Which is very hard to do. Getting harder every day. Man. I was kind of thinking about these fleas jumping and, like, evolutionarily speaking why? And I guess they're just so small that when a dog goes to scratch or bite at it or whatever animal tries to get the fleet off, they can't just be like, well, let me run away as fast as I can because the dog's bite will still get it. So they learned, I think, quite literally, how to jump and get the heck out of there very quickly in order to survive. And the coolest fleas make the Bionic man sound when they jump. Yeah. If you listen really close, all the hipster fleas. Right. So I guess we should talk about the main dude, though, right, who we owe, all of us owe a great debt to. I'm not saying his name. You know, you got to say his name. This is the 1820s, and he's an Italian impresario in London named Louis Burtolotto. Nice. Bertolotto. Yes. There's so many O's and T's, I thought I messed it up. No, I know. It's an unusual name. Yeah. So he's the guy in London who said, I want to be really famous one day, and my big idea is to take fleas and put them in shows. Yeah. And it worked. It did work. I saw somewhere that the origination of flea circus was due largely to him, but I didn't really see anybody else cited earlier than him. The watchmaker, the smithy, mark the blacksmith. He wasn't doing any kind of shows or tricks. Louis Bertolotto said you know what? The fleas aren't props. The fleas are going to be the stars in my show. That's right. And I think he may have been the one who had the original idea to do this. Yeah. I love our own article said his show was part action, part humor, part social commentary, but I think that was the case. Well, we might as well talk about what these things did. They would do everything from high wire acts to sword fighting to political and historical reenactments. Yeah. They re enacted the Battle of Waterloo dressed in, like, military garb. Yes. They would play soccer or football. They would do high diving. Pretty amazing stuff. Little pools of water. Right. It would pull little chariots and carriages. Yeah, that was one of the first ones, because I think especially back in the early 19th century, people didn't know everything there is to know about fleas like we do today. Right. So the idea of watching a little tiny, tiny flee, like a three millimeter long flea pulling, like a hearse or a chariot or a cart that was hundreds of times its own weight, does it get any better? It's going to impress you, especially if you're a five year old chimney sweep who's owned by the guy who bought you from your parents. Yeah. Or I actually looked up some flea circuses on YouTube. There were these little kids. There was one in, I think, Denmark in the 1950s that I looked at. I saw that in Telfaire. Yeah. People were just delighted. Yeah. I mean, I watched some of the videos, too, and I noticed that my hands were clashed together beneath my chin. I think it might have been the perfect post election YouTubing that I could have done, actually. Yeah, it works pretty well. Sorry, Berteloto. His act was not small, if you think. Well, sure. He did this at some county fairs and sideshows, and then his wife made him stop. Yeah, not true at all. He actually got really famous for this. I don't know. I mean, they liken him to Elvis Presley. I don't know if he was that big. I think the point the author is making is that this guy wasn't he wasn't Internet famous. He was like, famous famous. Yeah. Like, he traveled the world doing this. Right. So good for him. Right. Yeah. And he did. And as he traveled the world, people were like, I can do that, too. Sure. Tired of working. I want to do this. But it turns out that, from what I can tell, as far as showbiz goes, running your own flea circus has got to be one of the more demanding side shows there are. Well, sure. Part of the problem is your performers. Well, first of all, it says in here, and this is like again, with this research, you just sort of have to take some of these people at their word. But they say that about one in ten fleas can even make the cut. Right. Once you find your champion team of the 10%, they're going to die, and they need to be cared for. Right. And traveling all over the world with your prized fleas is precarious. Well, yes, especially if you're traveling to do shows and colder climbs. There aren't fleas, and fleas don't do very well there. Your whole troop may die the night before a show. Can you imagine? No, but apparently it happened a lot. There was a guy I read, and I'm not quite sure who it was, but he had a standing gig in, I think, switzerland, maybe, or somewhere somewhat northern Europe. And he had to send down no, she I'm sorry, she had to send down to Majorca to get fresh shipments of fleas, like, every two weeks. Yeah, because she couldn't keep them alive any longer than that. I have offers from all over the world to take my show. But you're afraid of one thing. When you get out of the country, can you get fleas? I went to Sweden, and I had to send to Mallorca in Spain to get fleas. Fortnight, every fortnight. Who was that? It was a woman a sword swallower, right. Was that Professor Tomlin? No, I can't remember her name, but she's like a legendary sword swallower. Professor Testos? No. Professor Chester? No. None of the professors. And that was another thing I noticed from this, too, but I couldn't really find the origin. Apparently, if you had a flea circus from, like, the 19th century to the early 20th century, you the flea master. Build yourself as professor or whatever. Yeah, so weird. There's just all these really weird trends, but in the history of flea circuses, it was like one person would come up with an idea, and then they go and show it, and for some reason, it would attract a bunch of other imitators. And that's basically the history of it. I would have built myself as a count. Oh, man. That would have broken new ground. But they would have to pay money. And it says in the 1950, Professor Testo said, we paid six shillings a dozen, although there have been times of shortage when a single flea has cost as much as two shillings. Well, you know, also, if you look around today, which I did, I couldn't find anywhere to buy fleas. Surely you have to send off for them overseas. But I've thought, surely there's some weirdo somewhere who's selling fleas to flea circuses. And there are none. None whatsoever. Well, there is a flea circus in Germany still. Yeah. At the Munich October Fest. Yeah. Where else would you have one? All right, so you want to take a little break here? Yeah. All right, well, let's break. Let's go pick the leaves from our own bodies. I know, I'm itching or scratching. Then maybe we can train them to finish this episode for us. Okay. So, Chuck, we kind of made it as far as Bertolotto, and there's actually a lot of mystery surrounding that guy. Here's the weird thing. Okay, I'm going to confess something to you. When I first read this article, I was like, here's a stinker. Yeah. Then I dug in a little further, and I was like, oh, I'm being tortured with research to do a stinker. And then the more I did and the more I did, the more I dug in, I'd find these weird little things that kept popping up that combined create the history or the culture of flea circuses. And the more I came upon these little things and put them together, the more I was just totally delighted. But then I think, like, you when I finally hit YouTube and was like, okay, I need to see some of these, then I was like, I love fleecer cases. I could sit here and talk about them all day. Well, we'll try and keep this to 30 to 40 minutes all day. So I just realized I didn't finish my thought. The weird little thing that I found out about Professor Berlottolo Bertolotto. There you go. Thanks, man. He just vanished. He disappeared. He was like, as famous as an astronaut. And then all of a sudden he's gone. And there's a guy who is I think his name is Andy Rich. He's like, basically the foremost flea circus researcher working today. And he found Professor Bertolotto. Apparently, he moved to Canada and lived out the rest of his life in anonymity. Wow. Yeah. I have a question. Okay. Why do you always use astronaut as the same indicator? It says Simpsons reference. Okay. Homer is saying somebody's richer than an astronaut. Got you. I was going to challenge you and say, name an astronaut. Oh, dude. Jim Lovell. No, name a current astronaut. Oh, current astronaut. Well, you got Mark Kelly and Scott Kelly. Okay. All right. The twins back off. Then their parents called them Project Gemini. Oh, that's cute. But they did. I just made that up. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, man, that would have been surely someone really thought of that. If not, I'm going to trademark it. Yeah. And then you could blackmail them. Feel like you want this nickname? Call. I know you're richer than an astronaut. All right, so early 1009 hundreds, if you're talking imitators. Over here in the United States, we had a man named William Heckler, and he was one of the first dudes over here to be a successful fleamaster. And he did the usual things, made them box and race and juggle. And we're going to tell you some of these secrets, by the way. If you're wondering how these things are accomplished, just hang in there. And he said at one point he was bringing in $250 a day or performance in a day of performances a day. Yeah, so many performances. And here's the thing, I kind of wondered because I didn't find it until later in the research, like, how do you see this stuff? But you wouldn't have very many people in there. You'd have, like, ten or 15 people crowded around a little table for six to ten minutes. You would shuffle them out and bring in the next group. Yes. I saw somewhere that if you were really dedicated to it I think Cecil Adams wrote it on the straight doubt that if you were, like, a really dedicated performer, you could conceivably do 50 ten minute performances a day. So that's basically like, 10 hours with a ten minute break every hour. And if you're not a really dedicated flea master, then just get out of my face. Why do you even bother? Seriously, though, when we talk about how to do this, it will become clear just how much work this must be. Yes. All right, well, let's talk a little bit about that. Every flee is different. And like I said, if you believe the research, about 10% of the fleece are fit for the job. Right. And like we mentioned, you don't really train them. What you do is, back in the day, you would take either some silken thread or some really thin gold wire. Hopefully you can't even see it. That's sort of the idea. And you tie a little tiny noose of sorts around this flea's neck, and apparently that was really hard to do. Oh, yeah. Because when a Flea eats the blood of their master, which is true, we'll get to that again later, but their neck swells, so you can't tie it too tight, or else they're going to die, and your prize flee could die. Or if it's too loose, then the flea goes away and the chariot stays behind, and that's no good now. And you just hear a tiny bionic man sound. That's right. So that's very hard, number one. Number two, the idea that you have to do that with new fleas every I would guess probably every few weeks, if you're on average, because fleas, I mean, they live mainly maybe a year. Most fleas live about three or four months. That's an old flea. So you got like, some star performers and they're performing for a few months or whatever. So you're having to basically constantly harness fleas all the time. And again, before you even harness them, you have to sort them. So you have to study and observe the adult fleas, see which ones like to jump. There's an old legend that apparently came from Professor Heeckler's son, if not Professor Heckler himself, who said, you put a lid over a jar and you can train them not to jump too high because they'll hit their head on the jar, and they don't like to do that, so they learn not to jump. Then they passed their first test. It's not clear whether that's actually hokum or not, but for a very long time, that's been part of the lower of training fleas. Problem is, I think you said it, fleas can't actually learn anything. They're not really being trained. They're actually being physically restrained in lots of ways, including that harness and starting with the harness. Well, I don't know, though heckler, professor Heckler, that is, also said, and this was fascinating to me as far as whether or not these fleas can learn anything. He said that he would, to get the best fleas, put them in a glass jar that's too tall for them to jump out. And he said that he would notice the really good fleas would jump up on the side, fart out a little bit of sticky stuff, whatever that is, and then spend the rest of the time trying and trying to hit that identical spot again to grab hold of the sticky stuff, basically a foothold to be close enough to the top to leap out. Right. Amazing. Don't know if I believe it. Well, yeah, I mean, he was a showman, a consummate showman. Like, you didn't just basically point and be like, look at the fleas. Give me your money. Please leave now. Like, you were carrying the show on, right? You had to tell the performance along your professor, for God's sake, right. When this guy is being interviewed over the years, I can't imagine he didn't ham it up in the interviews. So I don't know. Like, a lot of it is lost to time, what was true and what wasn't, as far as these old guys go. Yeah, but Professor Heckler also said when he was picking them out, and he said stodgy ones are broken to the Mary go round. Harness flighty. Fleas make good dancers. Those with especially strong legs will become kickers, jugglers, and chariot racers. Yes. So you've got fleas harness. That's like, the first initial thing. But there are other things you need to do to them, too, right? You can take that harness, and the most basic thing you could do is take that harness and actually hook it up to, like you said, a chariot or a merrygo round or something like that. And yet people will be like, that's pretty neat. That's cool, but I could do that. But you could do other stuff, too. And a lot of it involves glue, unfortunately. So say, like, you take a tiny piece of wood or a tiny piece of metal and you glue it to the fleece arms, right? Yes. And we should say once that happens, that's it. That's never coming off for the rest of the fleet's life. Yeah. Do you think they even survived that day? I think so. Yeah. I think that they typically survive a few weeks of performing. Okay, so even if they have a little sword glued to their body yeah. I think they live really horrible lives. I mean, basically, we as a species should know more about this, because if the fleas ever rise up and become intelligent, like our backs are against the wall for what the flea circus fleamasters have done to them yeah. Glued to the wall, they'll be like, oh, guess whose turn it is? All right, go ahead. So you glue a piece of stick or something to their arms, and remember already they're harnessed. And then you do the same thing to another fleet, and then you tie their harnesses down, and you just kind of tickle them or do something to stimulate them, and they start waving their arms, and it looks like they're sword fighting. So that's a really good example of a flea circus. It's like you're having them do things, and then the flea master is like, well, look at this. This is a sword fight. Everybody see they're doing or fencing or something like that. Right. And I've trained them to do so. Exactly. So these things really it's the interaction between restrained flee, usually with a prop glued to it defending itself or responding to some sort of noxious or threatening stimuli. And then the fleamats are coming in saying, oh, they're fencing. Right. Or they're walking the high wire. This is Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo. Yes. They would play soccer, like I said. So what they would do there is they would get a little piece of cotton wool. They would soak it in something that the fleet doesn't. Like some malnurus thing. Yeah, I looked that up. Like, lavender works really well. Citronella, cedar oil, those are all lovely. That's a shame. But come to think of it, when you see natural flea sprays, that's what's in natural flea spray. Exactly. So they would soak it in that stuff, and then the fleet would literally just kick at it to get it away. Like a little soccer ball. Right. They're either kicking at it to get it away or because they're restrained. When they kick, instead of it propelling the flea away, it's repelling the ball away from them. So if you have them just kind of do that back and forth, then, yeah, they're playing soccer. What about juggling? Josh? Love it. What you do there is you would glue a flea on its back, basically, and then put another little tiny piece of cotton on their legs, and they would kick at it trying to get it off. And apparently it would just kind of go up and down and spin around like it was juggling. Amazing. Yes. And this is thanks to Heckler in particular in the United States, he really started hitting the county fairs and the carnivals. So it became basically part and parcel with sideshows. The Fleece Circus. Basically, anytime you went to a decent carnival, there's a flea circus there. Yeah. And I get the feeling that these professors would try and they would try and innovate. They would try and come up with new tricks and new things that would delight people, because you want to keep people coming back. Right. So that's where you come up with things like the high wire act and the flea walls, when it would appear as if a fleet orchestra was playing and fleas were dancing. Yeah, because there's other things that fleas respond to, too, besides citronella. They respond very well to heat. They sense heat very well. And if it gets too hot, they want to get out of there. So if you apply heat from beneath on, say, like just a drum head or something like that, they'll all start hopping around. But if they can't get away, if they're harnessed in, then it looks like they're dancing. If you put a little flea orchestra to the side with instruments glued to their arms at a nice back beat exactly. Then you have fleas playing music and fleas dancing to it. A flea ball. So this all is delightful and well and good, but what fun is a naked little flea doing these things if you could have a flea dressed up as Napoleon? Right. And that's what they did. Apparently, historical figures were lampooned. They would supposedly get Mexican nuns who had, quote, nimble fingers tired and eyes deteriorated. I don't see how that makes any sense. So their nimble fingers grew tired and their eyes deteriorated as they were making these things. Okay. I thought that was a good quality they look for in a Mexican nun seamstresses. Right. How are your nimble fingers feeling? That's an entire it's sad, actually, then, sure. So they would get, apparently, these Mexican nuns to make these tiny little costumes, and they are still on display today. If you go to how do you pronounce that in England? I mispronounce everything in England. It's spelled Hertfordshire. Cambridge. All right. Cambridge, England. I think it's where that is. At the Rothschild Zoological Museum, there are two fleas dressed as Mexican fleas on display, and right. In our lovely Edinburgh, Scotland, that we adored so much have I know. Had I known that there was a museum of childhood there with a flea wedding party dressed up on display, I would have gone in a second, for sure. But, yeah, it was a thing. I think it was already a thing in Mexico. And the flea circus masters said, hey, I need to get some of those. So, Chuck, if you have a bunch of fleas and they're making you money, you want to keep them alive, right? Yeah. How would you do that? Well, as we all know, fleas are parasitic blood suckers. And so they would just go down to the blood bank and get a bag of blood right. And let the police swim around in it. Yeah. And they loved it. Now, what they would do is and this gives me chills thinking about it, they would roll up their sleeves, stick their arm down there, and let the fleas feed on their bodies. Yes. A couple of times a day. But apparently, though, it was part of every single show that you would end the show with. And now, since these flea performers have done so great, I shall let them feast on my blood. And the crowd would be like, EW, gross, I didn't run out. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. It was part of stage pattern, but apparently, at least Heckler. But I'm sure others actually did let the fleas feed on them. Yeah. I mean, what's a good flea master to do? Well, feed your fleas blood. Either that or have, like, again, a chimney sweep that you bought from a chimney sweeper to let the fleas feed on. I hope that episodes come out, people get to be really confused. Yeah. Or it'll be really delightful when it does come out, and they'll be like, oh, that makes sense now. Hey, one more thing about Heckler. So there was a Heckler senior and a junior, apparently Junior kept it going in Times Square until, like, the late 50s had a flea circus going, and Heckler's Flea Circus shows up in a scene in Easy Rider. No way. Yes. I couldn't figure out what scene. I didn't have time to go check. But there's a scene in Easy Rider where in the background, there's Heckler's Flea Circus, and then they. Were pushed out of Times Square by peep shows, and then the peep shows were pushed out by Walt Disney and Giuliani. Yeah. Heckler tried at first to do Pantless Flea Circus. It didn't work very well. Yeah, no one wants that now. And finally just packed it up. All right, well, let's take one final break here, and we will talk about another kind of flea circus right after this. So check one thing that I found. I'm pretty sure you found it, too, was that when you start looking into flea circuses, some people think that there is never such a thing as flea circuses that used real fleas. Yeah. I thought you were going to say, when you start looking into flea circus, there's no going back and you'll never be the same again. That's definitely true, too. Like, I've changed forever. Yes. I always thought that flea circuses were a complete ruse and that there were never any real fleas performing, right? Apparently, no, that's not the case. There have been, and indeed ours recently as the 90s, there have been flea circus that used real fleas following these traditions that we just mentioned. But if you believe that there are plenty of flea circuses out there that don't use any fleas whatsoever, you're right, too, because there's both. Yes. The type of flea circus that doesn't use fleas, it's called a humbug flea circus. It's all stage magic. It's all illusion. And it's pretty awesome, actually. Yeah. There was a man, a magician named George Tollerton in the 1930s, and he wrote a booklet actually outlining fake flea circuses and skips that you can do while the carnival barking was going on in the real flea circuses. You really want to take center stage. If you have a fake flea circus, not only introducing the death defying feats, but then you are following these fleas, jumping around with mimicking it with your eyes and following it around by moving your head around as if the audience is looking at some invisible thing, which they are. Right. They are. And you're basically just using your powers of suggestion to get them to think they're seeing what you're saying, right? Yeah. That's the most basic humbug flea circus there are, right? Sure. But there's one that started like, I guess the genuine stage craft, stage magic humbug flea circus came about from Michael Bentine, who is a goon, actually. Right. Remember the goon? Explain that what it is. The goon showed up in the Monty Python episode. They were the direct predecessor of Monty Python. Right. Spike Milligan and his goons. Yes. He wasn't a hockey playing goon. No, that's a different thing. Or a goon on Scuba do or a goonie. Right. Never say that. Just a regular old goon. Yeah. Michael Bentine, he was a British performer and entertainer, and he, in 1950 performed called the Royal Variety Show, I guess. I think so. And it was a little fake flea circus, apparently. Pretty elaborate. One. Yeah. Because rather than just using his power suggestion, he was using things like magnets and remote control pumps and mechanical devices to really kind of do this exaggerated simulation of a flea doing stuff going through the circuit of his flea circus. Right. So he would say, have a magnet or a piece of string or something pushing a ball, or rather pulling a ball up a hill, an incline. And he would say that, this is the flea sisyphus, and he's pushing this ball up a hill. Right. This is my favorite. This gets me every time a flea going up on the high dive board. And then so as it's going up the rungs of the ladder, each one gets depressed. Right. So you can see the fleas progress up the ladder, gets up to the end of the board, jumps a couple of times, so the springboard goes up and down, and then it makes a springing sound as he jumps off. Right, exactly. Dives into the water, and there's like this huge splash, which a fleet could never make a splash to begin with, but a huge one is just hilarious. I like the one the sand table. They would have a little sandbox, and the fake flea would invisibly jump around, but it would create a little splash of sand everywhere. He jumped all over the place. Right. And again, all with magnets. All fakery. Yeah, but really clever. I get the impression he was not terribly old at the time when he first debuted on TV. And in the grand tradition of flea circus, some other people saw it and said, I want to do that, too. So the Humbug flea circus took off and became pretty popular in the second half of the 20th century. I should say popular as far as flea circuses go, which is to say, not very popular. Right. Popular among weirdos. Yes. I'm really kind of wondering about this Bertoloto and his fame. Like, he might not have been. I don't know. I mean, just because you travel the world I mean, he could have been traveling the world performing in front of 60 people a day. That's not exactly Elvis. It's true. This whole thing is under a cloud of suspicion. Hang it is? Yeah. Man, it's really tough to figure out the what's from the who's and the whens and the why and the fleas from the magnets. Yeah, because once you introduce that Humbug hurry into it, everything comes into question. Actually, though, there is a book that I want to get. It's a pamphlet, basically turned into a book from 1975 that a guy named Tom Palmer wrote. It's called The Famous Flea Act, and it teaches you everything you need to know to do a Humbug Flea circus. I just want to read it just for funsies. You know, christmas is coming up. I bet you someone out there. I'll send that to you. I was talking to you. No, I bet you someone else out there will. Okay, my call to you. The public listening stuff you should know public is I know they're doing this in October 1, but somebody needs to bring this back in a big way. Well, a woman did in the didn't take for very long, but, I mean, it was pretty big in the 90s. Her name was what is it? Chuck Maria Fernanda Cardosa. Okay. Did you read about her? No. You should check out her act. You didn't see the video of it? No. There's like a seven, eight minute video of her act, and apparently it's just the highlights, I guess. Her act was longer, and she's a performance artist, so she did it at different places, like she did at the New Museum in New York and San Francisco and just kind of some pretty neat places, places you wouldn't expect to see a flea circus is what I'm saying, I guess. But she used live fleas in the grand tradition of flea circuses and made a very beautiful, neat, almost Cirque du Soleil ish flea circus in the 90s. Wow. But there's a video of it, or there's plenty of videos. I'm sure of it out there. Just look her up and look for the fleece circus video with our thumbs up on it. Yeah. And we kind of joked about this being cruel. It's easy to say this is a fleece, so who cares? But I'm sure there are people that get up in arms about using any sort of mistreating an animal for any kind of insects, animals, let's just say for this argument, for sure, for the entertainment of humans. There's probably at least one person out there that thinks this is a very cruel thing to do. No, there's apparently societies that are dedicated to preventing cruelty, to insects in particular. There you have it. And they have called specifically for flea circuses to be banned outright. And they make a pretty convincing case, especially if you don't allow yourself to stop and remind yourself that these are fleas we're talking about. But they're held in captivity their whole lives. They're connected by a harness that keeps them held down their entire lives. The tricks that they're performing are actually, like, stress behaviors, and they die probably prematurely. Yeah, well, that's what went off on fleas in the flea episode, so I can't really say anything about that. Sure, I've had bad infestations, and I've had no problem grabbing them between my hands and holding them underwater until they slowly drowned. They're like, please just crush me. And you say, never. You'll drown. You can't crush them. You can crush a flea. You need fingernails. That's your problem. You bite your fingernails too much. Yeah. But you try to smash a flea, and he just goes, yeah, anything else? You can buy flea circuses. Ready made flea circuses if you want. Well, that's fun. Yes. It's like an ant farm. Good luck finding fleas is the thing, right? And I think that's it. Man, that's flea circuses. Just go watch some flea circus videos on TV or on the computer TV. You're going to love it. Yeah, it's a good way to just dumb it down and check out. Yes. It's delightful, though, too, since I said it's delightful, if you want to know that's right. I got all that order. I was thinking about flea circuses. Yes. If you want to know more about flea circuses, do what I just said. And you can also type those words in the search bar, how stuff works. And since I said it's delightful before it's time for listener mail, I'm going to call this what the writer called it, which is pick me for listener mail. Thanks. From a teacher. Okay. It's hard to resist. Sure. Josh, Chuck, and Jerry, I'm finally writing to you all. I've been listening to stuff you should know for years. I think I've listened to nearly every episode, even the ones from the dark days when the discussion lasted fewer than ten minutes and Josh was still looking for his perfect podcasting partner. My sister introduced me to you, so if you pick this for listener mail, please do be extremely cool if you give my sister Laura a shout. Wow, that is really nice. If you Chuck. It is. You're feeling very generous. Regardless, I've been meaning to email my thanks and praise for your work. I was a high school English teacher in Illinois, but recently relocated to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where I've moved on to become a community college professor. Oh, nice, a professor. Maybe she could train fleas. Your podcast has been a great supplemental teaching tool, not to mention a guaranteed way to keep my mind occupied during long road trips to and from undergraduate and graduate school or while running with my dog. I've used the episode on book banning several times while teaching To Kill a Mockingbird or informing students about banned BookWeek. I've also used the episode about police interrogation during a unit featuring Walter Dean Myers novel Monster, about a boy who's on trial for a crime he may not have committed. That sounds good. It does. And more recently, I use a listener mail about the benefits of hunting as an example of how to structure an argument. Okay, let's hear that. I want to hear that argument. We'll shout you right back in. Okay. The students got a laugh out of Josh's comments about waiting for the deer to fall over and collecting the dead bodies instead of actually killing the animals. Anyway, really enjoy the show. Look forward to new episodes every week. If teaching doesn't work out for some reason, I think podcasting would be a pretty great career. And that is from Sarah Amado. Professor Amado. And shout out to Laura. Yes, her sister Laura Amato, or whatever her name is. Shout out. I'm presuming they have the same last name. Huh? A modern guy you are anyway. You have a beard. Thanks for teaching and doing what you do, professor. Yeah, and thanks for writing in smart thinking with the subject line. Good work. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us I'm at Joshlark at Twitter. And you can also follow the official Sisk podcast on Twitter. You can hang out with Chuck at Charleswchuckbrian on Facebook or facebookcom stuffyhea. You can send us an email to Stuffpodcast at how stuffworks.com. As always, join us at our homeowners web Stuffyshadow.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." | |
How Anesthesia Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-anesthesia-works | The use of general anesthesia is less than 200 years old. Before doctors were able to cause unconsciousness in patients, surgery was brutal for all involved. But despite this advancement in medicine, science still has no idea how it works. | The use of general anesthesia is less than 200 years old. Before doctors were able to cause unconsciousness in patients, surgery was brutal for all involved. But despite this advancement in medicine, science still has no idea how it works. | Tue, 17 Mar 2015 14:49:11 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=14, tm_min=49, tm_sec=11, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=76, tm_isdst=0) | 49878978 | 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 SYSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. 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. 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, who's about to go to the hardware store any second now. I wish. No, Jerry doesn't find that very funny. Yeah, I give the background there and just leave people wondering. Well, we need a trash can and a dimmer background. We've been asking for I feel like months. But it can't be months because we haven't even been here that long. It's been like four days. But what's the problem here? Why isn't there any movement on this? There's a Home Depot 1000 yards crossed from our street. Yeah, I specifically didn't mention their name, but, yes, it is the closest. Well, an orange, big box hardware retailer. We could also support local business and go to an Ace instead. Yeah, or we could just talk about anesthesia like we were supposed to. Ace is a big chain too, though. Yeah, but I think they're locally owned. Oh, right. Like Henry's Ace Hardware. Sure, I like Ace. Yeah, it's good stuff. Very helpful. Very knowledgeable staff. Good guy. Much more helpful than some of the other big bucks that are orange and blue. Right. Okay. That was a great start. Chuck? Yes? Do you know how to spell anesthesia? I have a struggle. It's one of those, in fact, when you are out of the room getting your coffee, jerry was asking how to spell it. I know, and I think she spelled it right. Or maybe missed a letter. I bet you missed a letter, an E, didn't you, Jerry? I think she put an A where there was supposed to be an E. Oh, well, I think that used to be an accepted spelling. You know how in some distant times, like the 40s or the 30s, which Jerry identifies with, anesthesia would have been spelled with an Ae rather than just an E because there was another sound. Yeah. It is a tricky one, though. Okay, well, then my next question. Chuck, do you know what anesthesia means? I do it's from Greek, like, a lot of medical terms. And this one stands for the loss of sensation. And we'll talk about our personal experiences, I assume, but I've never been under general anesthesia. Yeah, the big daddy. Have you ever been fully under? Have you? No. So neither one of us has had major surgery like that, then? No. Knock wood. Yeah, because after doing some research on this, I don't know that I ever would want to. It's scary. Yeah. Let me just say also to anybody who is listening to this prior to undergoing a surgical procedure that requires general anesthesia, we don't mean to scare you. No. Because we'll talk about rate of death and problems with it, which there are still but it's super safe now. For the most part. Yes. But when I was reading this, I was like, man, what they're doing is bringing you toward death and then stopping at a certain point. Yeah. And just letting you hover there and then bringing you out when they're getting ready to with a lot of, like, crazy, heavy drugs that are only slightly different from what they used in the early history, which we're about to talk about, but it's kind of nuts. And they still don't know exactly how it works. No. And the reason why they don't know how it works is especially we understand local anesthesia and Twilight sedation. Sure. What we don't understand is general anesthesia. And the reason why we don't understand because we don't understand how consciousness works. So how can we understand how unconsciousness works? Yes. It's pretty weird, but it works. Yeah, it definitely does. And although there are some risks associated with it, it is far, far, far better than the alternative, which is no anesthesia, which was the way it was for a very long time. I mean, anesthesia is a relatively recent thing. Yeah. We're getting you super drunk or hitting you in the head and knocking you unconscious. So knocking you unconscious, that qualifies the anesthesia, but it's still not medical. Anesthesia giving you drunk, giving you morphine, giving you marijuana, gymsum weed, mandrake. Yeah. Rubbing stinging nettles on you to distract you from the pain of having your leg cut off. Belladonna using ice, all this stuff. These are so prolific. These are narcotics. These are just plain old distractions, but they don't qualify as anesthesia. And the big difference, the thing that was such a huge progression forward with anesthesia is that it doesn't just do all the pain, it dulls the pain. It takes away your consciousness, and it also prevents you from creating memories during this experience. It gives you amnesia. So it basically cuts a chunk out of your lifetime that, as far as your subjective experience goes, does not exist. It didn't happen like you were on the gurney going into the Oar room and you wake up and you're in the hospital bed and you have stitches, but there is nothing there in between ideally, yeah. For general anesthesia. Right. And that's how we can conduct surgery, because before that, there was surgery, but it was very rare and it was very awful. Yeah. And we flew by some of those. But we did mention a lot of the soapophorics and narcotics that they use. They did knock you in the head. They did get you drunk. In fact, in the mid 1840s, those were opium and alcohol. Were the two go to a towel to bite on, I guess, and just make you feel to tolerate the pain, which didn't really help. No. I mean, I'm sure it helped. It dulled the pain, but it's not going to do what you want, which is to kill it completely or knock you out or render you sure. All right. So those were the two go to that they used. I mean, there were other ones, too, like blood lighting until a stupor or basically a coma was induced. Like, you lost so much blood. That's pretty dangerous. But these were the go to painkillers for surgery, and they still didn't work very well. But what's weird is, in the 1840s, all that changed, like, not one, not two, but three anesthesias came in. We're basically discovered for medical use, like, almost all at the same time. Yeah. People now basically say, Crawford Long, from right here in Georgia, university of Georgia graduate, fellow Bulldog. He was the first. He performed surgery, removed a tumor from a neck from a Mr. Bennett in late March, 1842, and also later did an amputation and childbirth with ether. And he was the guy, but it was pretty regional, and people just didn't know about it, basically. I also get the impression that he wasn't as much of a self promoter as Dr. William Morton. Yeah, he did well, william Morton in 1846. We might as well go and say he demonstrated it for the first time in a public surgical theater right. And said, Here is what I'm doing, and this is new and it's exciting, and I'm in Massachusetts, not some Yoko in Georgia. Pretty much. And that's how he gained the acclaim. But, yeah, I guess Crawford Long was able to prove that he does that. He'd used ether earlier. He's just like it just wasn't being a big shot about it. I was just using it. But, you know, he discovered ether by hanging out with friends who were huffing ether at a party, and supposedly he saw one guy run into a door and cut his head open. And Crawford Long, being a doctor, was like, Are you okay? And the guy was like, what are you talking about? It's like blood spurting out of his forehead. And corporate long went genius. Ether. That's pretty funny. And he went on to tell Congress about it, as did Dr. Charles Jackson, who said that he had done it before. Morton, as well. They both independently went to Congress. I was like, hey, man, I did that first. Right. So a bit of self promotion. Yes. But Morton is the guy who gets the credit. He's the one who really introduced it to the public. Well, gets the credit as the first demonstrator. Yeah. Right. He's the one that you hear of, typically. Yeah. I would say Crawford Long, though. Yeah, I guess you're right. You got lots of hospitals named after him. At least one here. Although now no, it's not Crawford Long anymore. Yeah. They change it. Yes. To Home Depot. So a little bit later on, there was a dentist, Dr. Horace Wells, who used the first dude to use nitrous oxide to pull teeth. And then chloroform was used by Dr. James Simpson. And these things you don't want to be using that, though. It's toxic. So dr. Horace Wells actually is a pretty interesting story. It's where chloroform and nitrous oxide converge. That's a beautiful place. So he extracted one of his own teeth on nitrous and was like, this is great. Did you read that history of hippie crack article? Yeah. So this all came after somebody, a guy named Joseph Priestley in the 18th century, synthesized nitrous oxide. And then very shortly after that, a teenage prodigy named Humphrey Davy started huffing it. And he actually had a box built for himself and was placed in it for over an hour once. Just huffing nitrous oxide. I suppose I've lived through that. I am, too. And he did, because that's what's dangerous. Yes, it is. But this guy was huffing it like crazy. There must have been, like, some escaping or other air getting into something, but he huffed it for, like, an hour just for self experimentation. By the time Horace Wells tried it on the tooth, there was a lot of confidence and understanding of nitrous oxide. He was able to successfully remove his own tooth. When he demonstrated it, he didn't dose the patient properly, and the patient apparently cried out. And so Wells had staked all his reputation on this demonstration, just failed utterly, and ended up on skid row in New York, went on a chloroform bender, and ended up throwing acid on a couple of women, was put in jail, and ended up committing suicide by slashing his flemoral artery with the razor from a shaving kit. But he was on chloroform, so he was anesthetized, ironically, when he died. Well, that's good. Weird. Yeah. What a strange history. The point is, in the 1840s, chloroform, nitrous oxide, and ether all emerged to form anesthesia. Yeah. And it would have come around eventually, but it's not so different today. Like I said, we're still using heavy duty drugs to knock people clean out and monitor them so they don't die from it. Right. It's pretty crazy. Well, one other thing about the introduction of anesthesia is that it took another 50 or so years before the medical establishment said, yes, we need to use this widely as part of standard and best practices. And part of that was because pain was seen as necessary. It was a sign that the patient was alive, was still vital. There's a bit of a macho edge to it, from what I understand. And then there was also a reluctance to draw attention to the fact that surgery is extremely painful. Yeah. Because they didn't want people to not go to the doctor much. Yeah. So it took like, 50 years to catch on. So imagine being one of those patients where the modern medicine is well aware of anesthesia but hasn't adopted it yet. That's worse than being a patient before they understood there was such a thing as anesthesia. Yeah. Or imagine being because there was a lot of figuring it out along the way as far as dosage and stuff like that goes. So there are a lot of unwitting guinea pigs. I guess there were duck. That hurts. Take a little more. That or doc, I'm dead. Yeah, exactly. Like, you remember the castration episode we did? Oh, boy, do I. And they talked about how they would use opium as an anesthesia, but it was very easy to accidentally overdose the little boys when you're removing their testicles. Sure. I think the same thing happened when you were cutting off a man's leg in the civil war. Great. Removing testicles. Yeah, for castration. Not circumcision. The castration. I thought you said circumcision, man. We've done both. Yes, but I was like, man, I thought circumcision was something different. No, that means the circumcision is going horribly awry. Yeah, man. We've covered some gruesome stuff. All right, well, I guess we'll take a break here and talk about some of the different methods of anesthesia right after this. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to sack via 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 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. All right, before we broke, we teased you a little bit with the different types. And here we go. And up first is my favorite twilight sleep. If you've had your wisdom teeth out or maybe endoscopy, there's plenty of procedures that use it. You might have had twilight sleep or conscious sedation or twilight anesthesia. And I had some for when I had my tooth replaced, my front tooth. And it's always fun because it feels great going in. You just relish those like ten or 15 seconds. Yeah. And then it feels fun coming out because you don't know what's going on. Or it's more fun when you're picking up your loved one. Right. I picked up Emily after her endoscopy and I went in and I don't know why I didn't think that my video going already, but she was like, I think everyone is throwing a party for me. The people behind the curtain, they're throwing a party. I saw balloons and it was very cute because they're like so out of it. Yeah. And when I came out of my wisdom teeth, I think I may have told this before, but my friend told me that this particular doctor put bunny ears on you and took a picture because you're all puffed up and you have bandages around your face. And I was like, that's not going to happen to me, I guarantee it. And I remember distinctly seeing the lady come in with the bunny ears, put them on my head and get the Polaroid out and said Smile. And I just went, yeah, gave a big smile. So that actually messed with you. Well, that's definitely Twilight Sedation. Yes. Because it's pretty fun. You are out of it, but you're still conscious and you're still able to follow instructions. Yeah. But you don't know that, right. When you wake up, quote unquote, you feel like, I did nothing happen. But they're like, no, you were talking to us and stuff. Right. So weird. It is very weird. The Twilight sedation, they use virtually the same drug in a lot of cases that they use for general anesthesia so much, right. Just smaller doses. So they'll use a sedative or something like that. Like ketamine. Right. Like we said, major drugs. I mean, if you've heard of falling into a K hole, that's the same drug, right? Ketamine. Yeah. But it's just crazy that we're like, oh, back in the days they used cocaine on people and that's nuts, right? We use ketamine. Big difference. Yeah. So there's like ketamine, they might use something like Valium or Adavan or something like that. They'll probably also use dissociative, which apparently disconnects your nerves from your brain. Yeah. That's what value is. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. And then also they'll use an analgesic, which is just another word for painkiller. That's right. You've got all these things working in combination, probably given to you intravenously and you're a little bit wasted. But the point of twilight sleep and the thing that separates it from other types of anesthesia is that you are not so wasted that you can't breathe on your own, that your heart can't beat on its own. Right. You'll be monitored. But really they've given you such a low dose of this cocktail of chemicals that you're still able to do things like smile when the dentist put funny ears on you. Yeah. I also remember when I woke up, I remember seeing a poster that said Locomotive Lasagna on the wall. And of course, it didn't say that unless they went so far as to switch out posters to mess with you. I could see that because this Venice clearly had a sense of humor. Put bunny ears on people, it's like Tim Watley from Seinfeld. Yeah, but I was a little kid, I never even had a drop of alcohol, so I never had my head altered in any way. Right. So I was like, this is crazy. Did you start going to dentist every Friday? I did. I had all 50 wisdom teeth removed. You're like, I know there's another one in there. The other good thing about the twilight sleep is it's not going to have the after effects as general. Like, you probably won't have nausea or dizziness or vomiting. Maybe a little bit. Like they will give you a prescription, probably, but you probably won't need to use it. Right. Antinacious stuff. So that's twilight sleep, aka procedural sedation. I don't know if we ever called it that. That's the clinical term for it. Twilight sleep is the prettier name for it. Yeah. Then there's also a local anesthetic, which is the other common type of anesthesia where basically a small area or a specific region of the body is basically numbed. Yeah. That's when you get the worst thing that can happen to you in life, which is shots into the gum, a needle in the gum, and the dentist. Which is why the dentist will frequently use a topical anesthesia. It helps a little, right. So that it will numb your gums when they put the needle in. Yeah. They'll put like, that gel and that will nun a little bit. Or if you're getting sometimes like an IV in the arm, they'll spray it with the cold stuff. Right. And that all helps, for sure. It does. You'll still feel the pressure of the needle going into your jaws, but you don't feel the pain. Right. The reason why these things work is a local anesthetic actually goes to the area it's delivered to and blocks the nerve receptors. It actually keeps your potassium and your sodium ions from firing. Right? That's right. Which means that it's not conducting electricity, which means that your nerves aren't capable of passing along the sensation of pain to your brain. They're just shut down. That's what a local anesthetic does. And if you pay attention, local anesthetics all end in AENE. Yes. And for a pretty good reason, like lidocaine or Novocaine, even though they don't use Novocaine that much anymore. It's a derivative of cocaine. And cocaine has a topical numbing effect. And they used to use it yes. To do that. Right. And then they said, Why is everybody showing up to the dentist all the time? And then they said, oh, yes, it's because of the cocaine. So let's figure out a synthesized version of it. And they came up with Novocaine, lidocaine, all that. And they stopped using Novocaine, apparently, because the potential for adverse reactions was greater. Yeah. But people still do have allergies to local anesthetics, but it turns out it's not the local anesthetic itself. It's not the Novocaine, it's not the lidocaine. What it is is when you use a local anesthetic, it has the effect of vasodilation, which means that it makes your blood vessels relax, which lowers your blood pressure, which is good, but it also is not so good. So they add epinephrine, which is a vasoconstrictor, and it actually makes the local anesthetic work better. So if you get a local anesthetic, you're getting the local anesthetic, like lydocaine mixed with epinephrine and a preservative to keep the epinephrine fresh. And it's the preservative that you're having the adverse reaction to. Yeah. And again, just a wellbalanced cocktail to give you exactly what you need. Local is going to wear off in a few hours. It depends on how much you have. When you leave the dentist, you'll still have your mouth numb for a while and they always want you not to eat or talk too much because you can accidentally bite your tongue and your cheek and not know it. Yeah, which actually happened to me recently. And I did bite my cheek, man, a lot. Yeah, I bled a little bit too. You all right? Yeah, I'm fine. So it's not just dental that you're going to get, like, a local anesthetic. You could also be given a local anesthetic for what's called awake brain surgery. What? Yes. So in some types of brain surgery, you need to be conscious, you can't be unconscious. They need to keep track of what the brain is doing and they need it to be in a conscious state. So they will give you some drugs where you're not necessarily like, you might be seated, like you might be on a little bit of volume or something like that, but you're still conscious, you're still able to respond to questions, but they give you a local anesthetic because they take the top of your head off and work on your brain. I think it's in hellraiser. There's like, awake brain surgery is shown. Yeah, I think I've seen that in another movie too. Yeah. Because I need to be able to ask you things like, isn't this nuts? Yeah. Can you believe that your brain is exposed? Is that crazy? This is weird. Are we onto regional? I believe so. Regional anesthesia is sort of like local, but it covers a wider area of your body. So, like, if you need your whole leg numbed for an operation, and not just like a small portion of your leg, that would be regional. It's also called a nerve block, basically, because they're just taking a single nerve or bundle of nerves and blocking that. Right. They're going after one of the big daddies rather than a little one, but, again, localized, like women who have given birth. Sometimes we get an epidural, and that's what that is. It is injected via catheter into the epidural space in the lower back, but that doesn't necessarily mean directly into the spine, which also can happen with a spinal block right into that cerebrospinal fluid, which is about as direct as you can get. And if you get a Csection or maybe hernia surgery, and that's when they want you awake again during the surgery, like with epidural. Chuck, I was wondering. So, in epidural, it's in the space outside of the spinal column. Yeah. But it's used to numb you from the waist down, like when you're giving birth or something like that. That's right. And it's actually a catheter is introduced in a continuous IV cocktails, given almost your spine. Yeah. But not into the spine. No. Yeah, that would be a spinal. I wondered, how do they make it so it's your waist down that's getting them. Why isn't your waist up? Oh. Like, how do they know the path is going downward? Yes. So I looked it up, and it turns out it doesn't always. Yes. Sometimes it can reverse and numb you from the waist up, in which case you're in. Like that's a problem because your breathing can stop, your heart can stop. There's a bunch of stuff that can stop, but apparently it's extraordinarily rare. But it can happen where, like, the intended area is reversed when they give you an epidural. There can also be complications from the epidural that aren't great. So hopefully that doesn't happen if you're giving birth. Right. Well, same with the spinal, as well. There are complications, like you can get a meningol infection or an abscess, something like that. It happened to a friend of ours. That's why I got dodgy. I didn't want to say it on the air. Oh, I got you. Yeah. I'll tell you after. Okay. Just write it down. Okay. Yeah. I talked about the spinal block. There's a little bit more risk, like we said, than local, obviously, like seizures and heart attacks, and sometimes it doesn't give enough pain relief, and you have to move on to general. They're like, Doctor, this is a working right. Can you just knock me out? Yeah. Because some patients want to be awake and some patients don't, and sometimes they will defer to you on that. Who will defer to who? The doctor. Oh, yes. Do you want to be awake for this or not? Especially during childbirth, too? Sure. Like, give me the drugs. Give me the drugs. Common refrain. Yes. Or I want to be awake, at least, but give me the epidural. I'll go in thinking natural childbirth is the way to go. And then I changed my mind getting into drugs, which is, hey, that's you're, right? Sure. Give birth. You should do it however you want to coats at home in a tub with a goat. Very funny. So Chuck, you had a pretty great segue that we just trod all over in the general anesthesia again. The big daddy is what I think most people call it. That's when you're put under and that is when you are out, you don't remember anything, you're asleep, you're unconscious. And that's the one where they don't completely understand how it works, which is a little scary. It is a little scary. And there have been people who have tried to figure out how to quantify it using magical boxes and transcranial magnetic stimulation stimulation. And I flubbed that one. The thinking cap. Yeah. But ultimately we don't know. So there's a general idea, basically a working theory, and that is that anesthesia the drugs that we use, and it's a bunch of different ones working in conjunction, but they depress the activity of the spinal cord. So you're paralyzed the brain stem reticular activating system, which is basically, they think responsible for sleepiness and wakefulness that's stimulated or depressed, depending on your way of looking at it. And then your cerebral cortex is affected as well. So you're not thinking, you're not forming memories, you're not making associations with any of this. And all of that in conjunction with one another comes to anesthesia general anesthesia which is utter and complete unconsciousness. That's right. And it can last a few hours or up to 6 hours if you're having like serious complicated surgery. But there is a limit. They can't just be like this is a twelve hour surgery. Yeah. I thought there were surgeries like that where they're like the surgery lasted 72 hours but the guy was successfully transplanted. Yeah, that is true. How do they do that? Because it's really dangerous to get someone under general anesthesia for that long. Yeah, that's a good point. I meant to look into that. Someone will let us know. Sure. We'll follow up on that for sure. If you are going to be put under general anesthesia, you don't just walk in and start huffing the gas. There's a lot of work that goes into that. You have to be invited. You have to be invited by you have to get a party invite from your anesthesiologist. You will meet with them and he or she will basically ask you a bunch of questions about your lifestyle and your medical history. Are you a natural redhead? Yeah. Because we covered that in the redhead episode. You might need a little more. Yeah. Are you a little kid? Yeah. I can tell by looking. Yes. Because little kids livers process these drugs a lot faster. So they need a higher dose, basically. Are you a huge alcoholic? Not well, it depends on what you say, sir. Are you heroin addict? Not anymore. So depending on the answers to these questions, they're going to need to adjust your dose, depending. Do you have low blood pressure, high blood. Pressure. Yes. And this is where you want to be super honest about your drinking and drugs? Yeah. If you're a heroin addict, you need to pass up. You can be like, hey, man, can you be cool and keep a secret? Yeah. Don't, like, lie like you do to your shrink. Right. You really want to be honest because you want this to work well and be safe. After they have all that, they're going to basically put together your program on what you're going to need, and then they're going to tell you not to eat. Because if you eat before you go under anesthesia, you can aspirate and basically breathe in what's in your stomach. Right. So not everybody believes us any longer, supposedly, about eating before surgery. I understand, is that when there are so few cases of aspiration under anesthesia, especially twilight sedation because you're not eating well, yeah, that's a good point. I hadn't thought of but apparently well, yeah, you just answered that question before you could say. Well, from what I understood, there was a study that looked at all these different cases of aspiration, they found it's very rare, and they concluded that the potential danger of aspirating under sedation is low enough that it's outweighed by the benefits of eating. Because if you don't eat and you undergo sedation on an empty stomach, which is what they want you to do, it's a lot harder on your system. You're much more likely to be nauseated, to vomit afterwards, to be dizzy, whereas if you eat something, your body can process these drugs a little better. So are they advising people to eat now? I think that they're starting to get to that point, but I don't believe it's, like current widespread practice. Yeah, I don't think I would I don't know, maybe I'm superstitious. I don't know if I'd be chowing on a burrito before I go in for my heart surgery. Well, just for the surgeon's benefit, I think you might want to avoid burritos before going under for being knocked unconscious. Yeah, you're right. You will be wearing a breathing mask when you're under general anesthesia or breathing tube because basically your muscles are so relaxed that your airways won't stay open. So that's a little creepy in itself. And they're going to be monitoring lots and lots of things while you're under. They are in the room and probably have an assistant in the room with them to monitor all this stuff. Right. Like blood pressure, heart rate, O, two levels, CO2 levels, temperature, brain activity. And there's even a little alarm if your two level drops, which is great. I think they should have an alarm for everything. Yeah. The more alarms the better, in that case. And I guess we should talk about the four stages of general anesthetic. Yes. Stage one is the induction stage, or the one you were talking about, those 15 seconds where you're like pure bliss. Right. And then quickly moves to stage two, which is the twitchy stage, where you're just kind of like, well, switching it's, your body going like, what the heck is going on? What is this? And then you move quickly to stage three, which is the stage that they're after, where you're not twitching anymore, you're not conscious any longer, and you are under a state of general anesthesia. You are anesthesized. Right. And this is where you want to be. But there is, like you said, a fourth stage. Yeah. You don't want to go there. No, that's the overdose stage. Yeah. And once you're in this stage, it is now a medical emergency and you have to be managed, brought out of before you suffer brain damage or death or all sorts of other problems. Yeah. And I remember when I read this the first time, I thought, well, why do they even have this fourth stage? I think it's just there. Yeah, but anesthesia is a thing. It doesn't mean, like, if you don't have a great anesthesiologist, there can be that four stage. Sure. I think even with a good anesthesiologist having a bad day, things can happen. I had a squirrel and now this guy is dead. When you do go under, you are, like I said, going to get the gas or an IV or both. There are lots of different drugs that they will combine again. Ketamine, Valium, sodium pinophol. Oh, the go to is they're going to knock you out first with the IV, usually almost across the board. It's propa fall. Michael Jackson's milk. That's right. And that's what they do to initially knock you out. And then they're going to add that he actually needed that to sleep and it didn't even work. It's a crazy thing. Like, he was so wound up that even propyfall wouldn't work. Unbelievable. It is sad. What a sad way to go. You might also get a muscle relaxer to make sure that paralysis really takes hold. Yeah. And if this is all kind of familiar, go back and listen to our lethal injection episode, because that is stage four and technically stage five. And general anesthesia is lethal injection. Yes. Again, that's why this is so nuts. They're almost killing you. Yeah, well, maybe that's overstating it, but they're not bringing you to the brink of death, but they want you close enough to where you're out. Yeah. After surgery, you don't just get up and dance out of the room. You're going to go to the Pacu, the post anesthesia care unit, and then you're going to keep getting monitored. You're going to be dehydrated and cold because you're heading toward death. So they're going to warm you up, some warm IVs. There are also some drugs that they started to use. Now, I had some oral surgery and you may pick me up and I can't remember any of the stories or whatever oh, really? But I remember going from being out to just being totally with it. Sure. And apparently I've been given a drug that's like a reverse sedation drug to wake you up. Yeah. There's one called flu Mazzano and another called Naxalone, and it's just basically they also use them for overdoses of certain kinds in the Er, but they can use them post sedation to get you going again pretty quickly. Do they stick it directly into your heart for your breast? Yeah, you can sit up and inhale deeply. Wow. It sounds like I had that when I had mine. Yeah, well, I'm cutting edge. I still couldn't eat ahead of time, though. Oh, really? Yeah. But you did anyway. I read that it was fine. Chuck said I could have a burrito. You might actually get a little morphine, too, for the pain after your recovery. Yeah. But you might also have those side effects like we talked about, with the vomiting and nausea and pretty out of it. Yeah. It might fall over if you get up to use the bathroom. There is a help there's. Probably the worst potential side effect of anesthesia possible is something called anesthesia awareness. I would say that death, but we'll talk about both of those. Okay. All right. We'll get into both after this. So, Chuck, we're going to talk about anesthesia awareness, but we should probably talk about anesthesiologist first, right? Yeah. There's many levels of anesthesiology jobs. Okay. You can be an anesthesiologist full blown, which means you've gone to premed undergrad, you've gone to med school, you have done your two year residency. Sometimes 395 percent of your income goes to malpractice insurance. Does it really? I would guess not that much, but a lot. Yeah. I didn't see where you had to be certified, but you are eligible to take the Aba exam. I think if you want to be a physician anesthesiologist, you actually have to be certified. All you have to do is be able to say anesthesiologist correctly. Actually, that's not true. It says 75% of physician anesthesiologists are certified. And most of these physicians anesthesiologist do a one year of specialty training as well with either several different subspecialties, like hospice and palliative medicine, critical care medicine, and pain medicine. So basically just almost like postgraduate graduate school. Right. Or you can be an assistant, which means you have your four year undergrad and premed, and then you've gone through an accredited program and then take an exam. Or you can be a nurse, anesthesia, anesthetist, anesthetist. Anesthetist. Man, that sounds like such a dope. These are some tough words, man. I know. It's okay. A lot of stuff going on in there. A lot of T's and HS and S. Yeah. That means you're a registered nurse who has completed a training program which lasts two to three years. You're going to have to have your BS degree, and at the end of one year of practice experience, when you go through that training program and take an exam. So, again, many years. It's like serious, serious stuff. It's not like, oh, I want to be a doctor, but I don't want to go through all the schooling, so I'll just be an anesthesiologist. I want to have access to the finest drugs available on planet Earth. Right. No, it's still serious. Like, you're a doctor. Well, you're not like you're any lesser of a you're a nurse. What do you mean? And anesthetic you said was a nurse. No, I'm just talking about all of those jobs require lots and lots of schooling. It's not like the easy way out. I certainly hope not. No, it's a very serious job. Okay, so it is a very serious job. Again, we said you are being brought to the brink of death or stupid, unconsciousness or whatever you want to call it, and then brought back without any side effects or as few side effects as possible. That's right. And certainly no lasting side effects. But there is something. There's a pernicious syndrome that doctors have been aware of, the anesthesiologists have been aware of at least since the 60s, which is called anesthesia awareness. And basically anesthesia awareness is where you are given anesthesia, which includes a paralytic, which means you can't move your body at all. And your eyes have been taped shut, so you can't see, but you are conscious. You are aware during surgery. So the painkillers would have probably worked, too, but something went wrong. And you're not unconscious, so you're able to form memories. You're able to hear the doctors talking about you like you're a piece of meat. You're able to hear the cutting, the squishing, the tearing of your organs being moved around. You can smell the singed hair and cauterized flesh. You're able to feel genuine fear in some cases if the pain reliever hasn't worked. You're able to experience this excruciating pain and you're not able, as badly as you want to, to alert anybody on the surgical team. It's like you're locked in yes. That you're experienced. Yes. It's like performing surgery on a locked in person without any kind of painkiller or anything like that. Yes. I didn't know your eyes were tape shut during surgery either because you never see that on TV shows, do you? I've never noticed that. Yeah, I've seen it before, but I probably on one of those, like remember they used to have real surgeries on maybe Discovery in the early days. Yeah. Back when they were doing stuff like that. Yeah, I looked into that, though, and that's for a couple of reasons, obviously, to keep the eyes from drying out, because apparently eyelids do not close in 59% of patients when under general anesthesia. They'll just be staying wild. It is creepy. So it's to keep the eyes from drying. And I didn't realize this is to prevent corneal abrasion. Apparently that had been or can be a real problem even if your surgery is not on your eyes. There's just a lot of activity around your face, like a stethoscope. You scratch your eye. Does that make sense? Yeah, a lot of stuff can happen. So we'll tape your eyes shut. So they tape it shut so you can't see. But again, you can still hear, you can still feel. And even if you're not feeling pain, you can still feel the pressure. Remember, even with, like, a local anesthetic, you can't feel the pain, but you can feel the pressure of the needle going in your jaw. This is the same thing with stomach surgery or your heart being taken from your chest or what have you. So a lot of people, apparently studies have found since the 60s that about two out of every thousand patients or surgeries will experience anesthesia awareness. Yeah, they said that's super rare. That's not rare enough for me. No, I was hoping to see like one in 100,000 or 100 million. Yeah. No, it's like two out of every thousand. And supposedly 70% of people who experience anesthesia awareness suffer from clinical PTSD, which is five times more than soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. And we're getting this stuff from an Atlantic article called Awakening by Joshua Lang. Just go read it. It's a really great article. Yeah. They gave this one case. There's a bunch of cases in there, but this one, Sherman says Moore Jr. Was a Baptist minister and coal miner. Former coal miner. He was 73. And he had exploratory laparotomy. Is that right? Yeah, in 2006. And any kind of exploratory surgery, it's not fun because they're basically looking around for stuff, moving things around. Yeah, they cut away, like the flesh and belly fat and all that stuff. And we're looking at the film that holds your guts in place. Yeah, they're poking around in there. And he, of course, had interoperative recall, which is another term for anesthesia awareness. That's right. And basically, his family couldn't understand what was going on with them. A lot of times you'll have these bad dreams, these nightmares about blood and people coming at you and trapping you, and it's severe PTSD. And he eventually killed himself, even though he had no history of psychiatric illness, within two weeks of his surgery yeah. Shot himself dead. And his family had settled with a lawsuit because they claim that no one even said that this could happen, or you should see counseling or anything like that. So sad. Oh, yeah, it's very sad. Supposedly, people who suffer from PTSD, from anesthesia awareness almost across the board, can't lay down and sleep. They have to sleep in chairs because laying down would stir memories of being on the or table. And again, anesthesiologists, philosophers, any kind of scientists, they don't know how this is happening because we don't understand consciousness. So we don't understand the mechanism that produces unconsciousness. And then, even further, we don't understand when that mechanism that's supposed to produce unconsciousness fails to produce unconsciousness and someone remains conscious and experiences anesthesia awareness. Yeah. I would think there's got to be some fail safe for this by now. Like, untape the eyes midway and say, like, blink if you can feel me. Feel this. But you've been paralyzed. You can't move. No, it seems like they should. I mean, I don't know. It seems like it's got to be something they could do. Like, there's a machine that has to breathe for you because your lungs can't even move well. That's why they tape your eyes to begin with, I guess, because you can't blink. Yeah. That's creepy that people like their eyes remain open. Yes. Wonderful. It's like the mom from Throw mama from the train. Like, even if you can't blink, I wonder if there's any kind of sign that you could give. Well, so in this awakening article they talk about, there was a guy who came up with this box that was meant to it gave, like, a number between zero and 100 that supposedly reflected a level of consciousness to be used in the operating room for anesthesia, so that the anesthesiologist could be confident that somebody wasn't experiencing anesthesia awareness, and they found that it doesn't really work. So there are people who have undertaken the request to basically show somehow there's some outward sign of whether someone's conscious or not, but we just haven't looked it yet. Yeah. I can't believe there's not some sort of machine that could pick up on that, but they've tried. Or maybe they're just like two and every thousand. Yeah, I can live with those numbers. No, that's way too common. Man. That scares me to death. Yeah, well, you said that's the worst thing that can happen. I vote for death is the worst thing. Yeah. In the 1940s, for every 1 million patients who had full anesthesia, 640 of them died. By the 80s, that was down to four for every million, which to me, that's good and rare. Four out of every million? Yeah. But that number is actually scarily on the rise. Since the 1980s, a German publication called Deutsches Artsablat it's the German Medical Association's science journal, and they said that worldwide death rate is on the rise to about seven now per million. And the number of deaths within one year after general anesthesia is one in 20. Or if you're over 65, one in ten. What, and that's within the year after. Yeah, but even still, it's not good. No. And that doesn't necessarily mean that's due to the anesthesia, because they make the point that it's not like the quality of anesthesiological care is different. It's that older people are having surgery these days. That's a good point. That's a very good point. Yeah, that's probably what it's due to. But correlation is not causing yeah. I mean, they said for a patient to actually die on the operating table is super rare from anesthesiology. It's currently much more common to experience anesthesia awareness two in every thousand. Why don't they say one in 500? Yes. Really? Trying to be like, oh, two in every thousand. They say it like that, too. One in 500. I know. And that's not one in 500 patients. One in 500 surgeries. There's a lot more surgeries than patients. Yeah. And when you take your pets in, they undergo general anesthesia, too, for surgery. They always say, like, your pet could die. It's rare, and it happens this often, but it can happen, and you have to sign the waivers. And that's always especially if an older animal it's a little bit of a quandary you're in whether or not to get the surgery. Is it worth the risk? Sure. All that stuff. That's all I got. I got nothing else, too. It's anesthesia. If you are feeling confident about spelling that word correctly, go ahead and type it into the search bar@houseworks.com. And I said, Search for everybody, which means it's time for listener mail. This one. I'm going to call ESP. We heard from a lot of people on this one so far. Yeah, but it wasn't as bad as I thought. No. Hey, guys, just listen to ESP. It was great, as usual. Your podcast helped me get through my work day and make me laugh, because I learned doing random things with regards to ESP, or whatever people want to call it. I don't know if I believe in it exactly, but I do strongly believe that some individuals are much more intuitive or connected than others. And here's an example. When I was eleven, my mother died. We were living in Vancouver at the time, and she had died at home. We had not yet called any of the family to notify them until a few hours later. But about 15 minutes after she passed away, my paternal grandmother, who was in Hong Kong, called and said, is Lana okay? I suddenly got a very strong and bad feeling about her, and I thought I should call. And again, we hadn't told anyone yet, and it had only been 15 minutes. My grandmother has always been very intuitive. It always felt like no matter where our family was, she always somehow had her eye on us in a comforting way. Not so creepy. Right. She points out she was devout and practicing Buddhist her whole life, and it is partly her devotion to Buddhism somehow makes me believe that she was a soul deeply connected to the rest of the world. Yes. Kind of cool. Yeah. Explain that. I think we pointed out in the ESP podcast that probably the likeliest, explanation is that the Buddha hands it out to as most of our followers. There you have it. Looks like Granny. I don't have her last name, but that is from Joy and the Grainy in Hong Kong. That's right. Even the joy is in Australia. Kenberra. Kenberra. Kenberra. Australia. Anesthesia Hong Kong. Joy. Thanks, Joy. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Joy. That's a good story. And we got some like that, actually, didn't we? Probably more of those than Peterson work. Yeah, we got very few of those. I was really surprised. Yeah, I thought we did a good job of laying it out there. Yeah. Well, if you want to share a good family story like Joy did, you can tweet to us at Syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffysheno, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com, and you can visit our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. There's a perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You know you're the best pet mom when you growl back during playtime, get epic belly rubs. Feed them halo holistic made with responsibly sourced ingredients, plus probiotics for Digestive health. Find us at chewy amazonandhalopeets.com." | ||
7a118cf8-4684-4053-be98-aeaf00e43ec0 | Selects: How Drowning Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-how-drowning-works | Hundreds of thousands of people drown around the world every year, and yet it can be easily prevented and is widely misunderstood – like how you can officially drown but live to tell the tale, or how you can drown but die days later. Learn all about it in this classic episode.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Hundreds of thousands of people drown around the world every year, and yet it can be easily prevented and is widely misunderstood – like how you can officially drown but live to tell the tale, or how you can drown but die days later. Learn all about it in this classic episode.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Sat, 11 Jun 2022 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=162, tm_isdst=0) | 49746416 | audio/mpeg | "Hi, everyone. It's Chuck. It's Saturday, and that means it's time for another Saturday select. This one is originally was originally released May 10, 2018. And it's pretty terrifying because it's about drowning. It's actually very sad. Said, I don't even remember if we made any jokes in this one because drowning is frankly terrifying and probably one of the worst ways that one can die if you don't like being in a panic. So how drowning works. May 10, 2018. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there. So that makes this stuff you should know. Hi. How are you feeling? Kind of upbeat, positive. Well, I will say that this topic I felt like I was having a panic attack while researching and reading this stuff. Me too. Like, I noticed I felt like I couldn't breathe at some point. Yeah. And we covered a little bit of this in worse ways to die many years ago. Yeah. But boy, oh, boy, drowning is no picnic. No, it's not. And one of the things that I'd always heard about drowning is that it was actually a very peaceful experience. I don't think that's the case. Yeah. Obviously, no one can say for certain, but it doesn't seem to be. No at all. And it seems to be actually not a good way to go. Well, I mean, you probably could and this is giving something away early, but one of the possible outcomes aside from death is morbidity, which is you develop an injury or disability because of what happened. Aren't you on record for hating that word, morbidity? Yeah, I don't know. I don't like it. Well, my apologies. Go ahead. And no morbidity. So you could ask someone who suffered drowning with no morbidity, like, was it peaceful? And they'll probably be like, no. Well, that's where I got that from was online. If you go and you got to take it all with a grain of salt because there's plenty of 14 year olds who like to just make stuff up. Sure. But there are threads on Reddit and other places that basically are supposedly people who have survived drowning. And I didn't find any that were like it was actually very peaceful. My brain flooded with endorphins, and I was ready to go into the light. Instead, it was more like I saw one that said it burned like lava. Which, I mean, if you think about it, if you've ever had something go down the wrong pipe or whatever, how much that hurts your chest. Yeah. Well, Chuck, we're here to tell everybody that what you experienced, where you took a drink of coke and it went down the wrong pipe, that didn't go anywhere near your lungs. Right. That was the least of what can happen to you. And it just hit your epiglottis, which is that flap that converts your trachea into your esophagus. Right? Yeah. That flap that's like, sometimes I want to work and sometimes I want to scare you to death. Right. But zero coke went into your lungs when that happened, so imagine how bad that is. That was just your epiglottis. It actually gets way worse when you actually are drowning. You said something that we really need to point out here, because for as long as people have been drowning, basically, yeah. Since people have been people. Right, exactly. So for as long as people have been drowning, we still have only very recently begun to make universal definitions of what drowning is. Yeah. It's 2002. The World Congress of Drowning. That's a thing. Then they at least had the good sense to hold it in Amsterdam, at least so they could get their good time on. Sure. After the meetings, they're awful. But what they did there was they decided, hey, we need to really codify this, because 350,000 people a year die, and it's the third most common cause of accidental death around the world. So let's really kind of classify this stuff. So everyone's on the same page moving forward? Yeah, because everyone wasn't on the same page. And actually, if you follow media reports, people still aren't on the same page. There's a lot of unclear terminology that the medical community doesn't recognize, but that the media uses pretty frequently. There's pretty widespread misunderstanding that drowning is not death. It's a way you can die, but it's actually a specific type of injury that starts with your epiglottis, as we'll see, or your larynx. I'm sorry, but it's like an injury that can happen to you that you can die from, but you can actually have drowned and survive. Yeah. That's very misleading because that's the actual definition. But in everyday parlance, if you say, I went to the pool last weekend and my child drowned and someone said, oh, my God, no, they're fine, right. It's not a very fair thing to say to a friend. No, it's not. But if you're following the definition of the 2002 World Congress of Drowning, that would be the right thing for you to say. Yeah, but that kind of pedantry and just everyday conversation you should lead by saying, I had a close call. My child technically drowned, according to the World Congress of Drowning. Right. They're doing fine. Push the glasses up your nose. Right, exactly. So I gave away a little bit here. With drowning, the whole process starts when water or liquid comes in contact with your larynx, your voice box, something as far as human evolution goes, something about that. Your reptilian brain out and your motor takes over. Like, your motor instincts take over, and there's very little you can do from that point on as far as conscious thought and movement. Yeah, I mean, we'll get to that last part later, but you're totally right, man. Your body is trying to do one thing and that is survive this experience. And like I said, we'll get in a little more of what drowning looks like. But during drowning, you're right. That first contact with water and the larynx, you have that gasp initially, and then you are in charge for a short time because you tried to hold your breath voluntarily. But then your larynx just starts spasming and hypoxemia. Hypoxemia. hypoexmia. Hypoxemia. Hypoxymia a bit. Hypoxiamia. No. Hypoxemia. Hypoxemia. That's what it said, right? Oh, my God. Hypoxemia. It's funny, I looked up a bunch of word pronunciations today, but that one just flew right by it. I'll tell you what I've got down is quintiniera. Yeah, that's next. Right. How about hypoexymia? Sure. Basically what that is is decreased levels of oxygen in your bloodstream. So your body is trying to fight that. Right. So your larynx, whether you like it or not, your larynx has closed. You're not breathing. You're holding your breath because your larynx is trying to prevent liquid from going into your lungs. Right. And so as this is going on, you're losing oxygen concentration in your lungs. You're having a build up of CO2. I got this from a reference to a passage from the book The Perfect Storm. Okay. But supposedly, studies have shown that after about 87 seconds, your body says, okay, the hell with this, I can't spasm any longer, I'm going to try to take a breath. Right. If you happen to be underwater, then you've just taken in water, and now a whole different set of events is happening. Right. So you're already starting to become sluggish, to lose consciousness a little bit from that lack of oxygen, because you haven't been breathing for, say, the last almost minute and a half. But now you've taken in water onto your lungs, and like I said, this changes things and it makes it way worse. Well, yes. And before that even happens, your body becomes something called acidotic. How would you pronounce that? Probably that way. Yeah, I actually listen to that one. Okay. What is it? It's acidotic. Oh, it is? Yeah. I actually probably would have made it a long o. Yeah, no long o, apparently. Okay, well, thanks for going the extra mile on that one. Yeah, I had to make up for the last one. But that's basically when if that happens, it can disrupt the electrical, your wiring to your heart, and you can go into cardiac arrest. And that's sort of near the beginning of this process. Right. So just bookmark that, everybody, because all of this is happening before your larynx stops spasming and you open up your airway and take a deep breath. And then if you happen to be underwater or your mouth is just below water level, then you've just taken in a bunch of water in your lungs. Yeah. Not good. So what happens when you take water into your lungs is when you look at your lungs, if you can just peer at your lungs, everyone, for a second, you're going to find that they are actually branching increasingly smaller tubes. Right. Yeah. This is like elementary school science. Everyone learned about the bronchi, the bronchioles alveoli. That was all kind of elementary school stuff. Right. The point is that in the alveoli, or the alveoli, the little tiny air sacs, where you exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide with the capillaries that bring blood to your lungs, there's a little something called surfactant, and it's this chemical coating around your little tiny air sacs that allow them to open and close, which pumps the oxygen and carbon dioxide in and out. Right. It allows for gas exchange. Yeah. It's a very key part of the whole system of staying alive. Yeah. Because if your surfactant isn't working, then the alveoli can't open or close, and so you're not breathing because that's really where the rubber meets the road when you breathe. So if the surfactant is damaged, you can't breathe. And when you take water into your lungs, it goes to the end to those air sacs. And depending on the type of water, it messes with the surfactant one way or another. And all of a sudden now you are not exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide, which you weren't doing very well already for the last minute and a half, but now the water is totally screwing up that jam. Well, yeah. In the case of fresh water, and this is something I didn't know, it is different depending on salt water or fresh water. But fresh water, if you're in a swimming pool or a lake or something, it actually destroys that surfactant and the alveoli collapse. It just kind of destroyed in saltwater. It actually doesn't destroy the surfactant, but it washes it away, which to me is sort of like splitting hairs. Yeah. It makes this a fact that it doesn't work anymore no matter which way you slice it. Right, exactly. And so there's a couple of different two real differences between taking in fresh water and taking in salt water in your lungs. Because fresh water bears a pretty strong resemblance to the water in your body and specifically in your blood. When that water enters your lungs, it actually passes very easily from your lungs into your bloodstream. And so what happens is the dilution, the concentration of water in your blood, it becomes overrun with water to where you end up. I saw apparently one World War II study found that people's blood, or animals blood, which I hate to think of how they found this out, you know how they found it out. But animals blood within three minutes had an equal part of water and blood or whatever is not water in the blood within three minutes, which is way more of a dilution than we normally have. So you've gone from not breathing very well because you're holding your breath, to suddenly, not only are you not exchanging air, your blood is diluted within, like, three minutes in a fresh water. Drowning? Yeah. You're really disrupting the balance of your blood and the water in your body. Everything is just thrown out of whack. And then with salt water, something else different happens, too, that saltiness in the water in your lungs actually draws water out of your blood so that your blood becomes more concentrated rather than more dilute. If you drown in salt water, the upshot of all of this is you are in big trouble once water hits your lungs. Yeah. In the case of salt water, again, in three minutes. And you know what's happening to animals? Because they called it experimental animals. So in other words, they drowned animals. I was hoping to dance around that, but, yeah, that's what they did. That's the reality. In three minutes with saltwater, experimental animals lost 40% of their normal water volume in their blood. Yeah, it just thickened, which can't feel good. The thing is, it takes, like, from what I saw, eight minutes to die. This is actually as bad as that sounds. This is actually a less quickly fatal process than what happens to you with fresh water in your lungs. Wow. But get this, Chuck. Here's where drowning gets really odd. You can die of drowning without a single drop of water ever touching your lungs. That sounds like a good place to take a break. Oh, are we going to cliffhanger this Amajama? I think we should hang it off the cliff. Okay, let's do it. All right. We'll be right back. Hey, everybody, chuck here. Did you know there are millions of people around the world hosting on airbnb right now? Yeah. Which means that's a lot of amazing homes that are making people a lot of extra money. And it doesn't have to be an everyday thing. You can host when you want. Like, let's say you're taking a week's vacation. Why not host your home? Because that money could go toward paying for your current vacation or towards your retirement fund or even towards your kids college fund. Yeah. For anything. And listen, if you're worried about your stuff, don't be. Air cover for Hosts. Let hosts welcome guests into their home without having to worry. You get $1 million in damage protection anytime you're hosting. Plus pet damage protection and income loss protection, too. And are you ready for this? Air cover for host is completely free every time you host on airbnb. Free with a capital F. With Air cover for Host, it makes hosting a nobrainer, and the benefits really start adding up. So learn more and host with peace of mind@airbnb.com. Aircoverforhosts, man. Chuck good called all. Because even I'm, like, a little on the edge of my seat, and I know it's coming next. And you know how this thing ends. Yeah, well, you're exactly right. That can happen. But to drown and die, you don't need to be the TV or movie drowning where you're floating in the water. You're fully submerged. Right. You went down with the ship or something like that? Yeah. I mean, they used to call it dry drowning in the media. They still call it dry drowning. It was coined in the but those are drowning deaths in which the larynx spasmed from exposure to water, but they died from asphyxiation. No water entered the lungs. Right. And it makes sense to call it dry drowning, but the CDC and everyone else basically said, this is just drowning. Right. It's drowning. Just because there's no water in your lungs doesn't mean you didn't drown. Right. Because whether it's the water in your lungs or the fact that you haven't been breathing, you're dying from asphyxiation. And it's a water related asphyxiation. Right? Correct. But it doesn't have to be water in your lungs. But that happens to something like 10% to 20% of people who die of drowning. Yeah. They don't have any water in their lungs whatsoever. They die before their larynx stop spasming. Yeah. There have been some really sad cases. This one that's referenced in the article you sent just last year, in 2017, a four year old boy in Texas was knocked over by a wave just playing out in the ocean, like, knee deep in water. His head did go under for a few seconds, but dad brings him out of the water, the kid recovers, he gets smacked on the butt and goes off and plays, and everything seems fine. Over the next few days, they think he has his stomach flu. He complains of a pain in his shoulder, and the parents did not get him to the doctor fast enough, and he died in his sleep. And then doctors found a very small amount of water in his lungs. Yeah. Apparently it doesn't take much. Most drowning victims have something like four CCS per kilogram of water in their lungs. So if you're a kid who weighs \u00a350, it's 3oz of water to die from that. Right. But the thing that scared everybody, scared the bejesus out of parents everywhere about this poor kid named Frankie Delgado. He died, like, days after he had his drowning incident. Right. No one knew that could happen. And this is one of the ways the media is not helping things. They call this dry drowning, too. Right. That was never even called dry drowning. This one is called secondary drowning. But again, if you go to the CDC or the World Health Organization, those don't exist. Stop calling them that. It's drowning. And you can actually die of drowning days afterward. But the thing that was really misreported about Frankie Delgado and then other kids like him is that it gives the impression that dad picked him up, spanked him on the bottom, and he went along his way and he was totally fine. Then all of a sudden drops dead three days later. Right. That's not how it works. Their health starts to decline and usually in cases where this is happening, where it's like a delayed drowning death, their health declines very obviously within two or 3 hours of the incident. And it's really bad. It's like they become sluggish because they're becoming hypoxic. They throw up a lot, they vomit a lot, they might defecate themselves, their behavior changes. It's very obvious that something is very wrong with them. But the problem is most parents don't say, oh yeah, my kid took in some water in the pool a day before. And they just think like Frankie Delgado's parents did, that it's a stomach bug or something like that, when in fact they're actually dying from drowning right in front of their very eye. Yeah. It's like the head injury that you die of a week later because of whatever, some kind of internal hemorrhaging that you don't even know what's going on. Right. Yeah. It is very much like that. Liam Neeson's wife, right? Yes. Right. She died in like a ski accident, right? Yeah. Natasha Richardson and I didn't look it up, but I know it was not that day. I didn't know that. I don't know how many days later it was, but same kind of thing where there's something going on in the body because of an incident that you don't realize is going on. And in this kid's case, I think he had edema, right. His lung tissue started swelling, right. Swelled. And it could no longer like it collapsed a little avoid collapsed. The gas exchange wasn't going on. So he had a decrease in oxygen and an increase in CO2. That's what you ultimately die from, from drowning. Right, right. But you can also get injured. Brain damage is usually the major complication. If you don't die from drowning, you can have that tissue damage in your lungs. You can get pneumonia or something called Ards. Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome. Right. And there's also usually a Co. Well, not usually, but frequently there's a comorbidity with a drowning, which is like a head or neck injury, a spinal injury. If you dive into the shallow end of the pool and you break your neck, you're going to start drowning, like immediately because you just lost consciousness and you're under water. So as we'll see in talking about treating drowning, you want to be aware that there's a good possibility that the person's neck is not quite right. Yeah. So here's one other thing that I knew before, but I had learned at one point, and it really opened my eyes. Every representation of drowning I've ever seen in any movie, on every TV show, in every book, in every song about drowning, they got it wrong. It's just wrong. It doesn't look anything like what we've all been led to believe it looks like or sounds like. Well, yeah, I mean, that is true if you are actually drowning. But what you're talking about that you usually see in the movies, if they end up getting pulled out of water and they're fine is just called aquatic distress. So when you're splashing around and yelling, you aren't drowning at that point? No. You could call it pre drowning. Yeah, it's aquatic distress. That means you can't swim, you're panicking, and you feel like, I'm in big trouble. So you're waving your arms and screaming when you actually start drowning. This guy named Francisco a PIA. He's a PhD. He defines what's called the instinctive drowning response, which is nothing like you see in the movies. It's very quiet, and your body like we mentioned earlier, your body's instinct kicks into gear. And it's not trying to waive for help or yell. It's just trying to survive and get another breath and keep that face above water. Right. All hands are on deck to keep you upright in the water. Literally, all hands are on deck if the deck is the water. Right, yeah. No, it's true. That's why I said it. So the thing is, though, Chuck, with that aquatic distress thing, it doesn't always precede drowning. So much so that drowning can come on without aquatic distress. And people are so conditioned to think of drowning as aquatic distress or vice versa, that this is about the most heartbreaking thing I've ever heard. There are kids who will drown. A substantial amount of kids who drown drown within 25 yards of a parent or whoever is supposed to be watching them, and a significant portion of those kids drown with the parent or supervising adult actually watching them drown and not realizing what they're seeing because it doesn't look like what they think drowning looks like. Yeah, 10% I wouldn't overstate it, but, yeah, 10% of the parents actually watched this happening. Right. So this is what drowning looks like, right? Once drowning starts, if you've gone through aquatic distress, once the drowning starts, your mouth is about at water level, and you can't call out for help because there's one or two things going on. Either you are trying to catch your breath every time your mouth comes above water and it's happening so infrequently that all you can do is work on inhaling and exhaling, or your larynx is spasming and you're not breathing at all. And if you're not breathing at all, you obviously physiologically can't shout or speak or do anything, but either way, you're not able to shout or yell or call for help or say anything. Yeah. I mean, the way I read it, though, is it's not like you're working on breathing. You have no choice in the matter. Yeah. Like, your body has taken over, and it's not like you're like, oh, I need to get my breath. You may want to yell, right. But your body is saying no. Breathing is speech is secondary in this whole situation. We need to get you to breathe. Yeah. And then, very similarly, you can't control your arms any longer. Whatever you want to do with your arms you can't. All you can do is kind of flap at the water. And the whole point of that is to keep your head above water as much as possible. One thing that I saw, Chuck, that I don't know if you figured out I can't figure it out, but one of the things about the instinctive drowning response is you're not kicking, you're just using your arms. I don't get that at all. Yeah, it says no evidence of a supporting kick. I don't know about that. It just seems weird that your body wouldn't be like, oh, yeah, let's get the legs in on this too, and maybe that'll actually help keep us above water. That's kind of the most important part of treading water. I wonder also if it's because as you're getting a lower concentration of oxygen and you're becoming a little more sluggish, kicking your legs is actually harder than flapping your arms. So you just can't like your muscles won't do it. I don't know, it's weird. It seems like that would be part of that natural instinct. I would think so, too. But another part of the fact that you can't control your arms is that if somebody holds a poll out right in front of your hand, you can't say hand grab pole. You can't grab like a lifesaver ring. You can't do anything but flap your arms up and down and you're not doing that. Your body has taken over. And this is this instinctive response that Dr. P is talking about. Yeah. And when they say you're not using your legs, that you're completely vertical in water, I don't know, that's the part that doesn't make sense to me. You can still be vertical in water and like, treading water and kicking. Yeah, I don't understand it either. Yeah, maybe someone can fill us in on that one. This whole instinctive drowning response, supposedly most people can last between 20 and 60 seconds of doing this, basically bobbing and using every bit of your strength to get your mouth above water. But eventually you start to lose that battle and your mouth comes above water less and less frequently. And then eventually you are submerged. And if you see somebody whose head is low in the water and their mouth is at water level and their eyes are closed, or they're just kind of blank and glassy, or their hair is over their eyes, you're looking at drowning person and you want to help them. Yeah. I thought that hair over the eyes was interesting because there must be just an immediate response when you get out of the water to wipe the hair from your eyes. Think about how annoying it is. That's got to be it. So if you see someone come out like the creature of the Black Lagoon, that's not a good sign. Yes. If they're gasping and they're doing this, that's another one, too. If they're trying to swim but they're not actually moving anywhere, really? Or if they're trying to roll over on their back and they're unsuccessful. These are all signs of drowning. Yeah. I mean, I was a lifeguard for a few years, and they tell you in class that you're used to the movies and you got to really keep your eyes out. You can't just be flirting with the girls oh, yeah. Waiting for someone to yell and scream because they're kicking in aquatic distress. Right. You have to keep your eyes peeled. A good lifeguard is very vigilant. Well, I remember hearing that when they interview most lifeguards about somebody who drowned in their pool, they're like, I had no idea they were there a second. And then they were gone, and I didn't even notice it didn't make a sound. Yeah. So, yeah, you just hit the nail in the head. Whether you're a lifeguard or whether you're a mom or dad or a pair or whoever, your focus has to be on the person in the pool that you're in charge of. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's. All right, we'll come back and we'll talk about what to do and how to treat a drowning victim if you are so unlucky. Hey, everybody, chuck here. Did you know there are millions of people around the world hosting on airbnb right now? Yeah. Which means that's a lot of amazing homes that are making people a lot of extra money. And it doesn't have to be an everyday thing. You can host when you want. Like, let's say you're taking a week's vacation. Why not host your home? Because that money could go toward paying for your current vacation or towards your retirement fund or even towards your kids college fund. Yeah. For anything. And listen, if you're worried about your stuff, don't be. Air Cover for Hosts. Let hosts welcome guests into their home without having to worry. You get $1 million in damage protection anytime you're hosting. Plus pet damage protection and income loss protection, too. And are you ready for this? Air Cover for host is completely free every time you host on airbnb. Free with a capital F. With Air Cover for Host, it makes hosting a nobrainer and the benefits really start adding up. So learn more and host with peace of mind at Airbnb Comaircoverforhosts. All right, so let's say someone has drowned. Let's just say you're at a pool. Just to make this easy, because that's kind of best case scenario. Because it's contained, there is usually some sort of rescue equipment on hand. It's not like you're on the beach and you're like, I need a defibrillator. Most pools have this kind of stuff now. Plus, you can also see the bottom. There's not usually like an underwater hazard or anything like that. It is about the best case scenario. Yes. So the, AHA, the American Heart Association said that if possible, like, if you're not by yourself, do the common sense thing, which is to send one. Person for help or to call 911. These days, with phones everywhere, it's increased response times. And if you have a defibrillator, go get that thing or have your buddy do it. Bring it to the victim side. Assess the situation. Like, are they breathing? Do they have a pulse? And this is one of the few situations they point out where because I know we covered CPR and the hands only CPR is kind of what's recommended now. But that is not the case with drowning. No. Apparently, you still want to do mouth to mouth, is how I took that. Right? Yeah, I think so. Which has never made sense to me, because if you're blowing into somebody's mouth, aren't you blowing carbon dioxide into their body? What's the point of that? Is it just to get the lungs opening and closing? I don't know. Maybe I've never understood that. Yeah, because I don't think it's I think that's the case. Like, it's not saying your body needs CO2. I think your lungs need to be expanding and contracting. Got you. It's been a while, though, since I lifeguarded. Yeah. And it used to be like, yeah, you do chest compressions in the mouth to mouth. And then they said, no, just do chest compression. So I was surprised to see that with drowning, they're, like, do both. Right. They're back with that. And then also, don't forget, while you're doing all this, keep in mind that the person's neck might need to be supported or kept at a certain straight angle because they may have injured themselves. That may have caused the drowning to begin with. Yeah. Like, if they dove in or whatever. Right. So if they're breathing but they're not awake, then roll them over on their side because they might vomit and asphyxiate that way, which the way Bond Scott went out, and I believe some other rock stars have gone out that way. John Bonham, Janice Joplin. Oh, did they all affixiate from vomit? Yeah. Irving Berlin. Really? No. I don't know. I was just trying to think of musician least likely to asphyxiate on his own vomit. Well, I think that's Benny Goodman. Yeah. Although he partied did he? I'm just being contrary. Okay. We have to lighten this thing up a little bit. Right. I know it's hard looking for jokes in here. It's tough. So, let's see. You got somebody who's breathing but unconscious. Roll them on their side. Somebody who's not breathing and doesn't have a pulse. You do CPR. You want the EMS to get there as fast as possible. But CPR, whether it's a heart attack or whether it's a drowning, if you can do CPR, you can prolong the amount of time it takes for the EMS to get there. You're just staving off, like, irreversible damage by doing, at the very least, chest compressions. Yeah, absolutely. So one thing that I did not know, that I ran across Chuck, is there's actually a tremendous amount of racial disparities. When it comes to drowning, there are far greater numbers of African Americans, and this is the US. Strictly African Americans and then Native Americans and Alaskan Natives who drown compared to white kids. And depending on the venue and the age group, it can actually get shocking how great the difference is yeah. Between the age range of eleven to twelve years old. African Americans drown in swimming pools ten times the rate of white kids. Ten times. And this is something I did know because the pool I lifeguarded for three years was majority African American kids, and we got not special training, but we were told that by the lifeguard company. It was a huge lifeguard company that supplied lifeguards all over the city. Like taxes. Yeah, exactly. So at my pool and pools like that, we had little breakout sessions for us, we were like, hey, listen. It is a systemic thing in this country where little black kids don't learn how to swim as often. And the CDC has done studies. And there's a professor in Montana named Jeff Wilst who wrote contested Waters Colon a Social History of Swimming Pools in America. And it all makes perfect sense because of discrimination and segregation. When swimming pools and recreational swimming and sports swimming started to come around, these black families couldn't go to the pools, so they didn't take swim lessons. They didn't learn how to swim. If your grandparents didn't learn how to swim, then they're what is it like? I think they even have a stat. You have a 13% chance to take swimming lessons and learn how to swim if your parents did not. Only a 13% chance. Right. So it's just passed down. Yeah. And it's just odd that it coincided with a surge in popularity of pools and swimming in America. Coincided with two of the times when segregation was most strictly enforced in America, too. The yeah. As a result, African Americans missed out on swimming, and it's intergenerational and passed down still to this day among African American families. Not all of them, obviously, but there are plenty out there who are like, I don't know how to swim, and I'm very much afraid that if I get you near a pool, you're going to drown. Right. So I don't even want you taking swimming lessons because I don't want to mess with that kind of thing. And so, like you said, it becomes intergenerational. Yeah. And there are plenty of programs now, thankfully, and even when I was lifeguarding 1000 years ago, plenty of programs to try and give reduced rate or free swimming lessons in communities like that and basically get everyone trained up. Swimming lessons help. It is one of the ways to prevent drownings, is knowing how to swim. Yeah. It sounds like a no brainer. It does. But you can drown even when you can swim. So that's the reason they point out that one of the best ways to prevent drowning is learning how to swim, right? It is, but they also make a very big point. Once your kid knows how to swim, you can't just be like, oh, you're fine. You go to the pool by yourself. This one article put it like learning to swim doesn't drown proof your kid. Now, something like a quarter of deaths by drowning are from kids who knew how to swim or people who knew how to swim. So it's good to know how to swim, and it probably will help at some point, like any time you get into a pool, but it doesn't drown proof you. And you need to also be smart in other ways, too. Yeah, we're literally right in the middle of swim lessons for our daughter at approaching three years old, and it's tough, man. She doesn't like getting her face in the water. That's just smart. Well, yeah, that's a good instinct, probably, but not when you're trying to teach your kid how to swim. That's problematic. So it's a slow process in our case. Other kids take to it like a duck in the water, as they say. Yeah, I still remember taking swim lessons, and I was a pretty little kid myself. But I remember the one thing I hated about swim lessons is that I had to leave in the middle of Thundar the Barbarian on Saturday morning cartoon, so I never really got to watch a single full episode of Thunder. Then the other thing I remember is realizing that as I was swimming toward the swim instructor, I wasn't getting any closer, and it finally dawned on me. I was like, you're moving further away. That old trick? And she's like, no, I'm not. And suddenly I was like, there. But I remember being like, oh, there's such a thing as guile and deception. I had no idea. Now I learned it, thanks to my swim instructor. Yeah, my deal was I was terrified of swimming and swim class. What were you terrified about? Drowning. Oh. Were you okay? Yeah. My brother and sister went to swim class. They learned how to swim. I refused. I was really scared I would not go out of the shallow end for many years. I know I was a little scaredy cat, but my mom, I remember very distinctly when was kind of old, man. I was, like, six years old. And she didn't threaten me, but she said, hey, listen, you're going to take swim lessons in July. You've got to learn how to swim. July is go time, and I'm making updates. But let's say it was July, and then in June, we went to visit my grandparents, whose neighbor had a pool, and we were doing that thing where you hold on to the edge of the pool to get a bunch of kids and go around and around and create, like, a little whirlpool. And I remember very distinctly taking my hands off earlier and earlier and taught myself to swim that day. Oh, cool. Because it was kind of a current and people in front of me and behind me, and I just started letting go a little sooner and a little sooner in the deep end. And before you know it, I was doing a very rudimentary dog paddle, and that led to very poor swimming, which I still have today. Are you swimming around and you're, like, self taught? Yes, at a T shirt that said self taught. Back off. Taught swim. I'm still not a good swimmer. I mean, I can swim fine, but I'm not as far as swimming strokes and proper swimming, I'm terrible. I can do a swimming stroke. It's not any good, but I can do the technique of it. But I was on a swim team. I never was. It was the worst swim team in the league, and I was the worst member of the team. Yeah. Worst member in the county. That was your nickname. Pretty much my worst was the backstroke. And the coaches would always put me in a backstroke and be like, please don't. Like, why are you doing this? And now, as a grown up, I know, because they were just like, we're losing anyway. We're going to watch Josh do the backstroke. Every time I did the backstroke, I would end up, like, two lanes over. I was just about to bump the other kid. Yeah. And when I bumped into the other kid, they would inevitably stand up, and so we'd both be disqualified because I couldn't stay in my own lane. And then the coaches just thought that was hilarious. Yeah. I was never on the swim team, and that's where you learn how to do it properly. I can ape those strokes from watching the Olympics, but it's nothing close to I mean, I can't do butterfly, obviously. I'll teach you this summer. Okay. Butterfly is definitely the hardest, man. But the breaststroke, it's nice. It's a good stroke. I'm teaching you to swim this summer. Some strokes. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I can do a rudimentary breaststroke, but it looks more like I'm just kind of bobbing up and down. I'm not really not going very far. Yeah, but if you do it, you're like, oh, this is what it's supposed to feel like. I know what you're talking about. I've had that sensation before, too. But you're just like a frog. That ain't quite right. All right, so here are some other handy rules. If you have a newborn or a toddler, anyone basically up to about four, they say they call it touch supervision. So, like, never be more than an arm link away, because it can happen very fast in a swimming pool and a bathtub. Get off your cell phone. Put down your Marie Claire and your Red Book and your Reader's Digest or your Men's Health. Sure. Or your Bodybuilders Weekly or your Mad magazine. Pay attention to your kid. If you have a pool, you need to have that thing fenced in. Oh, yeah. Or even better, these days, they have those excellent. It's not a hard top, but it's between hard and the little soft top that are retractable. So you get out and you go inside and you can cover that pool right up. Yeah. Although I think by law, you have to have a fence around, like, four sided fence with, like, a self closing gate that also self latches, too. Yeah. And you have to grease it with crisco so little kids can't climb it. Well, you do that anyway, right. But it is fun to watch them try. You should learn CPR. You should have all the little lifesaving implements at your pool. Oh, another one. I had not thought about this, but if you have a pool, you want to have a landline, too, because you need to keep a phone that works right by your pool at all times. Yeah. So you need to be like Thirsty Owl and have a pool that's made out of a clam shell that a guy and a white tuxedo can bring over and sit down on a side table. Right. Or like Hunter Thompson at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I need to bring up Hunter Thompson at some point in this episode. One other thing I want to say, too, also. If your kid has an episode that looks like a close call to you, but they seem fine, then yes, keep an eye on them for the idea that they could conceivably have drowned and they could be developing symptoms. And if they start to develop any symptoms and take them to the Er, and the Er, doctors will very kindly listen to their lungs to see if they hear any water. Easy peasy. Right. At the same time, don't freak out. Like, if your kid just coughs in, sputters a little bit, and they're fine and they don't develop any symptoms at all, they're fine, most likely. Right. But it does pay to be vigilant, and it is better safe than sorry. Just don't be terrified if your kid as long as they didn't have anything that you could be like, that was kind of a drowning episode that just happened, you're probably in the clear. Yeah. It's a rare case, that kid in Texas. But because it does happen, keep an eye out. For sure. On the other hand, though, the media talking about this stuff supposedly has saved at least one other kid's life from the publicity that went around that case. It happened to another kid later on, and the parents had heard about this and took their kid into the Er and saved her life, I believe. Well, there you have it. You also don't necessarily just drown in a pool either. No, I mean, this stuff is horrifying. The thought of an infant drowning in a dog water bowl is a nightmare scenario. Yeah. Dog water bowl, open cooler. That has melted ice, toilets, a cleaning bucket. Anything that can hold something like one inch of water is enough to drown an infant and possibly a toddler. I think, too. Cars. People drowning cars as well. Yeah. Bathtubs are actually another one. So get this, man. So usually people who drown in bathtubs are infants and the elderly, but there's a lot of adults who drown in bathtubs and specifically hot tubs. Did you know about this? Well, I mean, yeah, you get a little drunk, you stand up too fast, and you're dizzy from the temperature. It's not a good combo. No. And that's supposedly what happened to Orville Reddenbacher. He was in a hot bath and suffered a heart attack and ended up drowning. Whitney Houston died in a bathtub. And I think every year in the US. About 330 people drown in their bathtub in a year. Seems like a normal amount, right? Yeah. Guess how many die in bathtubs in Japan in a year? How many? 14,000. Why? I don't know. I think they take more hot baths. They have those soaker tubs, too. Yes. It's, like, part of the culture. That's the only thing I can think of, because they also have, like, one third of the population of the US. Too. That's a lot of drowning deaths and bathtubs, man. Yeah. Well, they did say, too, like, more people die in Florida in car drownings just because there are more waterfront roadways. And then earlier when we talked about the racial aspect, the whole deal, we kind of just kind of flew past it. But native Alaskans and indigenous peoples died more than white people because they are more often in bodies of water that are probably far away and have logs and rocks and things underneath the yeah. So they have more exposure to natural bodies of water than the average American. Yeah. You got anything else? Nope. Well, that's drowning. Hopefully we helped in some way, because summer is coming. Okay. That's right. And I'm going to teach you the breaststroke. Sweet. If you want to know more about drowning, you can type that sad, sad word into the search bar at How Stuff Works, and it'll bring up something. Since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this first thing. I just pulled up on my phone right here. Look at that. Nice. But it's about the Steve Miller Band in Peaches. Remember in the emojis episode, one of us probably you? I didn't say Steve Miller. I said Allman brothers. Oh, well, he said someone mentioned the line from Steve Miller Band. I really like your peaches. I want to shake your tree. Didn't want to not mention that. No. This person is out of their mind. Well, he has an email regardless. Okay, let's hear. We all love the Steve Miller Band. Now, this story is probably not true, but I want you to believe it. Back in college, when my youngest daughter was born. I was driving a delivery truck for a small auto parts company. I worked with this old guy and he was probably like 42. And his stories I worked with this old guy, he's probably like 42. That's me talking. Okay, so one time he told me that he worked in this auto show years ago, and it was owned by this husband and wife, and he had played bass for a little while in the Steve Miller Band. And her name was Peaches, his wife. So the story was that the line from Steve Miller really like your Peaches, want to shake your tree with Steve Miller taunting his own bass player mean, he says, I don't know if this is true, but the story is like, it rang true enough. So I like to think that somewhere there's a couple that owns an auto parts store in Arizona, and to stick it to Steve Miller who doesn't want to stick it to Steve Miller? You know, that's from Jared, dude, I was in the local market near my house about a year ago buying some artisan tonic. No. And my buddy Chris Cox, who plays bass in my band, he happened to be in there. We were kind of talking about music. His wife's name is Peaches, too. No, it's not. We're talking about music and this guy who looked like an old southern rocker came up and he was like, you guys in a band? Yeah. And he was like, me too. It's like, oh, yeah. And he said, I'm the flute player in the Marshall Tucker band. No. And I was like, whoa. Wow. Like the Marshall Tucker Band is known for one thing. It's the flute. Like for real name off a couple of other flutey songs. Well, herded and love song can't be wrong. That one has that famous flute part. No. You know that song? Sure, but I can't think of the flute part. I mean, it's the whole intro. That's all flute. I guess I never realized that. Anyway, a bunch of their songs have the flute. And granted, he was not the original flutist. He is one of the Marshall Tucker bands. One of those deals where it's like two original members, they've had 20 flute players, like the Temptations or something. Yeah, but I was still impressed. I was like, man, that's amazing. That is impressive. And then like Anchorman, he whipped one out of a sleeve right there in the store. Kick some candles off the tables and winter time. Yes. I'd say Marshall Tucker band is second only to Jethro Toll for flute innovation. Okay, that's who I'm thinking of. They did like Aqua Long. Hey, how about that? We just came full circle. All right? Let's just end it. If you want to get in touch with Chuck and me and Jerry, you can send us an email to stuff podcast@housetopworks.com. And as always, join us at home on the web. Stuffyhoodnow.com. Stuff. You should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts myheartradio, visit the iHeartRadio App Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, it's." | |
ec754432-d590-4849-8b91-aead00dc36b6 | Short Stuff: Cleveland’s Infamous 10-Cent Beer Night | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-cleveland-s-infamous-10-cent-beer-nigh | In 1974, the Cleveland (then Indians) baseball club held an unlimited 10 cent beer promotion to attract fans to the game. An actual riot broke out.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | In 1974, the Cleveland (then Indians) baseball club held an unlimited 10 cent beer promotion to attract fans to the game. An actual riot broke out.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Wed, 08 Jun 2022 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=159, tm_isdst=0) | 13000370 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And this is Short Stuff. This is yet another chapter in our ongoing coverage of Cleveland, Ohio history. I love it when you dive into all of the stuff we've talked about. Cleveland has come up a surprising amount of times. It has. And we got great listeners in Cleveland shout out to our buddy Gail Coons and her husband Mark. And we sold out there, and we love our Cleveland. So we're not making fun of you, but we can't not talk about Ten Cent Beer Night. Yeah. So tencent beer night is a legendary night in Cleveland. If you live in Cleveland, you know all about this. And it took place in June 1974. And it wasn't that Cleveland at the time, they were called the Indians. Now they're called the guardians. It wasn't that the baseball stadium was giving away beer for $0.10. That made it so remarkable. It was actually like a fairly routine promotion. If you do the inflation math, that's equal to about $0.57 today. Yeah. All over baseball, not just Cleveland. Right, exactly. And if you went to the stadium, they weren't keeping track of how many you had or how many you bought at one time. It was basically an open invitation to come get very drunk at the baseball stadium. That was the promotion. Right. So it wasn't just that they had a ten cent beer night. It was this particular night underscored how bad an idea ten Cent Beer Nights at the baseball stadium actually were. That's right. And it had to do with, in particular, a lot of things. I watched a little video about this, and they did point out that the mood in Cleveland at the time, given the pollution and laid off factory workers and the Indians not being very good, it all sort of culminated on this night that they played the Texas Rangers, who, a week prior at their Tencent Beer Night. Yeah. This is just crazy to think about. Now, if they had 57 Cent Beer Night, I would be down there. Unlimited 57 cent beer night during nine innings at least. Yeah. And I did see for the Cleveland one, they had a limit of six cups per person at a time. Okay. Well, they did have some rules then. All right. That's respectable. They figured that's as many as you can carry at once. I don't know, probably they didn't want you to strain yourself. So a week before in Dallas Fort Worth, at their stadium, they had Tencent Beer Night, and there was a brawl on the field. There was a hard slide by the Rangers, retaliation by Cleveland pitcher, which is what usually happens in baseball. And they charge the mound and a fight breaks out. And it was a pretty good baseball brawl. And Billy Martin was coaching Texas at the time, and he said that he wasn't worried about the next week in Cleveland because they were asking about retaliation. He said they don't have enough fans to worry about, which did not help the matter. Now, and if you know Billy Martin, that's a total Billy Martin thing to say, right? Yes. So Billy Martin says this just offhandedly and also, by the way, during that brawl, or after the brawl, the fans at the Rangers Stadium, through trash and all sorts of stuff, dumped beer onto the Indians as they went back to their dugout. So there was a lot of ire about this in Cleveland, not the least of which was Billy Martin's little quip. And there was, at the time, a sports talk radio personality named Pete Franklin. And if you're familiar with sports talk radio, they talk a lot of trash, they don't suffer a lot of idiots, I guess you could put it. And this Pete Franklin seems to have, if not been the origin of the modern sports talk radio personality. He was definitely one of the early people who was doing this. That's right. So I think he just sort of riled people up even more on the radio. Right? Is that what happened over the following week? He spent most of his sports line show on WWE just getting everybody riled up to get to this game and to show the Rangers what we thought about them. All right, I think it's a great time for a break, and we'll get to what happened on June 6 right after this. All right? So I said June 6. You said June 6. It was really June 4. Yeah. Please don't. We just got it wrong and didn't feel like rerecording the whole episode. Right. So it was June 4 that this game started, and it was the beginning of a three game home stand. And by the time that this game rolled around 26,000, clevelanders showed up at the game for Ten Cent Beer Night, angry at the Texas Rangers, who the Indians were about to play. That's right. And to say things got out of hand is, again, a pretty big understatement. The video I watched that told me about the Six Cups at a time said that at one point, people were buying so much beer, the vendors couldn't keep up, so they just pulled the beer trucks in just outside the outfield walls. And there were two teenage girls working the station that got so overwhelmed they left. They just ran away. And all of a sudden, there were beer trucks. They flipped over the table. And I don't know if this is true or not, but there were reports that some of them literally carried tapped kegs of beer into the stands. Okay. From everything that I've read about this night, that is 100% believable. Totally is. So in addition to stuff like that happening, there was a lot of foreshadowing that this was not a normal game. A lot of people were running out onto the field more than normal. I mean, in the 70s, streaking on a baseball field wasn't just totally unheard of, but same thing. There was a song about streaking. Yeah, the ones put me in, Coach, I'm ready. Oh, not that one. Look at me. So there were two streakers at this game in the third and the 6th innings. And then there was another, I guess you could call them streakers that came out. I'm not sure what inning, but it was a father and son duo who ran into the outfield and mooned everybody in the bleachers. Yes. One of the streakers, this completely naked man and this is not advisable, went in and ran and slid while the game was going on. Slid into second base, but naked. Yeah. So this is happening during this game, and this is a baseball game. This is while a lid is being kept on everything. This is like a simmering kettle at this point. And so you can make a case that all that's kind of in good fun, even though it's pretty rival and a little unruly, to say the least. But it kind of started to turn ugly at one specific point when Larryn Lee, who is a Cleveland player, hit a line drive back to the pitcher for the Rangers, Ferguson Jenkins, and it hit him in the stomach and dropped Ferguson Jenkins like a sack of potatoes. And rather than show any kind of concern or anything like that, that set off the fans to hit them again. Hit them again, which kind of ticked the Rangers off a little bit. Yeah. So that rails people up even more. They start throwing stuff. They start throwing hot dogs, batteries, beer, the usual stuff. Billy Martin comes out and starts blowing kisses into the crowd. Apparently, there's a picture of them doing so. This is like classic Billy Martin again, that riled up people even more. And they started shooting they brought fireworks and started shooting fireworks into the Rangers dugout. Yeah. This is during a baseball game that's going on, everybody. Yeah. They were still trying to play the game. Yeah. So as this game is going on, the Rangers are winning most of the time. I think the 6th, they had a five to one lead, but then the Indians scored two runs in the 6th, made it five to three, and then they scored two more runs in the 9th. So it was five to five. And they actually had the winning run on second base and were at bat when the incident that proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back and let all hell break loose happen. Well, it shouldn't have happened, but it was a bit of a misunderstanding and that a fan ran out and tried to grab Jeff Burrows hat off his head. Burrows tripped and fell on the ground, but all the Rangers saw was Burrows on the ground with a fan right there, and they thought he was attacked. And Billy Martin basically says, go get them, guys, and take your bats with you. So the Texas Ranger Baseball Club streams out onto the field with baseball bats looking for vengeance. They're met by a flood of angry Cleveland fans who start streaming onto the field. And they have more than baseball bats. Bleacher report says that they had knives, chains, and portions of the stadium seats that they had ripped off. This is like The Simpsons rumbling or something like that. It's cartoonish. But this is what happened in Cleveland on this night. That's right. I saw that there were 50 security guards in the whole stadium with 26,000 fans. So they did not adequately prepare for what ended up basically being a riot. They stole the bases. Not like, hey, he stole second base. Nice job. They ripped the bases out. Apparently, those bases are still not recovered. So, like in garages in Ohio, like, someone has these bases still. I guarantee it. And I'm sure there's a tapcake right next to it. I hope so. We should definitely point out that to their credit, the Indians streamed out on the field with bats of their own to defend the Rangers, because they're like, these people might actually kill some of the Texas Rangers. So baseball players are getting in fights with rioters on the field. Baseball players from both teams. The guy who was actually the head official of the game, Nester Chilak, suffered a head injury because he was hit by one of those stadium seats that had been ripped off. He also had a cut on his hand because he had been hit by a rock. And finally he calls the game and says, this game is over. The Indians forfeit and the Rangers are the winners, I guess. Yeah. There are a bunch of videos on YouTube that they don't show it live, but they show photos. It's hard to believe when you see this, this happened. I mean, it was a street brawl between professional athletes. It showed people, like, bleeding from the head and being carried off on stretchers. And today, like, an NBA player, if he gets into, like, yelling at a fan in the stands and there's a confrontation, it's a really big deal. This was a street fight on a baseball field during a baseball game. Yeah. It was like that scene in Anchorman. There was a guy on horseback with a trident. It was like that, but in Cleveland. And it was because everybody had drank so much beer. So the Indians very wisely went back to the drawing board and they said, we've got three more of these beer nights scheduled, and we've already been publicizing them, so we can't really take them back because they'll probably riot again. So we're going to change it from unlimited beer to just four beers per person. And that was that for ten cent beer night? Yeah. So instead of six at a time, four total. Yeah. I saw again, who knows what? These YouTube videos, if these are accurate, but I saw 60,000 beers consumed. And how many people were there? 26,000. A lot of which were probably underage. So you do the math. Yeah, and he said that there were 19 streakers total, so who knows, man? Isn't that just nuts? Yes, it is crazy to think about. And, boy, if you were there, please email us. I would love to hear a story. Yeah, definitely. And spare a thought for those poor two teenage girls who were chased off of the beer trucks for their lives. Yeah, and anyone that got legitimately hurt. I mean, we're kind of laughing at all this, but I didn't see that anyone was, like, seriously, seriously injured. Right. Blood streaking down their face from their stitches and light stitches. They were in handcuffs, being led away. Had to call in late for work the next day. I hope we find another good Cleveland topic. This is starting out to be quite a serious yeah, it's a rich vein, isn't it? It is. You got anything else? I got nothing else. All right, everybody, then. Like beer night in June 4, 1974. Short stuff is out. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your phone favorite shows." | |
cff26498-6a26-11ea-b8fc-6f3c2c0f3edb | SYSK Distraction Playlist: How Grass Works? Yes, How Grass Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-distraction-playlist-how-grass-works-yes-how | There’s nothing more boring than watching grass grow, which is why Josh and Chuck aren’t asking you to do that. Instead, you can learn about all sorts of neat things about grass - like how American became obsessed with perfect lawns - in this episode. | There’s nothing more boring than watching grass grow, which is why Josh and Chuck aren’t asking you to do that. Instead, you can learn about all sorts of neat things about grass - like how American became obsessed with perfect lawns - in this episode. | Fri, 20 Mar 2020 12:30:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=12, tm_min=30, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=4, tm_yday=80, tm_isdst=0) | 47666352 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's. Charles, Debbie, chuck Bryant. We were just talking about Canada, so I said to you, yeah. And there's it's Jerry over there. So this is stuff you should know. Hello, live from the bowling Greenhouseupworks.com, what the site slogan is. Yeah. You doing all right? I'm doing great. Watch this. Chuck? Yes? Have you ever seen grass? I have, sir. You won't find a lot of good grass in my yard, but no. Is it terrible? I've seen it before. I don't remember it. It's pretty bad. Okay, well, I mean, I will be moaning myself all throughout this one. Well, you have, it turns out, the traditional American yard crappy. Did you know that? Yeah. Pack dirt, maybe a little bit of garden around. Yeah. And there you go. Some native grasses. Yeah. That's tradition. And it turns out that's the way if you went to an American house, chuck pre Industrial Revolution. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. You're going to find that, like, you're just going to find packed dirt in the yard, maybe a garden, some weeds. Nobody really cared much. They were more trying to survive. Yeah, right. Sure. And then in the 19th century, as Americans said, we've been hanging out here for 100 years. Let's go back to England and visit. Is it safe yet? Right. They found it was, but they also found that the English had something called a lawn, which is a beautiful, well manicured expanse of grass that a very wealthy English could afford. Well, wealthy Americans were never ones to be outdone by wealthy British. No. So they came back and they're like, I want a lawn. I am worth so much money, it's mind boggling. Make me a lawn. And whoever they were talking to said, we can't really do that here. Right. The native grass is not conducive to a Kempt lawn. Yeah. You can't pop over to the big box hardware store and buy huge sacks of seed. Right. And so they said, well, you know what? I'll be right back. I'm going to the UK to buy my seed. And then they traveled there, and then 14 weeks later, they made it all the way back and they said, Here you go, grounds Keeper Willie. Make me a lawn. Here's some British seed for turf grass. That's right. And he said, hey, man, he said, When I'm done with you, they're going to need a compost mortem. Wow, the deep cut. That was good. I think that was Tree House of Horror, like oh, the one where he's freddie yeah. Nice, man. You got to need a compost modem. So he said that? Yes. And then he said, well, here's the problem. Our climate is different than the UK's, and these seeds aren't going to survive here. So the Lord and the ladies said, I give up. We'll figure something else out. And it took the golf association, the US. Department of Agriculture and the American Garden Club to finally get together and say, let's make this happen, everybody. Yeah. They got together the USDA got together with the USGA. And they said, Our names are similar, so let's plant some grass together. So what they had to do, basically, was look for kind of fool around with the right combination of seed varieties, which they imported from around the world. Yeah. Just to see what's going to grow here in this new country. Because we got a place in golf. Yeah. Kentucky bluegrass. Yeah. Friends that's from Europe. Bermuda grass. Where do you think that's from? Obviously, Africa. That is right. God knows where Zoeja came from. Although I believe Asia, and not just because Zoeja and Asia are somewhat similar. It took them about 15 years and they finally kind of settled on some good combination of grasses. Yeah. But you can thank golf. Yeah. To start. So if you hate golf, but you love your lawn, you have to kind of like golf anyway. That's right. But still chuck. Even though they finally came up with the right grass combinations, you had to still be pretty rich to have a lawn. The reason why was because irrigation was a factor. Cutting it was a big factor. Like all of those manor houses in the UK, they had people whose job it was to cut grass with a scythe. Yeah. A lot of people, I would imagine, because these lawns were not small and like you said, they didn't have, like, garden hoses back then. No. And buckets of water is not a great way to water a lawn. No. Although livestock, they did cut them with the sites, but they also had cows and goats taking care of a lot of that. Yeah. Who was it who had the sheep on the front yard of the White House? I don't remember what administration that was. I think it was Wilson. Was it? He was saying, like, look what you can do as an American. You can put a sheep on your lawn. Yeah. So do it. And then he sold the wall or auctioned it off for, like, $100,000. Oh, wow. And he kept it, probably. That's a good story. The lawnmower mechanical mowing in the 19th century became a real thing when an Englishman named Edwin Budding, who's an engineer, developed what is called the real mower. And that is reel. Yeah. And you've seen these you've probably seen some suckers in your neighborhood with one. I'm just kidding. I actually have a real mower. I live in a condo. Yeah. Real mowers. I mean, you can still get them in there. Great. And they have zero emissions, which is really neat because a lot of lawn mowers are pretty bad offenders for yeah. They're internal combustion engines, which means they put out all sorts of greenhouse gases. Yeah. And it's not like a car. They don't have catalytic converters and things like that. It's just straight up bad junk. So you can get a real mower if you're into it. You've seen them. It's a series of blades around a cylinder and it's geared which is the key to making it work. If you just pushed it and it traveled like the wheel did, you wouldn't be cutting a lot of grass. But there's a 16 to one gear ratio. Oh, yeah. So when you're pushing it, your wheels are turning at this speed, but the blade is turning really fast. Oh, yeah. Okay. That's sort of the secrets, how they work. And apparently Mr. Budding said or he found another machine that was similar that was used to cut the nap on velvet. Did you know that? Yeah. And that's kind of where I got the idea. Right. And it took off like a rocket. All of a sudden, people were like, hey, we can have lawns now. Let's buy these things. Apparently, they're somewhat affordable. In 1885, America built 50,000 of these things and sent them around the globe. Yeah. That was the beginning of lawns in America. Really. Right. And you know what else that guy invented? What? The adjustable wrench. Is that right? Yeah. Dynamo. Or as they called it, the adjustable spanner. Who called it that? The Internet. And I was like, what the heck is spanner? And then it turns out it's a wrench spanner. That doesn't even make sense. Yeah, it may be an English thing. The garden hose comes around and that helps too. That was a big help as well. But even still, you had this thing. It was kind of like, okay, Richie Rich, love your lawn. I don't really care. I don't need one. And the American Garden Club said. Oh, yeah, it's the 1950s. You live in suburbia. You have to have a lawn if you are a clean cut, decent American person. And the American Garden Club had this whole thing where they had contests and publicity and PSAs and basically drummed it into the head of every American man, woman and child. That part of your civic duty was to have a perfect lawn. That front lawn, specifically. Yeah. And there was this article man, I can't remember what the article is or what the website is. I wish I could, because they did a great job describing the history. But they quoted an American Garden Club, I guess stipulation, that said an appropriate type of lawn was, quote, a plot with a single type of grass with no intruding. Weeds kept moaning at a height of an inch and a half too short, uniformly green and neatly edged. Yeah. And then today, Americans spend about $30 billion a year on long care. Well, you know how, like, people are crazy for their pets and everything? Yeah. Half a billion. Really? 30 billion on long care. Wow. Yeah. Now, is that lawn care or is that outdoor care? Lawn care. Okay. Yeah, I looked it up. Just grass, long hair. Not planning a Zelyas. No. I imagine, like, just the whole total of outdoor stuff sends it through the roof of 30 billion long care. Yeah. I mean, I looked because that article we borrowed from was way outdated. Well, it was from, like, a 2000 survey. Yeah. And it was, like, 17 billion on all outdoor stuff. Outdoor home improvement, I think they put it $30 billion on lawns. That's crazy. Yeah. All right, let's get into grass. It is the name for the Grameena family of plants of which there are more than 9000 species. And if you think, well, 9000 species of grass, you might not realize that things like corn and rice and oats are grass plants. That's right. And bamboo is grass. Yeah. So building materials, plastics, room sugar, all this stuff is made from grasses, corn. Like, if you look at a corn plant and then you get down on your hands and knees and look at your Bermuda grass plants, because your lawn, although it looks like one large single organism, and technically, you could make the argument that it is, really is a series of interconnected related grass plants that form a lush patch of turf. Yeah. And like you said, if you get down and look at the little individual plants closely, it doesn't look so far off of a corn plant. Right. Thank you for calling that thought for me. Obviously growing no, but what is corn but a type of flower, right? Yeah, I guess. Is it? No, it's the fruit of the grass, I guess. Okay. Because corn does have, like, a flowery top. Yes. And I've heard I don't know if this is true. I've heard that each corn stalk only grows one corn cob. Is that right? I don't know. I'm not a farmer. We used to grow corn when I was a kid, but I hated gardening when I was a kid, I have to say. You remember we just recorded sushi, and it made me want sushi. This is like man, I love gardening. Yeah. I think when you get older, you get into gardening because eventually you might own a home, and then you want it to look nice and you want it to be a pleasurable place. And gardening is just really, like that's why every old British rock star now just gardens out in the countryside. Yeah. Because it's just quiet and peaceful and it's just a really nice thing to do. Meditative. Yeah. Very much right now, though. So, you know, I live in a condo, like I say. I've got, like, a pretty nice little patio garden going, oh, nice. But I am combating this one squirrel oh, yeah. Who is driving me crazy. Is it the same one? Do you know? I believe it is. There was one that was driving me crazy. I thwarted him, sent him packing. Now, so I have a bird feeder that squirrels love to attach, but I hung it in a way and cleared off branches around it. So this one squirrel go dive for it and miss and go sailing. And one time he hit it and realized that he couldn't hang onto the chain and fell off, and that was it. This new squirrel, man, he is persistent. Tenacious squirrel. I'll look outside at any given point in time, and he is hanging upside down by this chain with his feet eating out of my bird feed or sapphire seeds, which squirrels aren't even supposed to like. Yeah. And so that's just that he comes onto my patio. Now it's war. He just digs up stuff, and it's like, stop digging in my plants. But I'm really kind of like I have a trap. I don't know if it's big enough for squirrel, but you can get traps and then just drive them out to Piedmont Park. Yeah. Or you can set the trap behind, like, the exhaust of your car and turn on your car for a little while. You want to kill a squirrel? No, I don't. But man, this thing is pushing me. I mean, if you look on, like, getting rid of squirrel websites, that's pretty much number one. Yeah, I don't want to do that. No. All right, you murder. Let's talk about you're a Thuggie. I'm not, though. It's the thing. I don't smoke hashish, and I'm not a bandit. Yeah. I just hate the squirrel. Let's talk about grass. The grass plant itself at the roots, they are a little fibrous thread like, and they're going to reach down to the ground like little fingers. They're going to soak up water and nutrients, and they're going to secure it to the ground and then fussily. That ground is going to be more secure as well. Yeah. Because anywhere you have grass, it prevents erosion. Any type of grass is huge at preventing erosion. Yes. And I would recommend, as we're describing this, actually go to the article on housetofworks.com about grass and pull up this great picture. Yeah. Really good one. Yeah. It breaks it all down at the base. The stem is called a comb, and the base is the crown. Right. And the crown is like, almost like this clump of matter that's above the roots that the roots are growing from. That gives rise to the crown or to the stem. The column. Yeah. There's a lot of, like, words I had no idea existed until this article came along. Yes. I always just call it the stem, but apparently it is a comb. Okay. And then from the comb on the comb are nodes, which is, I guess, where new comb growth starts. But for the most part, that stem is going to be hollow, except at the node, which is kind of like a connective ball. Yeah. Like if you've seen bamboo and how it looks like it's segmented, those the little places where it's segmented, those are the nodes. Right. But it also happens in your backyard grass as well. Exactly. And then you have the leaf. The leaf? Yeah, the stuff that we call grass. We're actually talking about the leaf, and we're not even talking about the whole leaf, we're talking about the blade. So anytime you hear some old timer called grass blades, grass, he or she is correct. That's right. The lower part of the leaf is the sheath, and then the upper part is the blade. And then you're going to have a liguel L-I-G-U-L-E surrounding the connection of the sheath and the blade. Yeah. It's almost like the blade comes to the column, the stem, and just wraps it around in a hug. And the hug is the sheath, which makes sense when you see this picture, because the stem looks like it's growing out of the sheath that leads into the blade. And then you're going to have a couple of other things. These additional stems that grow sideways that you might have noticed, if it's on the ground, it's called a stolen, and if it's below the ground, it's called a rhizome. And this is where you're going to get new grass plants. Yeah. This is how it spreads. Yeah. There's two ways that grass reproduces. One is through seeds that are usually blown by the air that are produced by their flowers, or through basically moving sideways via a stolen or rhizome, this kind of root system that just goes over and produces a new crown and new routes and a new plant. Yeah. If you've ever seen a new yard, and we'll get into this later, you can either just plant seed you can do sod, or you can plant individual sprigs or plugs. If you've ever seen a yard that's all dirt and a ton of little individual plants, like a foot apart, and you think, well, that's interesting looking, that looks very modern, eventually that's going to all grow together thanks to the rhizomes and the stolen and fill in and form a fullyard yeah. So they are connected, and because of that, they are related. But really, these are different plants. That's right. And it's green individuals because of chlorophyll. That's right. And photosynthesis because all grasses is a photosynthesizing, sugar making little machine. That's right. Remember, sugar powers the earth. That's right. So, Chuck, there's probably a lot of people out there who are just like, just tell me how to improve my lawn. And we say, hold your horses because we're going to take a message break first. Okay, we're back. And that wasn't such a bad way. No, I'm sure it was very helpful. So we're talking how to take a lawn and make it into a world class American Garden Association approved lawn. Yeah. A lot of neighborhoods still have that junk where they have the contest, and you're very much expected to keep it up. It's part of your civic duty for your neighborhood association rules. Right. I don't live in one of those type of neighborhoods, there's no association, and there's a lot of crappy lawns like mine as a result. Nice. All right. Soil that is, I guess, your first start. If you want a good lawn, you're going to have some good soil. Well, yeah, technically, your soil is what holds your nutrients. It holds your water. It gives stability to the roots in the planet itself. Soil is pretty important. Let's just come out and say it all right with the soil. Apparently, for most turf grasses in America, you want to have what's called loam, and loam is a sand clay soil mixture. And ideally, loam would be 40% sand, 40% silt, and then 20% clay. Yeah. You want it to be sort of loose so things can spread around and breathe, and water can get down in there, but not too loose. It's got to be that right. Combination. And you also want a PH of about six and a half to seven. Yes. And this isn't something you can look at your lawn and be, like, 5.3. Well, maybe if you're like the grass, the soil whisperer, maybe if you are like that, then you should be charging people for that kind of thing. I would think you'd at least have to stick your finger in it. Right. If you have, like, a wacky disco ghost that follows you around and is really the one that's telling you the PH of different soils, you better be making money from them. Yeah. So the PH, you can get a home test kit, or you can pay for someone to come out and test your PH level. Right. That's the more typical way of finding out. Yeah. It'll either be acidic or basic, and you can add various things to correct that. Like sulfur or lime. Yeah. If you want to make it more acidic, ed sulfur. If you want to make it more basic, add lime. Yeah. And I've never done my PH rating. My soil I've got georgia is famous for red clay. It's pretty awful. It's actually good for growing. It's got to be a mixture. So I've seen, like, 100% clay. This is what I think is going on. Boy. No, I think your soil is compacted. Yeah. Have you ever aerated? Okay. You also have a lot of trees, so there's a lot of shade. Yeah. Front yard is way too shady, and it's dry. Yeah. I think if you fix those three things, you would have a fine yard. Well, here's what we're going to do. We're going to forget about grass in the front yard and zero escape it. Oh, yeah. Put some cacti out. Cacti. And just mold plants and rocks. Yeah. We're going to go that route because it's too shady. And then in the backyard, I have no excuse other than just not spending the kind of time you need to spend. The backyard seemed fine to me. Well, if you have enough weeds and you cut them down. It can give the appearance of a green lawn. Oh, I got you. But it's not real grass. All right, let's get back to it because we're going to solve your problems just by explaining the rest of this to everybody. Okay. By the way, to improve your soil, not only can you use the lime to get the right PH, but you can amend it with compost or fertilizer topsoil as well. Yeah, manure, you can use whatever. Just go out there and poop. Actually, I looked into this. You want to use compost and manure? Yeah. You don't want to add just poop to it. Now, that's feces. Right. And you can just spread that stuff with, like, a fertilizer spreader. You just have to use more of it because it's organic. That's right. Which means it's weak. Yeah. And we'll get into some cleaner options, too, if you're not into chemical herbicides and stuff like that. Right. So you've got your soil. You're thinking about your soil now. Yeah. Share a little bit of brain space for the actual kind of grass you want to plant. Yeah. In America, there are basically two types of grasses that we use warm season grasses and cool season grasses. And then there's a transition zone in the middle. And by the way, you and I live smack dab in the middle of this transition zone. Really? Where you can conceivably grow. Either the winters are mild enough, and the summers used to be not so hot that either one was prohibited. You could use both. So is that like cool season grasses, like Kentucky bluegrass, aka eurograss warm season Bermuda grass? And that's the one that turns brown in the winter. Right. I don't like it. It looks great in the summer, but I don't like it in the winter. No, I mean, like, if you've ever driven through a subdivision in Georgia in January, it is a depressing site. It's just this kind of mustardy, light brown Khaki field with houses that all look exactly alike right next to one another. Yeah, but it looks great in the summer. Sure. And Bermuda is soft, and it's great to walk around on barefoot and lay in and watch the stars. Yeah. Plus, it looks dynamite, too. Have you ever seen people who have their Bermuda cut like a golf course where it's maybe a quarter of an inch tall? Yeah. There's special mowers that you have to get. There are thousands and thousands of dollars that let you cut that without killing your grass. Are they the ones where you stand up and ride? Those are my favorite. That's just a mower. There's these ones that are, like they cut in a certain way that are Bermuda, just for that super short Bermuda. But yeah, Bermuda turns brown in the winter because it's a warm season grass, which means it's growing season. Is the summer cool season grasses. They don't go dormant, but they only really grow in the spring and fall. Yeah. And by the way, bluegrass, if you've ever wondered why it's called bluegrass is not named for the leaves, it is named for the seed heads. Is that right? Yes. So if you let bluegrass grow and don't touch it to like, two or 3ft tall, it will appear blue at the top. Beautiful. Yeah. And I never knew that. I didn't either, chuck so they just schooled everybody. Jerry, did you know that? Everybody? Well, everyone in kentucky is going, no crap, buddy. Man, did I just in salt, kentucky? No. Okay. I love kentucky. All right. So you're picking your grass you probably will end up getting unless you're a big bermuda aficionado or something, you're probably going to get a mixture or a blend. Mixture is a combo of types of grass. A blend is a combo of varieties of the same type of grass. Right. So, like, a mixture is like warm and cool, seasoned grasses, maybe. Yeah. Or you get a zoeja blend, and it's all different types of zoeja. And a blend is not as adaptable, but it will probably look more uniform and attractive and pretty. Right. It's not like patchwork, but if you're just looking to fill in, like, some shady spots or something like that, you might want to get a mixture. Agreed. And then another thing you want to take into account when you're considering what kind of grass to get is the amount of sunlight that your yard gets. Grass loves sun. Yes. Direct sunlight. Some love shade or not love shade, but some tolerate shade. Right. That's way. Better way to put it. Yeah. No, grass really loves shade. And then there's some areas that are, like, just shady all the time. In which case you might want to consider something else, like monkey grass or something that's not a turf grass, but it's still a grass that you can cut. Yeah. Or zero escape. Yeah, you could do that, too. I got the big oak tree, and it's just not very sunny in my front yard. No, I'm glad you bring up their escape, because reading this, especially when we get to the watering part, it's like grass is not going to be around for many more decades. What? Lawns. If we're going to start fighting resource wars over water in the next 50 years lawns. No way that there's going to be such a thing as lawns. Yeah, it's good point. Yeah. We're back to the old dirt dauber days. Yeah. I'd welcome that. Sure. Dusty america. We do. Really? Yeah. The dust bowl, it was great times. We had one game, it was called chew the bark off the tree. What's that from what was a grumpy old man. Oh, really? The dana carvey thing? Oh, yeah. Chew the bark off the tree. I think that's what he said. That's pretty good. So the sun is you're going to like I said. Like you said, take that into account, and then the water as well. There are grasses that like water more than others, and some do a little bit better without as much water. So if you live in Phoenix, well, you're probably just watering all the time. Yeah, but if you don't want to water all the time because you shouldn't be watering all the time because we'll get into watering later. And you should never be watering every day. No. I predict lawns won't be around in 50 years. All right? Mark my words. 2064, no lawns. Well, I'll be dead, but let's see, I could still be around. I'll be 93. If I'm still around 93, I'd be a sad case of a human being. I don't know, Chuck. Like, they're making some serious advances in aging. Do you want to be that old? If I were healthy and happy? Heck, yeah. Right? Sure. Especially if, you know, friends and loved ones were, like, that old, too. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I wouldn't want to be, like, cursed to walk the Earth forever and, like, just me be that way. But I mean, I'm not talking about a science fiction movie. No, I'm talking about, like, advances in aging. Supposedly, if not our generation, then definitely the one right below us will see the triple digits for average life expectancy and fees. Average life expectancy, yeah. Okay. That's either key. Yeah, I don't want to be shuffling around and drooling on myself. Well, there's a whole school of thought that all of these are unnecessary byproducts of aging, that you don't automatically become stooped, over, and demented just because you get old. Like we're doing something wrong or not doing something that we should be. Well, if they can combat all that, like sarcopenia, that's easy. But getting into the brain stuff, it's a little trickier. But, I mean, we're there, and you and I may live to benefit from it. Yeah, I think keeping the mind active is huge. Totally. Because Emily's grandmother is in her 90s. She's sharpest attack. Yeah. Because she does puzzles all day long and reads and is on the Internet and balance your checkbook. Yeah. All that jazz. All right, so let's talk about if you want to start a new lawn, as they call it, establishing a lawn. Okay. You can plant seed if you want to go the cheap, hardworking route. Yes. But you have to wear nothing but overalls, nothing under them. No shoes. While you're planning fees, you can do sod, which is we'll talk about that. Or you can do the plugs and sprigs, which I mentioned. First things first. And you're going to have to do this for all three methods. You're going to have to prepare your soil. Yes. So you want to get, like, a tiller? Yeah. Go down to your hardware store and rent one. Yeah, my mom's got one in this case. Okay, so borrow it from your mom. Yeah, anyone can borrow it from my mom. And basically. It's probably a good idea, too, depending on where you live. But if you live in a subdivision and you value your cable TV or Internet yeah. You might want to call your local cable provider, your gas company, your electric company, and say, hey, send one of your people out and mark this. And they'll come and they're going to spray paint your lawn and everything and give you an idea of how deep it is. But you'll know where your cables are and you can make sure the aerator doesn't go too deep. You're going to cut right through one of these cables. That's a good point. So once you've done that, then you're going to take that not aerator, I'm sorry, the tiller. Yeah. And you're going to till the dirt up. You're just kicking it up, down to probably, what, six inches or so, I would guess. Yes. And if your soil is bad and you know this, that's when you're going to add in your topsoil or fertilizer or compost and you just till all that up together to a delicious soy soup. Yes. Chuck, it is very important to add something to your soil. You can't just till it. That's right. And just leave it like that? Well, you can if you got good soil, I guess. But I mean, it doesn't hurt to add more nutrients, does it? No, probably not. But in some parts of the country you're good. Like you've got great soil and you're good to go. Got you. But in Georgia, like I said, there's so much freaking clay, it's a nightmare. Then you want to rake that and level it out. They said you can use a board scraper, too, but you don't want to leave it super bumpy and clumpy right. To smooth it out as best you can. Yeah. And you're going to thank yourself later, because if you have big bumps or holes or divots or whatever, you're going to run into those with your lawnmower. Yeah. So you're doing yourself a favor by smoothing things out and leveling them now. That's right. Then you want to scatter your seed. You can do it by hand, but what you want is one of those little walk behind spreaders that you get at the hardware store. They're pretty cheap. And you just dump your seat in there. And remember, when you dump your seat in there to keep the little gate closed, otherwise it will just start pouring out in a big pile. Yeah. And then start walking and open your gate and it's got a little bit flywheel that spins and flings the seat out in a nice equal distributive manner. Yes. If you're doing it by hand, you're probably going to put too much someplace and not enough in others. Sure. Unless you're really good. It's very tough to do that. Unless you're that soil whisperer guy. He can do anything because of his ghost friend. That's right. And then you take like a regular rake, and you just kind of want to cover this stuff up a little bit. Just rake over it. About half of the seat is covered. Yeah. If you have a lawn roller, you can use that, but I've never used that. So that is basically it's like a big metal drum that you fill a certain amount with water to make it heavier, and you just roll that over it to compact it. Yeah, and like I said, I've never done that, but I got a crappy lawn. That was the key DrumRoller. Yeah, maybe. So then you want to cover that up if you want, with straw, multi material. They sell stuff in sheets as well. I've never done that either. I'm telling you. I think I realized the mistakes I'm making. I think that you should be a case study in this and do step by step exactly what it says and see what happens to your lawn. All right, maybe I will. Maybe I can get work to pay for it. I'll bet you could. If I documented via video. I'll back you up. All right, we'll see about that. Or you can go the easy route, which is sod and that is when you see the big rectangular rolls of already grown awesome turf, and you roll it out on your lawn after your soil is prepared. Green side up and straight rows. We need to make sure it's greenside up. My friend used to yell that out the window when he go by, like, lawn cruise. Green side up is really obnoxious a little. He's not my friend anymore because of that. No, but that says a lot about why. And you want to stagger it. Like, if you're doing a brick wall, don't lay them out exactly in a row. Right. Because the water will just run right through there. It won't get trapped. Yeah. And it'll look a little funny for a while. It'll look like squares of grass, and it'll eventually grow together and look like one big solid turf unit. That's right. And the closer you lay your side together, the better off you're going to be, because any patches in between them will allow weeds to grow. And that's a big problem with using sprigs, which is the third way, sprigs or plugs and sprigs or plugs. A sprig is just a grass plant, a little individual grass plant that's bare root. A plug is the individual grass plant with, like, a little dirt root ball associated with it. Yeah. And you can order those online and get a bunch of them shipped to your house, right. If that's what you're into. Yeah, because some grass, it doesn't grow well from seed, like Zoeja doesn't propagate well from seed. But then some people are like, I don't have the money for sod. So you can order a bunch of sprigs or plugs. It's always you and do the work yourself. And you take these little holes about six to twelve inches apart, fill them with water, then you take your plug in your sprig, put them in the hole and cover around it with dirt. And there you go. Boom. You want to weed these things while they're growing in, but Zoeja apparently grows very fast with its stolen and its rhizomes and whatnot. And there you go. Lawn six to eight weeks later. Or months or years. Yeah. And all of these methods, you're going to water a lot at first just to get things going. But we'll get into watering here in a minute, too. All right. Before we get into maintenance, should we talk about weed and feed? Oh, yeah. Which is like the shampoo plus conditioner of lawn care, pretty much. That is a combination of weed and feed, herbicidal chemicals and fertilizer chemicals. It might be pre emergent, if you don't know what that means. That is an herbicide that kills weeds before they sprouted in the cradle. That's right. Or post emergent, which kills already grown up weeds. And experts say this is not a good way to go, because optimum fertilizing time isn't the same as optimum weed killing time. Plus another problem is you may not need an herbicide all over your lawn. No. You don't want to use it just as a matter of course, if you have some real problem with weeds, you want to target them as much as possible using kind of a low level herbicide, rather than just spraying herbicide all over your lawn. Because your lawn is a plan as well. Yes. And if you have children and animals oh, yeah, that's true. You don't want that crap in your yard. At least I don't. So you got your plugs grown in. Yeah. Or your sod or your seat or whatever. And you're like it's ready. I'm ready to maintain this lawn. It's established. What do you do? Well, there's eight steps to lawn maintenance, and we will start with watering. And like I said, you never want to have a sprinkler set to water your lawn every day. No, it's a total waste. It's a total waste. You might have to water every day at first, but once it's established oh, yeah. We should say that, like when you plan or whatever, you have to water a lot more than you normally would, I guess. Yeah. But once you're up and running, it's a total waste of water and you're going to run your bill up and it's not good for your lawn either, so there's absolutely no reason to. No, what you want to do is deeply soak your lawn when you water it and when it needs it. Right. And you can tell when it needs it when you step on it and it doesn't bounce back in a minute, few seconds, then it probably needs water. Yeah. It might curl up a little bit. If you see it curling up or changing color at all, you need the water and so get out there in the morning. Yeah. That's the best time to do it. Yeah. Don't do it in the middle of the day. It'll burn off. Yeah. It'll evaporate. And the water in the morning will keep the soil cool throughout the day. That's right. It's just a big treat for your lawn. Yeah. And like we said, you deeply soak. It so much so that you want to have about an inch of water collecting above ground. That's a big long soak. Yeah. And if you think, well, how in the world do I figure that out? Just put a little cup out there, turn your sprinkler on, and when that cup has an inch of water in it, you're all set. I don't know if that's right. No, that's exactly right. No, because think about it. That cup is going to fill up immediately because no water is soaking through it. No, that's how you do it. You put a cup and the cup just collects little drops, and it takes about an hour or more to fill that thing up. An inch. I think what I said makes sense anyway, because you put a cup out there or not, when it fills up. How's he going to tell if it's I don't know. I guess you would take a little measuring stick and go out there every once in a while and see, you just put a cup trust me, I think mine is better. Just guess. No, measure with the measuring stick, because then you're measuring how much water is collecting on top of the ground, and that's what you're looking for because that means about six to eight inches of the ground has been soaked. So measure down six to eight inches? Is that what you're saying? No, just put it on top of the grass, like on the ground to put it in the grass until what's, the measuring stick? A ruler. Okay, so I want to get this. You stick a ruler into the ground? No, you stick a ruler into the grass until it comes in contact with the ground. Okay. And then when there's an inch of water, that measures up to the inch, but it doesn't. It soaks into the dirt. Right. And you want to keep doing it until there's about an inch of water that's collected. No. Yeah. I'm telling you, dude, you will never have an inch of water sitting in your yard. That's called a lake, dude, I'm telling you. That's what this article is saying. All right, I'm going to leave it out there. Okay? This is what we're going to do. Let the people hear it. We're going to call for a turf pro to tell us which one is right, and he will say, dude, if you have an inch of water, that means you were flooded. We'll just find out. Agreed. So you're saying the ground has become so super saturated that the water sits on top of the ground yeah. I'm not saying it's saturated, but the water has accumulated enough that it hasn't all soaked down enough. Okay. I think it's clear who lives in the condo anyway. I recommend you put a cup out. When that cup fills up to an inch, then that means you've watered enough. I'm calling for a turf expert to let us know what's what. All right. This is a good legitimate disagreement. Yeah. Okay. So we're done with water. Yes. We brewing you lawn one way or another. That's right. And we mentioned water in the morning. Mowing is the second part of upkeep. And this is another important thing because a lot of people think, oh no, man, you mow really low and then you don't have to mow as much. And that is not what you should do. You should let it grow because it's better for your lawn. Because when you cut too low, that grass is going to race to try and grow more blades to make sugar. And it's going to grow super fast and it's going to use stored sugar. It's going to weaken your plant if you have tall grass and that stored sugar is going to make new rhizomes. So it'll just be thicker and more lush. Yeah. But if you let it grow too long, then it's using up a lot of the nutrients from the root system and a lot of energy. So if you do something in between, I think for like a cold season grass, they say keep it at about three inches. When you cut it, you're just basically forcing it to propagate because it's like, oh, I need to produce more chlorophyll, so I'm going to grow some more blades. Yeah. So actually cutting it, unlike hair, actually does make the grass thicker and more lustrous. Your lawn. Yeah. So you're doing the lawn a favor and yourself a favor because you're not going to have to mow your grass as much. That's the dirty little secret. And you can tell your wife, no, you're supposed to let it grow. Right. And she'll say, look it up and show me. And then you go to houseepworks.com. That's right. And in the summer, you should let it grow a little longer, too. In the fall and winter and spring, you can't go a little bit closer because your temperatures are cooler. Right. So you don't need to sweat it as much. And then when you do mow, you should vary the direction you mow in. So like one week mow north to south. Right. And then the next week mow east to west. Yeah. And I think, and a lot of experts think you should always leave your clippings on your lawn and not bag them and dump them. Because when you're doing that, when you leave in the clippings, it ends up becoming compost and it just helps your soil. If you constantly are removing the clippings, that soil is going to compact and get hard. I'm a big proponent of getting a mulching mower and just leaving the clippings. And those clippings do not equal theatch apparently the clippings break down in like a week that actually build up of dead crown and calms and other stuff of the plant. It's not the cut blades. Yeah. Actually, if you remove your clippings, you're going to encourage that. So don't do it. Yeah. That is no good. No, it isn't good because it keeps air and water out of the soil, which are essential. Well, a little bit of theatch can be okay. Some, but not much. No. And if you do have a theatch problem, you can just break it out. Yeah. And then your clippings will come back the next week. Exactly. Fertilizing is key. You want to add nutrients to the soil. Granular fertilizers once or twice a year is the way to go. The spray on stuff, that's not a great thing because that just kind of gets on the blade of grass itself. The granular stuff soaks into the ground over the course of weeks and it's like slow releasing. Right? Yeah, slow releasing. And a lot of these are chemical fertilizers. I'm not into it. There's a great brand called Ringer, and it's natural. And a lot of the chemical fertilizers are just salt. And salt is no good for the ground. So it's really weird. That is made up of salt. If they understood that, then the Romans used to salt the earth of the lands they conquered. Totally. People couldn't grow stuff. Yeah. I mean, what about Idiocracy? They accidentally salted the soil using gatorade. Really? Yeah. I don't remember aerating, something I've never done, which is one of my reasons why my lawn stinks. Well, that's basically like so over time, your soil becomes more and more compact. And as it becomes compact, there's less air movement, water trickles through less easily, and there's aerobic, which means they need oxygen, bacteria that helps keep things nutrient rich down there. And if they're not getting oxygen, they're not able to do their thing. That's right. So you want to aerate, depending on how high traffic you are, maybe once a year, where you use one of those it looks like what's the drum barrel DrumRoller thing, but with spikes, hollow spikes. And they just pull plugs out of the grass that you just leave in place and bam. Aerated. Yeah. And you can rent those too, at a hardware store. Or they even have this if you have a small yard, they have aerating shoes. No way. Yeah, you just basically attach them. You just attach them to your regular shoe and strap them on and it's like just spikes that you walk around in your yard. But you'd have to have a pretty small on or kids. Yeah, that's true. Put them to work, attach spikes on their shoes. Yeah, that's probably safe. Go run around. Just to run around in the same place. We've talked about detaching and then there's weeding. Weeding is the bane of my existence, and I don't really know what else to say about it. It stinks. There you go. I got a lot of weeds. Weeds aren't necessarily terrible for your yard if you have a few. What are weeds besides plants that we decided we didn't like? Yeah, but certain types of weeds can indicate, like, if you have a lot of dandelion, that means your soil is too alkaline or too compact. Oh, yeah. Or if you have a lot of clover, means it's too low in nitrogen. So it can be a sign of some amendments that you need to take care of. You can read the weeds. Yeah, read the weeds. And one thing, if you don't make the mistake I made, which is, hey, I'm going to put a bunch of weed killer on my yard and see what happens, because you might be surprised at how much your yard is weed. And then you'll look out one day and it's all brown. Well, except for a couple of patches of green. Well, then you just start over, right, with some seed. Yeah, I need to start from scratch back there anyway. In the backyard. Yeah, it's time. And then do you have pests? Yeah, I got all kinds of pests. So there's this I guess it's called biological control, pest control, using this stuff called bacillus thorageiensis. That is how you say it, and it's a grand positive bacteria. It's similar to the stuff that causes anthrax. Totally fine for humans, but for certain kinds of lawn pests, like flies, mosquitoes, butterflies, beetles, moths, they eat this stuff and it creates a crystalline protein in their guts that turns their guts to mush, and so the things starve to death. Wow. And you can just put that stuff on your soil. Basically, you're putting bacteria on your soil and it'll take care of pests. Nice, man. This is informative, I think. Yeah, it was like, we don't do a lot of HOWTOs, but we just did the mother of all HOWTOs. Have you got anything else? I got nothing else, man. So if you want to know more about grass, you can type that word into the search bar@hostelforks.com. It will bring up that really helpful demonstrative picture, too. Yeah. And I said demonstrative, which means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this fishbowl at the LaBrea. Tarpitz hey, guys. Huge fan of the show. Gets me through my long commute. Just listen to the Labrador. Tarpitz and the fishbowl at the Page Museum. Sounds similar to a set up that I've worked in before at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, which I've been to. It's pretty nice. Is there a fish bowl? Isn't it all fish bowl there? Well, there's a fishbowl where they work. I interned at the veterinary department, which had glass walls so visitors could check out the procedures. Turns out the glass walls are really neat for the observer, but really annoying for the fish inside, meaning us. I never saw anyone tap on the glass and yell nerd. But we did have a regular onslaught of small children tapping and smashing their faces against the glass. One day in particular, we're doing surgery on a chuck walla. A lot of people were outside the glass watching. A little boy started tap, tap, tap, tap, tapping. Eventually, the veterinarian got fed up, slowly, turned with a scalpel, and glared and pointed at the little boy. The vet shook his finger at him, and the little boy's eyes widened in fear, and he ran away crying. And that was my favorite day of my internship. That's awesome. Anyway, that story always makes me chuckle, so I wanted to share. Keep being awesome. And that is from Caitlin with a K. Nice. Thanks a lot, Caitlyn. Yeah, you've threatened a boy with a scalpel, and that was no, Caitlin was just witnessed that and he cried. And that was Caitlin's favorite day. If you have a favorite day, that's a good one. Chuck, tell us about your favorite day. We want to hear about it from everybody. You can tweet it to us. If it was a short day at Syskpodcast, you can post it on our Facebook page@facebook.com, stuffyteano. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. And as always, join us at our beautiful home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, 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." | |
4581d9e4-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-5f93cc1bd94d | Short Stuff: Fear of Public Speaking | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-fear-of-public-speaking | Speaking in public is frequently cited as people’s number one fear, even more fearful than death. Most people go through life avoiding public speaking, but it turns out that only makes things worse. The best medicine? Public speaking. | Speaking in public is frequently cited as people’s number one fear, even more fearful than death. Most people go through life avoiding public speaking, but it turns out that only makes things worse. The best medicine? Public speaking. | Wed, 24 Apr 2019 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=114, tm_isdst=0) | 11768179 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's Josh. The other Josh, who's now become our go to guest producer. And this is short stuff. Enough about that. Yeah, we fired Frank Chair and the little water dipping bird that pressed record, which was really yeah, the bird really started to phone things in, don't you think? I think so. Chuck. Speaking of phoning things in, imagine having to do public speaking. I can't imagine what that must be like. Do you remember? I mean, we've done plenty of talks, we've done live shows. It's just kind of part of what we do. Do you remember the crippling stage fright I used to get? Yeah. I mean, we both had varying levels early on. It's not like I was always a cool cucumber. You seemed like it. Well, that you didn't go into the bathroom with me moments before showtime. I always wanted to. That threw me. You always were a bit more nervous, but I think you're just wound a little tighter in general. But we both overcame that for the most part, don't you think? Yeah. And you know how we overcame it? I can tell you how, and I know that you know how, but let's tell everybody else. We did it through, basically, exposure therapy. Just doing it totally and it turns out what we're talking about is just public speaking in general. But the fear of public speaking almost goes hand in hand with public speaking. I saw a stat that said that 75% of people in the world have a fear of public speaking. I'm surprised it's not more than that. To be honest. I am, too. And then there's that old trope, the idea that there is some poll taken somewhere of what Americans fear the most, and number one was public speaking, and number two was death. And Jerry Seinfeld turned that into that meant that most people would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy because of that fear of public speaking. And there's a word for it, too. It's called glossophobia. It's just great word. Yeah. I mean, it's a it's a real thing. And we should point out that it is a legit anxiety disorder, a social anxiety disorder for most people. I had a bit of the jitters. I don't think I had a technical I was a technical glossophobe. Right. But for a lot of people, it's not just like, I'm nervous, so my palms are sweaty. For some people, it's debilitating to the point where they will structure their life so that they never have to do that, never have a job where they have to speak in front of, like, a conference room. Right. Or a small handful of people. Basically anybody. They always want to be the ones in the audience. They don't want to be the ones giving the talk so much. So, like you said, they'll structure their life around avoiding it. Avoidance is like the number one go to thing that people do when they suffer from glaustrophobia. They just do whatever they can to not give that talk. That's right. And like you said, it's a subset of a social anxiety disorder, which is really at base, a social anxiety disorder is a performance fear, the fear of being judged and or failing. That's what it is among your peers. Yeah, it's the fear of the result. Not like I mean, it manifests its way as you walk up on that stage, but what you're really afraid of is saying the wrong thing, feeling like you said something dumb, being judged as not knowing what you're talking about. And that's why it helped us because we have a very forgiving, loving, loyal audience whenever we go out to do live shows. It makes it a lot easier than and we've done talks where we weren't full in a room full of stuff you should know fans. And those are always more nerve wracking for me. Well, they also always went really poorly, too. You're kind of right. One of the problems, though, with this is like that you not only fear not knowing what you're talking about or being judged and failing, but also catastrophically screwing up, like forgetting your place, maybe bursting into tears and running off the stage. And so you fear these things. But the insidious thing about glauciphobia or really any social anxiety disorder is that you come to fear the fear. Right, right. It's not like you experience just the fear while you're up on stage. You fear this failure, whatever it is you're having to do for a very long stretch ahead of time. And that is the most crippling part of any social anxiety disorder, the fear of the fear associated with it. And that's what leads to the avoidance. Right. So let's take a quick break, and we're going to come back and talk about how this manifests itself and what you can do about it right after this. If you want to know, just listen. Humor. All right, so you got to give a talk at your school or whatever, which I did, by the way. My very first big in front of people speaking, and not just like classroom size, was when I ran for vice president of student council. I had to speak in front of the entire school and the gym, and it was pretty nerve wracking. New locker combos for everyone. Was that your platform? No. What was it, Brady or no. Happy days was angled parking. That was the big thing that Ritchie was running. Was it really? Yeah, man. And that is an arcane trivia question right there. I have no idea how that stuck with me. But what you will feel in your body, which is what I felt back then and what I don't so much feel now, is on edge. If it's really bad sense of panic and doom, your heart is going to be beating faster. These are like literal physical changes. You will be sweating, especially if you're me. You might be trembling, you might feel weak and dizzy. You might have trouble sleeping in the days proceeding four weeks. Four weeks. I have trouble sleeping after shows because of just the adrenaline. Just because you're so amped. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. There's definitely a come down stage. But all this is actually science and physiological things that are going on in your body, isn't that right? Yeah. And the reason why you're having this physiological reaction is because the whole thing any social anxiety disorder, but also glossophobia, since it's a subset of that, is centered around the amygdala which regulates our emotions. And for some reason they think it starts in childhood probably, where there's just some sort of innate shyness that doesn't dealt with and just grows and grows and grows as an adult. But you start to associate performance with fear and the amygdala. Then when it senses that there's some sort of performance impending starts to freak you out. It associates performance with that fear and not only things that have gone wrong in the past, but all the things that could go wrong in the future and releases the same stress hormones that it releases if a bear suddenly shows itself to you and takes a swipe at you with its clause, which means that the fight or flight response is kicked in. So you're having a physiological fight or flight response, which is why you feel like you want to run from wherever the place you have to give the talk is just run forever, quit your job, start a new life, maybe grow a mustache as this guy. Yeah. And as a kid, it can very easily be avoided instead of dealt with. And then that fear just never has overcome and you become an adult who has that same fear. Right. And you walk a really fine line as a parent. I'm already seeing this with like, no, you don't have to do that if it freaks you out too much or you don't want to be the 50s parent either. That's like, no, get on that high dive and jump back. Then they thought they were helping. Like my dad, I was scared of roller coasters and he told me, I'm not bringing you back anymore then if you don't get on this roller coaster right now. And I did. And I loved it. However, people don't parent that way anymore. So you really got to walk that fine line of encouragement and maybe like, it might be good if you could overcome the sphere without traumatizing them at the same time. Right. You have to figure out a way to trick them into doing it, kind of. There's a lot of trickery involved. I can imagine. There has to be. There's your fine line. There's the balance truck right there. But avoidance is not going to solve your problem. And experts say if you have to overcome this fear or want to, you got to do what we did and you got to just kind of start doing it on a smaller scale, ideally, right? So if you really have it bad and this is affecting you personally or professionally, whatever, it would help probably to go seek a cognitive behavioral therapist who's going to help you retrain your brain to see things differently so that your brain doesn't associate public speaking with abject fear and terror. And the way that you do this, like you said, just kind of starting out small, maybe giving a speech alone in a room and then moving up to one in front of a friend, then a handful of friends, or your dog maybe even for sure. I'll bet your dog wouldn't judge you. Most dogs aren't very judgy usually. And then maybe moving up to something like toastmasters, like a supportive group that can really help you and give you a chance to give speeches in front of other people who are very supportive and aren't going to judge you. And then you just keep going and pushing yourself and pushing yourself. And by doing that over and over again in increasingly anxiety inducing settings, you retrain your brain so that it doesn't associate terror, it associates good things instead, like being pumped up on adrenaline afterwards because you're so thrilled with yourself. Yeah, I've been to many weddings where I feel bad for the toastmaster. That position was shoved onto them and it ruins the wedding up until that point for them a lot of times because you can just tell, they're just like, I didn't want to do this, man. I've just been going over and writing and I just always feel so bad. I thought you were going to say it ruins the wedding. Well, it ruins their experience until it's over and then they just get plastered. Right. But one of the things you can do too, no matter whether you're performing for yourself in a room alone or in front of a room full of people, one way to really help yourself is to know the material, to be prepared and not just memorize it. Because if you memorize it, you can lose your place. And then you're just toast to know the material so much that you can improv and ad lib whenever needed. Because there is such a thing as hecklers out there and they will try to throw you off. But if you know the stuff, you can find your place again and be much more comfortable. That's the advice I always give to people is if you're nervous, just know the material inside and out. Then you can start to relax and make the jokes that people love. That's good advice. If your crutch is the actual material, then you're in good shape. Right, so that's it for public speaking. Get out there and speak publicly. And in the meantime, this is short stuff. Out. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts ever. You listen to your favorite shows." | |
42e2dfd8-53a3-11e8-bdec-c39f1e640a24 | Transdermal Implants: Body Art or Nightmare Fuel? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/transdermal-implants-body-art-or-nightmare-fuel | Transdermal implants are just one in a number of procedures under the banner of extreme body modification. We don't like to yuk yums, so we'll offer a fairly straightforward look at this niche art form. | Transdermal implants are just one in a number of procedures under the banner of extreme body modification. We don't like to yuk yums, so we'll offer a fairly straightforward look at this niche art form. | Tue, 14 Jan 2020 15:57:26 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=14, tm_hour=15, tm_min=57, tm_sec=26, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=14, tm_isdst=0) | 50691026 | audio/mpeg | "The world doesn't need just another Chardonnay. What it needs is Martha's Chard. The Martha Stewart Chardonnay from 19 Crimes? It satisfies the palette with bright notes of citrus and a crisp, clean finish. And what you need is to make, with this refreshing crowd pleaser, the star of your next part of your gathering. Because Martha's Shard just might be the perfect summer wine. So come on, let's work hard, play hard and drink. Martha's Shard. Available at a wine aisle near you. And on 19 Crimes.com, please drink responsibly with no fees or minimums on checking and savings accounts. Banking with Capital One is, like the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Kind of like choosing to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with their top rated app, you can deposit checks and transfer money anytime, anywhere, making Capital One an even easier decision that's banking reimagined what's in your wallet terms apply. Capital One NA Member FDIC. Welcome to stuff. You should know 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 Jerry over there. She has a doughnut beneath her skin on her forehead, which makes this Stuff you should know the transdermal implant edition. Although technically that'd be subdermal implants. Right, good point. There's a difference. I'm kind of excited about this. Are you? I'm excited, too, because as we record live today, this is the last full length session of the year. Right. We're doing some shorties tomorrow. Yes. And then I'm doing movie crushes tomorrow. And that's it, man. We're done for. Like, if you look at calendar days, almost three full weeks, you get a big day tomorrow, don't you? Yeah, I'm recording a lot of shows. That's a lot of episodes tomorrow. Five, six, seven episodes tomorrow. So are you sad if we're not going to be recording for a little while, or are you like yeah, no, I'm super glad. That's fine. I'm going to take it personally because I feel the same way. No, I'm not saying I hate all the View people, but it's going to be nice. Breaks are really good. Yeah. We get to charge us, tear the covers off of our textbooks. Yeah. Turn them back in for a substantially less amount than what we paid for them. Yeah. After the bell rings, we go down the hall throwing all our papers around and stuff. Yeah, exactly. The best. Everyone's like, this is super slaying. This is work. Yeah. No, it's going to be a great break. And it means good quality family holiday time. Not having to research stuff is nice for a few weeks, and then it makes us eager to get back and start researching stuff again. And not only that, we get to go on the road shortly after we get back. That's right. We're going to baking in a shout out. Prepare for this. Yeah. We're doing a show in Seattle, the more on January. That would be the Thursday 16th. And then we'll be in La for the Iheart Podcast Awards on Friday. Right. No events other than that. Right. Because we're in and out. Sure. Then Saturday we're going to be at Sketchfest, the Castro live show. Brand new stuff. It's the 18th. 18th. So yeah, it's going to be a big jam. That's right. And then I'm doing a movie crush on the 19th. Right. And this year, I'm not going to do a single guest talking about a one movie. I'm going to mix it up and get the audience involved. Very nice. Going to have a slate of people on stage be wandering around the audience with a microphone. I'm having a lot of fun. I'm, like, nervous just thinking about that. Really? Oh, yeah. I'm not even going to be in the audience because I'm not going to be in town. I'm sorry, but the idea of being in the audience and you picking me oh, it's voluntary. I'm not going to just someone's face that's classy. Have you been? This is the cream of the crop of stuff. You should know, Lesters. Sure. They're not these drunk manners who jump on the mic and Q and A going off on Maine. Again, they're nice, but we had a couple of drunkies at the end that tried to ruin the show. We totally did, didn't we? Yeah, they're fine. It happens from time to time. Not in San Francisco or Portland, though. They know what's up. Or Seattle. Seattle, sorry. Yeah. But we're hitting Portland in March. We haven't announced those yet. Portland and Vancouver, it looks like. Yes. And then we're debating other various places for 2020. Yeah. Right in. Let us know where to go. Yeah. Okay. So off to transdermal implants. Charles. Yeah. This is one kind of an extreme body modification. And I want to go ahead and say right off the bat, we don't like to yuck people's. Yums. Right. I'm going to do this as straightforward as I can, but it is hard in some of these circumstances to not recoil in horror at what you're seeing. But the reason I feel like I can say that is I think that's kind of the point for a lot of these folks, is they want to sometimes scare your average square walking down the street. You're L seven. Yeah. Otherwise every picture wouldn't be them going right in the camera lens. A lot of them do that. They're inciting a reaction and I get it. It's fine. For sure. Yeah. They're freaking out the normies, basically. Yeah. Not all of them. I was reading I actually looked up psychology of body modifications. Interesting. And this person wrote, I think it was from a tattoo place or a piercing place. And they're like, despite what most average people think, there's not some sort of psychological defect driving people to do this stuff. Right. But there is some psychology to it. And frequently the most common explanation for doing this is self expression. Yeah, sure. Can't really fault anybody for that. Sometimes it's kind of like to show your affiliation with the tribe or something like that. Right. Like, if you're a grinder, which will get into or a raver or Goth. Yes. Or a Mukmuk or possiboumb. You sound a million years old right now. And then let's see. What was the last one? Oh, sexual enhancement. Also can't fault anybody for that one. Yeah, we'll talk about some of those, too, but I don't want to leave you high and dry here, because I don't have any issues with anybody doing whatever to their own body sure. For whatever reason, short of serious mental illness. And, I mean, I think that does come up, but it's very, very rare. But if you look at pictures of the after or the during, sure. It can make one a little fainty. Is that what you mean? Yeah, we're curious people. Like, if I ever sat down across from someone with a split tongue and elf ears and things like that and say, hey, what's going on with that? You say? How about them cubbies? Big baseball fan right now. I'd want to pick their brain a little bit. And the likely response, like you said, would be, it's just self expression, man. This is just how I feel. I want to project myself. Sure. He's like, you want to project as a tubby old bearded guy? Yeah. You're gross. So we're just kind of dropping in on a subculture that we're not affiliated with in any way, shape, or form, but we're also Squares. This isn't to parade them around and point and gawk and laugh. So if you're here for that, move along. That's right. Okay. All right. Boy, these are weirdos. I'm kidding. So we're talking specifically about transdermal implants, which we'll get to, but those are, I think you said, an extreme form of body modification. Yeah. EBM. Yeah, e. It's very important. This is not to be confused with the Mountain Dew version of extreme. There's an e at the beginning of that word, which legitimizes the whole thing tremendously. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. You were a child of the know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Even though I never had Mountain Dew. What? I know never. I don't think I've ever tasted Mountain Dew. What about mellow yellow? I think I might have had a couple of those when I was a kid. Okay, well, then yeah, you're fine. I did about the same virtually the same thing. Although Mountain Dew is branched out. They have some new freaky stuff. They got all kinds of colors and flavors now. So there's one that's blue that you may accidentally got from a vending machine the other day and brought home and was like, I can't touch this, but I'll bet you'd, like, you can't drink blue stuff. This is the epitome of blue stuff. That you shouldn't drink, but it's like highly addictive. The taste is like, oh, it's awful, I want another sip. Oh really? That's so weird. It's a very addictive cotton candy ish taste with a little bit of blue raspberry mix. And I'm not sure what it is, but my brain is still quivering from it and this is like a week ago. I don't know what a blue raspberry is, so I'm already confused. But really, you got to think Chuck, there are people who do engage in transdermal implants listening to this and they're like, these guys are talking about the wildest experience they've had recently. And it was Blue Mountain Dew. This is our stage in life that we're in. Yeah, that's fine. I'm comfortable with that. Okay. So it's an extreme foreign body modification, which is a larger umbrella that covers a lot of different stuff and some stuff that's been around a really long time. Like tattooing. Sure. Piercing, gauging. So, you know, with gauging, like there's like a hole in your ear and you can make a pretty big that's actually a traditional custom that dates back a very long time. And our Buttsy apparently had zero gauge years. Oh, really? Yeah, he was from 5000 something years before. Yeah. And I've also seen it in the lip, the cultures that have the disk inserted in the lip. So yeah, this is something that it is very important to point out that it is our Western culture. To us, it's like, oh, this new thing that these kids are doing. But for tattoos, like for thousands of years, other cultures across the world have done similar things like that. Right. And that also raises a really important point too. Body modification can also include something like a pure sear or a nose job or getting an eyelid job. Right. A little Nippet or a tuck. Sure. And these are typically people modifying their body to reach some sort of social ideal of beauty, a norm of beauty that they feel like they don't have naturally. So they're modifying their bodies with extreme body modification, like transdermal implants, the intention is to go the other way. Right. But it's still like on the same coin. It's just a different side of that same coin. Right. That's a beautiful thing to them. Right. But I think they realize that it's going to freak out the normies. That's right. So it's a win win. Yeah, it is. We're not going to get into all these because this is mainly on these transformal implants. But we do need to mention things like beating. We've talked about the tongue splitting. Do you know what beating is? Yeah, go ahead. Oh, you're going to lay it on me? Sure. I was trying to lay it on you. So that's all fair. Beatings or genital beating or purling is inserting like a bead or something beneath the skin or on the top of the skin or somewhere under the skin on the penis. And that is a million percent for sexual enhancement. Yeah. We'll go over some more for her pleasure terms. Is that what they used to say? That's what it said on the bathroom wall of the gas station. No, it was like ribbed. Yeah, for her pleasure. Right, sure. They also have ribs instead of pearls, but ribs. So like a ribbed penis. I got you. But those are subdermal implants. They're meant to be under the skin. They're not supposed to break the skin. Right. Again, of the genitals. That is true. The tongue splitting. Apparently there's one form of tongue splitting you can do where you have movement over both sides. No, like independently, I think so. That's pretty awesome. I haven't seen it in action, like, on YouTube, but I read that that's neat a couple of hours ago. And I did not go to YouTube on purpose. Right. Yeah. I've suffered quite a bit the last couple of days from my curiosity getting the best of me. And then there's the subdermal implant like you were talking about, which is different. If you've ever seen anyone that looks like they are. What are the Star Trek? Is it a Klingon that has the big we're going to get killed puffy? I'm not a Star Trek guy, but whichever ones have the very prominent brow. A lot of times these subdermal implants can look like that as something under the skin. That's the shape of something. Actually, it's a pretty cool one. Oh, yeah. On the top of a guy's hand, he had a skull under his skin. Yeah. And I got admitted. I was like, that's kind of awesome. It seems like transdermal implants. There were subdermal implants first, and then transdermal implants kind of made a splash, and then everybody's like, this is too dangerous. Let's go back to subdermal implants. And now those are a big time thing, and apparently the success rate for them is much greater. And they're meant to just be, like you were saying, completely under the skin. And they come in all these different sizes and shapes, and the sizes in particular are meant to just kind of slowly stretch the skin like you do when you gauge your ears. Yeah. You can go bigger and bigger. Right. So you just put one in and let your skin kind of loosen up around it. And underneath the skin, there's that shape of, what you say a skull. Yeah. I've seen skulls, hand grenades, throwing stars, which may or may not have just been regular stars with pointy edges, hearts, music notes, cherries or whatever. And you can put them anywhere on your body, and it's just like that shape protruding from underneath your skin. Or the most famous one I saw, I think, first, because I think the kid who did it was an early adopter that donut shape on the forehead, which I'm not sure if it's just aesthetic or if there's some sort of symbolism behind it or not, but it is a definite look. It's not like Doctor Manhattan, is it? I don't know who that is. Okay, is that like a 70s Cisco Group? No, it's The Watchman. It's character from the watchman. What did he epic novelmovie? He had, like, a glowing thing underneath his skin, right? No, it was on his forehead. He had a circle, but it was glowing. No, he could glow sometimes. Okay, maybe that's what I'm confusing it with. But there are now subdermal implants that have Led lights so that not only is your skin this shape, protruding, it also lights up. Did you see that thing about people having magnets put in their fingers? Let's talk about that for a second. All right. People have magnets in their fingers sometimes. Yes. Shannon Larryt is like kind of a huge, extreme body mod artist, okay. Which is something we should say. The people who implant this stuff are called artists. The people who have it done to them are also called artists typically, too. It's kind of like art. I do the art and I am the art. Exactly. But don't call me a doctor. Right. Especially not Doctor Manhattan. But Shannon Larrit was an early adopter of magnet fingertips, but it didn't work out all that well because of the way that they were produced. Yeah. That is called sensory augmentation. And the idea here is you put a tiny magnet in your fingertip, and you can sense things like magnetic fields. I mean, you become a magnet, right. At least the tip of your finger does. You, like, check out this paper clip. Now it's attached to my finger. What are you going to do, Normy? Well, it said there were some funny things in this. I got a couple of articles on this. One of them was what You Need to Know About Getting Magnetic Finger Implants by George Vorsky. George Davoski? Yeah. You know him? Oh, yeah, he's a huge IO nine rider. Okay. So one of the things that said it could be useful if you work in electronics, you can feel the live wires versus the dead wires. And I'm just thinking, like, they have devices that do that. And then they listed a few other things. And finally it said, you can also do things like pick up bottle caps and paper clips. Pretty neat. But it's an early example, or I should say primitive example of biohacking, which is like trying to do things. It's kind of like a part of the transhumanism umbrella where it's, like, stellar with the ear. I knew that was coming. Okay. Of course. He's like our go to poster child for transhumanism. That's right. This is actually following through on biohacking with your own body. And there's actually a name for that community that very specific set of people who are actually doing this stuff. And they're called grinders. Yeah. And that's like a magnet or an RFID chip or something like that if you really know you're going to be working at the same office for a while, you might have your RFID card implanted into the top of your hand. Never lose it. And then you just swipe your hand and freak out your normy coworkers. Yeah. This one guy from Wired, and he wasn't even listed as the author, maybe because he just wanted to remain anonymous or she and this person got the magnet done as an experiment for the article. What? And it said four months after the thing, basically, eventually, he tried to get it taken out by his family doctor. He said, my family doctor tried to remove it and failed. The implant shattered into pieces and it no longer worked as a magnet, he said, but four months later, I lost all the effect. The spot darkened and the magnetism returned because the magnet, being a magnet, had reassembled itself in my finger. Wow. That's awesome. Isn't that amazing? And it reassembled itself into a skull and crossbone. I don't know. He said it wasn't as sensitive, but he could pick up bottle caps. That's pretty for sure. Which is ultimately the point, you know? Yeah. It's all very interesting, and I know we're laughing a lot and stuff, but it is unusual, so forgive us if you're out there and you have a magnet in your finger and you're offended by us. Yeah. Go listen to some other episodes of stuff you should know and you'll catch our vibe. You'll know? We're not laughing at you. All right. Should we take a break? Sure. All right, let's do that. Let's get some magnets implanted in our pinkies, and we'll be right back. 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 Shard, available at a wine aisle near you. And on 19 Crimes.com, that's one nine Crimes.com. Please drink responsibly. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but we're pretty excited about summer. What's not to like? School is out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's right. And that's where True Crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. Yeah. And with so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. Prepare to go deep and become your own detective in the world of serial crimes and unsolved mysteries. Get lost hearing spooky stories with a combination of detailed research and lighthearted analysis. Whether you're a lifetime fan of true crime or you just feel like being entertained while doing the dishes at night, there's a podcast out there for you to download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. One of the things I saw about having magnets implanted in your fingers and actually any kind of implant that involves metal, an MRI is a terrible idea. I saw that. And sometimes you might need an MRI. It's medically necessary. It will pull it out of your body. Oh, my God. And I saw two different things. I saw one article where a guy said that you need to let them know so they can account for this. And I saw another one where they said, no, they won't let you do this. Sure. So I don't know if accounting for it means, like, hanging your hand out the side, which is not possible, I don't think. Maybe temporarily amputating your hands and then throwing it through the MRN and reattaching them and hoping for the best. That sounds like something out of a movie, though, ripping a magnet out of your finger in real time. Oh, my gosh. So everything we've talked about, basically up to this point has been subdermal implants, which are completely under the skin. They either use for biohacking or just for adornment. There's something else, and this is what we're actually talking about today. I know. Those are called transdermal implants, right? And they bear a striking resemblance to subdermal, except they are even more extreme body modifications because they're implanted under the skin, but they also protrude out of the skin, which means they break the body envelope, which makes them extremely risky as far as this whole thing is concerned. Yeah. And I've heard it's also called single point is another name for it. I've seen those for microdermals. Oh, really? Yeah, which we'll get to. Yeah, because it definitely wouldn't be Single point, because there's the second point that they make. I think so, yeah. I think Single point is we'll talk about it with microdermal. All right. So the idea of the implant, though, is if you imagine permanent jewelry, maybe, or if you look online, the first thing that you will likely see is someone with a shaved head and little horns or spikes or any kind of adornment coming out of the head. But this guy what was his first name? Mr. Al Ward. His first name, Chuck, was joe. Joe, right. He was one of it seems like the first people, if not the who got this done in Steve Hayworth. Yeah. And Hayworth seems to be still a very prominent body modification artist. He's called the mod father. Okay. Well, there you have it. Those subdermal implants. He designs and sells them like crazy, made out of silicone. Yeah, because he worked in medical tool engineering, which we're not saying that's a qualification. It definitely wasn't this guy, but it probably helped. Oh, yeah. No, this guy basically he grew up in his father's company. His father created cosmetic surgery tools, and Steve joined the family company, and he made cosmetic surgery tools and was very successful at it, first with his father's company and then later with his own company. But he also said, well, this is kind of a cool idea, too, using this stuff for body modification. So not only did he invent design and create these tools that are used for this stuff, he also invented the procedures, and he also invented the implants. He created this. He truly is the Mod father. Yeah. And it's not always a metal mohawk of spikes or anything. We should talk a little bit about a gentleman named Dennis Avner, who is no longer with us. If you have ever poked around this community, then you know who Dennis Avner was. He was known as stalking Cat. Yeah. Stalking Cat. Or just the tiger or catman or tigris or Cat Man. He was a veteran of the US. Navy. And this was from his obituary written by Shannon Laurette from Mod blog. From the Mod Blog. And he worked as a programmer and a technician, and his totem was a tiger. Right. And a female tiger. He was a Native American of the Huron tribe. So he was actually okay. That's what I couldn't find out. No, he definitely was. Is he just followed along that tradition, or if he actually was. He was an actual Huron. Okay. So he also had implants and things above his lip to kind of puff it out like a cat. He had metal whiskers. Yeah. He had his upper lip surgically severed to make it more catlike. Yeah. What's that called? I can't remember. Something acomy, though. Yeah. I'll tell you how it ends. It ends withectomy so. Yeah. His ears, his nose, his lips. He had fangs, and not just like you've seen the little vampire fangs. Like, these look like legit cat teeth, from what I saw. And maybe he did both, but he engaged in teeth filing to give himself fangs. I also saw that he had his adult teeth removed, and he had fang dentures implanted. Well, they had to be, because these were super long. Right. So I wonder if he did teeth filing at first, and it didn't suit his needs. And then he followed up with the dentures. But he was doing all this and face tattoos. We should mention extensive facial tattoos, like tiger stripes. Right. And he looked like a tiger. Like, if you were, like, look at that guy. What do you think he looks like? Anyone would say a tiger. Yes. He nailed it in that respect. He totally did. But he was still in the process of he said, I saw two different things. One, that he was trying to emulate the perfect balance between a human and a cat, a tiger. And he wanted to become the synthesis of those two things. Another was that he was just trying to become a cat. Right. They were working on being surgically altered so that he would have to walk on all fours and that it would be comfortable for him. Ultimately, that was his end goal. Either way, he died by suicide before he reached his goal. Right. But this was like his life's passion. This is what he did. He worked so that he could make money. I think he repaired computers and then he took his money and gave it to underground surgeons to carry out these procedures, or body modification artists to carry out these procedures on them. That's right. I think the one quote I saw was, it's brought me fame, but not fortune. Right. And he liked the fame. If you look at the pictures of him, he's hamming it up at the Ripley's Believe It or not opening and things like that. He really enjoyed being in this spotlight like this. Yeah. It looked like he stepped off the Broadway stage from Cats. Sure. Except it was real. I bet he had lifetime free admission to Cats. And I was like, I can't believe it actually closed. I was just liking it after the thousandth time. Have you ever seen Cats? Yeah, that's why I'm ragging on it. It's terrible. Isn't really the worst. I mean, I've heard things like that, but I've also heard people that are so excited for this movie do not trust those people. So you're not going to see the movie? I think. No. A Good Life motto is don't trust anyone who says they like the show cast. Okay. But anyway, one of the shows from a former cast member, one of the things about yeah. Rom Tom Tugger and the traveling Cast. Was that one of the names? Yeah, I think that's the only one I can remember. One of the things that we should say about stalking cat is that in the body modification community is widely considered to have suffered from a serious mental disorder, like body dysmorphic disorder or something like that. He was the most extreme version. Even though he gets lumped together with all people who engage in extreme body modification, he was an outlier. And that he probably did suffer from a mental illness. That's right. So back to the implants. They're anchors under the skin like we talked about. Are we talking about how they do this? Yeah. And kind of what they are and how they do it. But these anchors, it seems like nowadays are mainly clover or figure eight shaped. That's what I saw in that thing you said. Although I did see that they could be round and circular. This is the same thing. Or rectangular. They can be custom made. They're made from what's called implant grade titanium or teflon. Yeah. Or silicone. Right. I don't know how they could be silicone. I don't either, because it seems like it could be wobbly. That seems like a more of a subdermal thing, but maybe not. The key. Is this Chuck? Whatever the post or the anchor, the anchor of the implant is, it has to have gaps, holes in it. That's right. And the reason why is because scar tissue is supposed to grow in these holes and really cement that anchor into your skin. It embeds it. It's not an anchor if it's not anchored. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that's the whole point, is that it's not slipping around in your head or wherever you have it. Sure. And it is stuck there and it's protruding through the skin via the post. That's part of the anchor that's sticking out of your skin. Yeah. So anytime you see a little devil's horn or whatever that is screwed on and they can just screw that thing off and screw on a Homer Simpson head, that's what I want to see. Sure, that would be good. Mohawk of Homer Simpson head like Dr. Klong from A Fistful of Yen from The Kentucky Fried Movie. I don't remember that. He had a prosthetic arm and hand. He could unscrew it and put on things like a flamethrower or spear gun or something like that. You've seen Kentucky Fried movie? I have. It's been a long time, though. It's time you saw it again. Yeah. It's even more juvenile than you remember, but it is just fantastic. More juvenile than when I was twelve and watching. That's amazing. I've seen it. Yes. Because when you're twelve, you're like, oh, this is how grown ups think. Right. I can't wait to be a grown up. Then you become a grown up, you're like, no, it's just the Zucker brothers. Right. So there is some controversy around all this. And I looked up the legalities and from what I saw, if you're a tattoo piercing place, you have definitely been certified and you have your operating license and all that good stuff. Probably have an autoclave to sterilize everything. Probably. So if you live in a basement, though, it's a different story. Well, what I saw was that the courts have still, and this was from an article from last year, the courts still have not been asked to rule on extreme body modification. Because the question is, does this qualify as surgery or is it like piercing? Is it the same thing as piercing? There are scalpels, there are sutures. Yeah. From what I've seen, everybody in the body modification community is like, no, that's surgery. Right. It's pure and simple. It's a type of cosmetic surgery. The reason why it seems questionable is because every other cosmetic surgery you've heard of is toward this norm of, like a norm? Yeah, western norm. Right. Whereas this is the opposite way. So people are like, wait, what are you doing? And you do this in a tattoo place or a piercing place. Right. But you're not being coerced. Right. But it's still surgery. Yeah, absolutely. So should we go through the process? I woke up excited about this part today. I can't wait. We'll kick it off then. Okay. Hi, I'm Chuck. I would like multiple hands giving high fives to each other down the center of my head more. Welcome in, Chuck. Have a seat. I'm a body modification artist. Or what? You think one is like all right. Like it right? I'm kidding, Chuck. I'm just teasing. Okay, let me take that again. Oh, well, please come in. I have a seat. Thanks. Care for some local anesthetic? It's illegal, but I want you to have it if you want it. Yeah, I mean, there could be some local anesthetic, or there could just be ice. Are you breaking the fourth wall right now? Oh, sorry. I've heard sometimes there's just ice. Yeah, it could be. Which is really saying something, because people like you in the extreme body modification community endure a tremendous amount of pain in doing this procedure that we're about to describe to one another, even though you're my customer. All right, so what happens next? Seen. All right, can we go back to normal? Yeah. All right, good. So what happens next? It's actually very straightforward. It really is. So the artist, the body modification artistunderground surgeon, will make two. So you'll say, I want a metal mohawk, which is a bunch of spikes coming out of the top of your head about where your forehead ends. She didn't like my idea about the hand sideiving. Oh, the hand type. I'm sorry. No, whatever. So how many do you want? So you've got one hand coming out and another hand coming out. So you have two. I want them all in a row. So I want four sets of two hands. So that's what, eight total hands facing each other. Okay. So I'm going to figure out and show you where I think they should go. Okay. I'm going to do that by using, like, a sharpie and marking those spots. And you'll say, yes, that's perfect. I've got eight dots on my head right now. I think that's great placement for these hands. And then on each side of those dots, where those implants are going to be, I'm going to measure off about an inch, about two and a half centimeters, and make another mark. And that mark is where the actual incision goes. Right. And in each of those eight spots and again, Chuck, bear in mind you have had maybe some ice. You turn down the anesthetic because you're super legal. Right. You're going to feel a scalpel, make a slit in your head eight different times about an inch away from where those implants are. Right. That's step one. That's going to be like a drive around Paradise Island compared to what's coming next as far as pain goes. Yeah. I mean, that sounds bad enough, but then what needs to happen? Because remember, your skin likes being very close to your head. Yeah. It's not Lucy Goosey. It's not Lucy Goosey. But you need to make it a little bit looseygoosey because you got to slide that anchor over from your incision point to its final destination. Right. Which is why you have two points marked off the place where the implants coming and the place where the incision is. So how do you separate the skin, then? You separate it with a little tool, sort of like a tiny little spatula invented by Steve Hayworth. Did he invent us? Yes, he did. This guy is legit, dude. No, I'm not saying he's not, but I thought it had been long used in plastic surgery. From what I saw, he invented the dermal elevator. Okay, well, it's a dermal elevator. It's a little metal thing that you insert, and you use it as a little pry bar, basically. Yeah, it's like a spatula to pry the skin up from your head. Yeah. So what you're doing then is creating what's called a pocket. And in creating this pocket, so you've got the dermal elevator. Now it's pressed like you've separated the skin from the top of your head. You got a little room now along all of these incisions. You're probably doing it one at a time, I would guess, because you don't want these incisions hanging out, waiting for you to be done with the first. But you slide that dermal elevator under finally until it's under the spot where you marked off where the implant is going to come out. And then you take another, maybe either the scalpel again or thermal punch, and you make a little hole. And then now you have that pocket. And then you have a hole. And you take the implant, which, again, consists of an anchor with the post coming out of it, and you put it into the incision, move it through the pocket that you've created with the thermal elevator, and then just kind of move it along. Your skull pops right out of that hole until it pops out of the hole. And the whole reason for this specific procedure is because you want the hole that the implant is coming out of to be smaller than the anchor of the implant, which is why you make that decision. So you can move the implant in, and it won't just protrude through the hole that you've made for the implant to come out of. That's right. You do this, in your case, eight times after that, after what I just said, and the implants in and in position, then you suture. And then I guess you do it seven more times. That's right. I can't imagine sitting through one, let alone eight. Yeah. I mean, it's not my bag. It seems painful. I got my ear pierced when I was in high school, and that hurt bad enough. I used to self pierce my own ears. Well, you know, the funny story is I got my ear pierced on spring break senior year with all my buds. Like the dumbest suburban white boy thing to do. You're like George Michael me up right here, basically. And they're all standing around going jitterbug. Yes. I got that done. I actually thought that was part of the story. First, I sold it that way. We got home, and my mom got really upset and cried, so I took it out. She cried it right out of your ear? She did. And then she felt bad, and my mom re pierced my ear. Oh, wow. How about that? Why did she feel bad? She was successful. In what? Crying it out of my ear. I think because I was one of the eight guys, and I was the only guy who had it cried out of their ear. I got you. I think she just came around. It was that initial. That's great. Shock. Shocking. All the normie. Came to love it. Yeah. So one other thing. So we're talking about how it's not our bag and that just having your ear pierce was painful. One of the things I saw in explanation why people do this is for the pain. Some people get off on the pain. Yeah, I figured that. But also, some people want to kind of push their comfort zone of their pain tolerance. They're not necessarily getting off on it, but they feel like they're increasing their endurance, their grit, whatever you want to call it. They're gaining something, right? Yeah. Possibly a spiritual experience from it. That it's not just like there are people out there who don't just necessarily think like you and me. It's like, let's avoid paying at all costs. Some people run into that stuff head first, forehead first, and say, Cut some holes in this man. Yeah. So that's cool. Yeah. And that's basically the long and short of how you do that. You've got this post sticking out, then it's sutured up. However, they don't tell you, I'm sure they do tell you. This is the success rate for transdermal implants is super low. Is it 20%? Yes, 20% is what I thought, too. Well, you know what? That's a great place to break, because that's the first downside, and we'll talk about more of those when we come back. The world doesn't need just another Chardonnay. What it needs is Martha's Chard. The Martha Stewart Chardonnay. That's the newest addition to the 19 Crimes family of wines. Martha Shard is a contemporary lens on 19 Crimes. It's the wine that disrupts the chardonnay category. 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That's right. It's part true crime and part comedy. Morbid takes you on a journey through murderous mysteries and major laughs, all in the same week. Yeah. From the paranormal to the pretty spooky and everything in between, hosts Selena Erkart and Ash Kelly cover it all. And with two episodes released each week, you'll be hooked on this chart topping series before you know it. You can listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. So, Chuck, you said the success rate is 20%. What does that mean? Well, that means that 20% of the time, everything is great. You don't get a skull infection, and 80% of the time, a number of things can happen. Infection is obviously one of the biggest risks. Right. Because you're working with people who may have things fully sterilized or may not. I'm sure they take it really seriously now. Sure. And I'm not saying it's all like, in someone's basement and they fish a scaffold out of their pocket. Right. I'm sure they take it really seriously now. But infection in hospitals is something that's a problem. Right. It's going to be a problem here. Yeah. It's not even necessarily that the tools or the implant are infected, but you have just broken open the envelope of your body and now there's a direct pipeline into one of the most vulnerable parts of your body, your skull and your brain, from the outside environment. Come on in, bugs. And if you've done that eight times in your head, and technically, you have 16 holes in your head now, eight for the implant and eight incisions. That's 16 opportunities. Exactly. And so even if you keep the thing clean and really keep up with it while it's scarifying and healing, you have an open area for the outside environment to come into your brain. And that is one of the frequent infections that happens, is a skull infection. You might have a skin infection, it might go away, but it might have just migrated to your skull and is eating into your skull, which can become an abscess in your brain, which is a real problem. You can imagine. That is one of the risks of transdermal implants. And it's such a risk that people in the body mog community are like, this is nuts. We really probably shouldn't be doing this. Let's go back to subdermals. Yeah, that's what I saw. Is your finger on the pulse? Oh, yeah. I'm super hip. I drink nothing but Mountain Dew blue all day. I'm trying to picture you now being, like a cub reporter podcaster who infiltrates the organization. I get talked into doing a doughnut forehead thing. Yeah, because they don't believe you, so you got to prove it. Right? I'm like, Can I just do some cocaine or something to prove it? You're like, well, when I was younger, I got a BB lodged under my skin and a BB gun fight. How do you remember that? Did that really happen to you? Oh, yeah. Okay. I thought you remember. No, I was taking that from Royal Tannin Bombs. Right here. Yeah. So there you go. You've had a subdermal? Yeah, it was unwilling and involuntary. What happened? Did you just pop that thing right back out? I didn't. A custodian at my school did. Oh, man. God bless them. That's amazing. God bless her. Oh, really? Wow. Oh, man. She was the definition of grizzled. She's like, I can help you with that. Whipped out her pocket knife and just went to town, man. The custodian at my elementary school these people are like teachers. Like, you grow up with them. This is my high school. Yeah, we had the same guy for seven years, Roger. And he was amazing. He was, like, 63. He was tall and lanky, and he had this big, long Cadillac with a front license. So seventy s a front license plate that said Maha Raja and Air rushed. And he was so cool because my dad was principal. So he hired Roger and Alfred, the two guys who worked there. And they were there the whole time. I was buddies with those. How could you not hire Roger Roger when he shows up with that car? They were good guys. All right. I feel like a scumwad for not remembering my lady's name. Well, I think the fact that my dad was the principal, I got to know a lot of the staff more than a normal kid might. Oh, that's true. Because I was there in summers and hanging out and stuff. Right. They helped you with homework. Yeah. So where were we? We're talking about infiltrating okay, here's some of the other things that can happen aside from infection, obviously, rejection. Anytime you're introducing a foreign object to the body, it really doesn't want it there, so it strives to reject it. So when it does work out, it's sort of not luck, but it's your body failing to do what it wants to do, which is get rid of that thing. Right. And can also move. So I guess if that tissue doesn't grow, I'm curious, I guess the suture is supposed to hold it in place enough while the tissue grows? No, I think you're not supposed to touch it for a while while the scar tissue is growing. But I don't know that the suture has anything to do with it. The suture, I thought, was just from the incision site, which is an HOA. Oh, I thought they sutured around. I don't think so. Really? They just punch it through? Yeah. And I think the hole is small enough that it's not really going to move as long as you don't mess with it while it's scarring. So it's like the little snaps on a trucker's cap. Kind of interesting. One of the other things that can happen, too, is some people don't use dermal elevators. Some people use butter knives instead. There was another Wired article from 2006 that I saw. Wired is all over this kind of stuff. Yeah. Steve Hayworth was saying that's like trying to thread a needle with a Cadillac, I guess a Maharajr Cadillac. Right. And you just don't want to use a butter knife. And if somebody's using a butter knife for this, just stop. Be like, stop, stop. I'm going to go find somebody else. But even if you use a transdermal or dermal elevator, you can go too deep and pull too much skin away and start to mess with tendons and nerves and all sorts of stuff you don't want to mess with. And that can cause a lot of problems, too. I have, as you can see, I sliced my thumb open last week, and the tip of it is still completely numb. Cutting a bagel with a serrated knife? Yeah. And it is completely numb. Yeah. I didn't want to take away from your glory, but I cut a significant portion of my finger off right here. See all this up to the nail, just off. And it took a while for the feeling to come back, a very long time. I was like, I don't think I'm ever going to get feeling back. And I did. It comes back. It just takes a little while for the nerves. But isn't that spectacular that my finger is intact again? Now it is like we can regrow fingertips. So I guess what I'm trying to say is keep the faith, buddy. Well, I got another story since we're on this. All right, well, then I'll come up with my own against you. And this was two and a half months ago. I kicked my bed frame with my shin, and Emily heard the sound, and I hit the deck, and I tend to overreact, and she was kind of like, all right, you're like, this is worse than when I got my ear pierced. I told her. I was like, Something happened this was not a normal shin kick. Oh, yeah. And there was a lump. And if you touched it, it was clearly some kind of exposed, nerve like pain would shoot all the way through my leg for like, two months. And now the left top of my calf is still numb two and a half months later. Wow. And like a large seven inches worth of my calf. Is it one of those things where it's probably best that it's numb? Like, you'd be in a lot of pain if it weren't? Well, it's basically healed now, but that lump and the nerve damage was now the lump is just now gone. But it was pain like I've never literally never felt before. That's crazy. It was awful. Oh, you didn't like it? No, I didn't. So this is not my thing. I understand. I'm not down with this, but the whole thing is leading me to suggestion that we tackle nerves and nerve damage at some point. Sure. I've been wanting to do one on pain itself, but it's such a big topic, we haven't had time to tackle it. Right. But we will. Okay. Are we done with this? We're probably not done yet. We were going to talk about microdermals before we leave. Yeah. So those are way safer because the idea is that it can be done with, like, a piercing gun type machine. Yeah. The device, it's the same thing. It looks like there's a piece of jewelry or some adornment growing out of your skin, but it's much, much smaller than what a transdermal anchor and post can handle. Much smaller. And so you basically just kind of make a hole and dig the skin away just a little bit just to create just enough of a pocket to put basically a mini transdermal post and anchor in there. But it's so small that you can just kind of move the skin over in a hole and pop it in there. And then the skin closes back over it. And now you have a little post and you can screw a little stud or diamond or whatever. And it just looks like if you've ever seen somebody with a stud on their cheeks and it looks like a jewel mole or something like that, that's a microdermal. They actually have a hole in their face not going all the way through. Right. That there's a post kind of in there. They're apparently easier to get out, too, which is a big problem with transdermal, is that once they're in and it scars over, you got a real problem if you want them out. They're hard to remove. Sometimes surgery is involved. And then I saw, even though they were called permanent, that eventually they all kind of need to come out at some point. Right. I'm not sure if that's what the science is behind that. When you get an office job, that's usually the science behind that. Yeah, I know. The last thing I wanted to do was read over some of these adult piercings. Yes. How many of these did you look up? Most of them I could not resist. Anal piercing. Yeah. So two things. Google Image, beware. I think that's fair. That's a good COA. And also, if your kid, your mom or dad, prepare to see what a anal piercing looks like, you might not want to hear any of these things. Or if you're playing this for your class for some reason. Right. Teacher this might be a good time to stop. So, for males, it's list the following ampalangs. Do you want to describe any of these or just that one, how's it spelled? Because I didn't look up all of them. A-M-P-A-L-L-A-N-G. That one I didn't see. Is that the glands piercing? I'm not sure. Okay. I only looked up about half of these. There's another one that begins with an A. That's a glance piercing. The alpha dravias? I think so, yeah. Where there's a piercing with two studs, a stud on either side that goes right through the head of the penis. Again, for sexual enhancement. All these are for sexual enhancement, right? Well, almost all the time. Sometimes it's for aesthetics, but I got you. There's something called a deep PA. Something called the dolphin, something called a ditos foreskin piercing. Boring. Something called a Gleechis. Have you seen that? No. I got to see that one. Yeah, you can check that out. I don't know how to describe it without losing our show. How does it spell? G-U-I-C-H-E-S. pubics princess wand, a reverse PA. And then the ever popular Scrotal ladder. What is that one? Just look it up. And these are the adult piercings listed for females anal, of course. Men and women. Christina, the old clitoris piercing. The forchette the horizontal hood. The Hymen inner labia. Isabella nipples. Boring. Outer labia princess. Albertina, the triangle and the vertical hood. Yeah, there's a lot of things to be pierced on a vagina. Apparently there are. You're right. We probably can't describe the yeah, it's sort of like no man's land. Yeah, that's a really great way to put it. I think you just saved the day. Okay, good. Well, if you want to know more about body modification, there's an actual there's an article on how stuff works you can check out. It's a great place to start. Maybe it's your bag. You'll find out. And since I said maybe it's your bag, it's time for listener mail. This is about when I was talking about that story about the Googling, the two words oh, yeah. That didn't match up or whatever. Chuck mentioned he had a friend who had Googled two random words to get as few results as possible. I got really excited. This practice is called Google Sculpting, and it was used in a subversive poetry movement called flarf. You ever heard of this guy wrote, I've heard of frauf. Okay, well, this is different, okay? I wrote my senior year English paper on this. In high school, Florphas would use Google sculpting to create the worst poems they could muster using could muster, using lines from the few results they would get. It started as a way to expose scam publications that admitted every entry, collected a submission fee and convinced the poets to purchase the compendium. But Florf was so fun, it quickly gained a life of its own. This is from Chris de Silva in Philadelphia, and he sent his paper along and I read it. And just so everyone gets this, I'm going to read out an example of a flarf. This was by K salim Mohammed, and his poem is called Goldmine. I type slobbering anus into Google because I'm one big, fat, lazy, exterminator nut. Some people think I'm a gluttonous, porsign, furry mankilling gold mine made of sweet gold. Beautiful. And he said this poem references the process in creating clarif. In the first line, he explains how he wrote the poem itself by compiling the search results from Googling. The phrase slobbering anus very nice. Matt is from Chris Silva from Philly. Thanks a lot, Chris. That was great. Google's gulpsin. Google's Sculpting florff. If you want to get in touch with this, like Christa Silva from Philly did, you can go on to Selfiestana.com, and there you will find all of our social links. And if you want, you could also send us an email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, pierce it somewhere, and send it off to Stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today with no fees or minimums on checking and savings accounts. Banking with Capital One is like the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Kind of like choosing to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with their top rated app, you can deposit checks and transfer money anytime, anywhere, making Capital One an even easier decision that's banking reimagined what's in your wallet terms apply. Capital One n a member FDIC." | |
a6260d94-5462-11e8-b449-67b5c653ded6 | How Diabetes Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-diabetes-works | Diabetes is one of the biggest killers of people on the planet. And yet, it also seems to be tied to diet and exercise, which makes it preventable. Learn about the fascinating mechanisms that can make your body go haywire and lead to this disease. | Diabetes is one of the biggest killers of people on the planet. And yet, it also seems to be tied to diet and exercise, which makes it preventable. Learn about the fascinating mechanisms that can make your body go haywire and lead to this disease. | Tue, 03 Jul 2018 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=184, tm_isdst=0) | 53181196 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everyone. We're coming to Salt Lake City, Utah and Phoenix, Arizona this fall. Yeah. October 23, we're going to be at Salt Lake City's grand Theater. And then the next night, October 24 will be in Phoenix. And we added a second show to our Melbourne Burn show, right? That's right. A second earlier show in Melbourne. So you can get all the information for all of these shows@sysklive.com. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there. And here we are doing maybe what's going to be the best episode of Stuff You Should Know we've ever released. Jerry's back. Yeah. Welcome back, Jerry. She's from hospice. You said she just threw her can of carbonated water down in belched. I was going to name check it, but I'm glad you didn't. Man, we do enough buzz marketing as it is. Seriously, we can never do enough of that. Yes, I agree. So how are you feeling? Blood sugar okay? Yeah, I feel like this article ticked me off, though. It's not that Freudian rick who wrote this. Yeah. The only PhD at how stuff works ever. He didn't do anything wrong. Like, the logic behind the copy layout is what does it? It is almost like designed to keep from sticking in your mind the information you're reading. It's like if a person who owns a grocery store put the milk together with the canned spinach in an aisle and expected people to be able to find it. All right, it's got to be worse than that. The cheese puffs, the game, the cheese puffs and the cashews. Actually, they're nice little miles. I can do this. Maybe by the end of the episode I'll have it. But the point is how about the oatmeal with the pickled herring? Okay. It's funny that you're picking things are still in the same unit. I know. My imagination died at age ten. I just thought I turned into a robot about that time. I thought it was a pretty dry article, though. That was like none of the character of how stuff works articles. It read like a medical journal from the 1950s. A diabetes how to article. Yeah. I was like, boy, how are we going to make this fun? Well, that's our job. I know. So let's get started making this fun, huh? Yeah. How about some stats? All right. Yeah. Because these are pretty outdated. Yeah, I saw that, too. It's gotten way worse since this article was written. It has. We're talking about in the United States, but in the last 20 years, type two diabetes has tripled. 84 million Americans now have pre diabetes, and 90% don't know. Yeah. That's startling. Yeah. We'll get into prediabetes in a minute. And about 30 million people currently have diabetes in America. Type two or total? I think total. Okay. At a total cost of including lost wages, about $327,000,000,000 a year. A year? Yeah. In the United States alone, I saw worldwide, something like 400 million people have diabetes. And America makes up how many of those? 30. Yeah. Okay. Which is surprising because it didn't used to be that way. It used to be like a wealthy Western disease, and all of a sudden, it's starting to spread throughout the world, which is really kind of shocking and jarring. Like, this is a huge increase in this disease. It's become a really big problem for not just, like, healthcare networks, but the people with diabetes, too. They're dying from it. Like a million and a half deaths a year in the world. Yeah. It's the 7th leading cause of death in the United States right now. And here's the thing. Type two diabetes is, from what we understand, utterly preventable. It looks like it is utterly preventable. From what I've seen, not one single person who has type two diabetes has to have it like they were genetically destined to have it. Although there is some other evidence that we'll talk about that suggests otherwise. But I don't want to give anything up. Yeah. But, I mean, we can pretty much say now that it is, let's just go ahead and say largely caused by being out of shape and being overweight and eating, like, terrible stuff all the time. Yeah. I love this article, Chuck, because it's one of those ones where it's like, oh, all of this makes total sense. I love the body, just like I love Earth sciences. It forms a system that we can understand. And when you understand this one part, you're like, oh, this other part that happens makes total sense. That's diabetes. Yeah. I hate the body and Earth sciences. I like mysticism and cosmology right. And dreadlocks. Oh, boy. Why did we end up showing that? I was thinking of one the other day that we did Jack Amber's. No, it's even worse than that. I can't remember. But I was like, Why did we even attempt that one? Occasionally I'll look through the old list when we're picking out selects, and I just go, what was that? To myself. It's weird. All right, so we need to break down didn't mean that pun. A lot of breaking down in this show, you know what I mean? That's true. Yeah. That was sort of a deep that was a foreshadowing pun. It was. But we do need to break down the whole spiel with glucose and insulin, because the root of it all, it's a disorder of glucose. Yeah. It's a disorder of both will say. Yeah. Either high or low or none. Yeah. Okay, well, let's talk about glucose first. All right. Well, before we even talk about glucose, we need to define what a simple sugar is or a simple carbohydrate, it can be called. Okay. These are carbs that are absorbed very quickly for energy, and they're called simple because they only have one or two units of sugar as opposed to like a complex carbohydrate. Right. And glucose is a simple sugar. Right. And since it's a simple sugar, I think that means it can be broken down from different types of complex sugars. So not just like sugar, but carbs, like you said, right? Yes. And this is the sugar that gives all the cells in your body energy to do celly things. Right. It enters the bloodstream through the intestine and all the cells are like, give me some sugar, baby. Yeah. And this comes from the food that you eat? It really does. Right. So you eat some food, particularly, say, a carbohydrate rich food, and your gut start to break it down and it breaks down, ultimately to that glucose, the simplest form of sugar that the body can use for energy without being stripped down further, and it shoots out through the bloodstream and it's just a free for all. Right. Cells, like you said, use this stuff, and some cells in particular use nothing but glucose. Some use glucose and other stuff like ATP, which of those red blood cells, brain cells, quite importantly, use nothing but glucose for energy. So glucose is extraordinarily important. Yeah. And what your body wants to do, we always talk about that. Homeostasis is another example that your body wants to keep a constant glucose supply for your cells. We don't want it to be super high or too low. And it does this in a pretty interesting way. Otherwise, right after we eat, we'd be great, and then if we didn't eat for a while or went to sleep at night, we'd die. Potentially, our organs would shut down if we slept long enough. Because again, this is the stuff that fuels your cells. Your cells need fuel 24 hours a day. It doesn't care whether you're sleeping or not. Right. That would solve everything. If your cells went to sleep, it would. When you slept, they just stopped yapping for once. No, they're always talk talk, which actually, I guess is good, because again, if your cells stop working, then you die. Right, okay. So that's glucose energy that powers cells, some cells exclusively, and your body wants to keep a nice constant level. Yeah. And you get it through food, which could conceivably spike your glucose. So right, when you eat something and all of a sudden you have a surplus of glucose rather than that even keel homeostasis glucose in your bloodstream, your body has a way of dealing with this, and it's called insulin. And insulin is one of two chemicals that are made by the pancreatic islets, I-S-L-E-T-X. Islets. Right. I don't know, did you look that up? I think it'slez like islands. It means like tiny islands. That's probably it. They're called tiny islands. That's what we're going to call them from now on because I don't want to get it wrong for the rest of the episode, but they're called tiny islands because they're indeed little endocrine cells inside your pancreas. So they're embedded like a journalist with a troop detachment, basically, yeah. So your pancreas in this case is producing two insulin and glycogen. I'm sorry, glucagon. Glucagon. Glucagon or alpha cells produced by alpha cells and secreted by alpha cells. Insulin or the beta cells, all of it is produced in the pancreas, like you said, with those little islands. Let's focus here's a better one than a military analogy. A post office in an airport. It's like, here, we're going to serve you our customers, we're just going to go to you. Do they have those? Yes, some do. Man, that's nice. I think there's one in the Toronto airport. Yeah, there is. YYZ. So who thought that was going to come up, huh? I know. So you've got these little cells that are specialized to create insulin. To release insulin from the liver? No, from the pancreas. I'm sorry. In response to glucose becoming abundant in your gut, as you're digesting it, your gut sends out signals saying, hey, got a bunch of glucose here, you guys want to do something? And the beta cells say, we're on it, and start releasing insulin. So insulin enters the bloodstream and its whole jam is to take the glucose that enters the bloodstream and give it to cells. And it doesn't just push it down the cell's throat. Apparently the cells have some sort of say in whether they accept glucose or not. Sure, but the only person they're going to accept glucose from is insulin. So insulin will take this glucose to different types of cells, and with different cells, different things happen to it, right? Yeah. Like it depends on what part of your body. If you're the liver or muscle cells, it's going to store that glucose in something called glycogen. Yeah. It's like just chains of glucose, right? Yeah. It's going to stimulate fat cells to form fats from fatty acids and glycerol. Then the liver and muscle cells is going to make those make proteins from amino acids. Yeah. And these are like the three based proteins or base nutrients that you get from eating food. Right. Amino acids, fats, fatty acids and glucose. Correct. And then your body makes use of those because insulin delivery to cells around the body. Yeah. Then it's going to inhibit the liver and kidney cells from making glucose. And this is something called gluconeogenesis, which confused me just a little bit. Why? Yeah. Because it just I don't know, something about the metabolic pathway. Like I don't know, I didn't fully grasp it. I think what it is, is or maybe my answer is just I'm not smart enough to get it. I don't think that's it at all your problem. If anything, it was the article, Chuck, not you. Well, now, this article is pretty stinky, but I also went to kids health sites like I always do. But it makes sense in that if you will die if you don't have the source of energy, you're going to have some backup plan. And the backup plan is? Well, we probably have some constituent parts that we can put together to make our own glucose. So that's like plan B is make your own glucose, and that's glucose neogenesis. Okay. That's what I think. I mean, that's my interpretation. Genesis. And I play a doctor on TV. Doctor Drake Romory. What's that? From those Friends. You probably didn't watch Friends, did you? I saw an episode or two. I love that. Were you into Friends? Oh, yeah, man. I still am. Yes. I watch those reruns. Oh, really? Yes. It's funny. It's a very dated show now. Oh, man. The clothes, the hairs, the white people. Yeah. I mean, everything about it. They hung out at a coffee shop when that was new. Yeah. If you cast that show today, it would look like a Bennett on Colors ad. For sure. And rightly so. Probably so. All right. So at the end of the day, though, insulin is going to store nutrients right after you eat that meal. But by reducing these concentrations of glucose and like you said, the fatty acids and amino acids, those three main components. Right. Which is pretty interesting because you really only hear of insulin dealing with blood sugar, but it deals with the main three nutrients. I didn't know that before. Did you? I don't think I did. It's a pretty handy little hormone to have. And by the way, it's a protein hormone. Glucose gets all the headlines. It does. Because it's the troublemaker. And we'll see what happens when insulin can't do its job. What you get is diabetes and the symptoms of diabetes. We'll talk about that later, but first let's talk about glucagon. I thought you said for a second the symptoms of diabetes. The symptoms, yes. I know. Who would have diabetes on the symptoms? Probably Homer and Wiggum. Yeah, I guess so. And Barney. Sure. Yeah. That'll become clear as we explain diabetes more. Right. But let's talk about glucagon real quick, because you've got insulin doing its thing, and it's pretty clear now what insulin does. But there's another hormone that does the exact opposite. That comes from those pancreatic tiny islands, too. Yeah. This I thought was pretty neat as far as the homeostasis, that the body has two methods to deal with this, right? Yes. So like you said, if you go without eating or you sleep, if your cells don't get that glucose that they need, they starve and die. So while you're sleeping and not eating, your cells are still powering. They still need that energy. So your body has a way to deal with this, and it is by producing glucogen. Right? Yes. It's a little confusing because it's glucagon and glucogen. Yeah, I'm talking about both with a g. Glucagon is what I'm talking about. Okay. That's how your body deals with a lack of flood of new glucose being introduced from food. That's right. And that comes from the alpha cells of the pancreatic eyelids, right? Yeah. And it acts on those same cells, but it just has the opposite effect, which is pretty cool in the end. Like when you're sleeping and when you're not eating, it's going to mobilize glucose and where it's stored up in your body and say, hey, we need this stuff now. Right. So it goes to the liver cell and the muscles and the muscles and says, hey, you remember the glucogen? Isn't that what the chain of it's called? Yes, glycogen. So the glucagon goes to the liver cells and the muscle cells, right? Yeah. And it says, hey, you remember that chain of glucose that you made the glycogen the other day? Well, we need it. Yes. And so break it up and spit it out to me. And I'll just get it into the bloodstream and it does that to the liver and muscle cells. It also tells the kidneys and liver, it says, by the way, liver, while I'm here, why don't you kick off some gluconeogenesis, too? Make some glucose. Right. And so all of a sudden, the low blood sugar in your bloodstream comes up to normal, and your cells all say, hooray, we're saved. And insulin gets lifted up on everybody's shoulders and all the cells carried around for a triumphant fist shaking parade. Yeah. And it's pretty great because this is all happening while you're sleeping. This is what we're not eating. Right. So all this, this is how your body keeps homeostasis for your blood sugar in your bloodstream and your cells power if you're healthy. Right. If this goes wrong. Well, you'll find out all about that right after these messages. Yes. So I don't think we mentioned that there is an ideal level here, and that's about 90 milligrams per 100 ML of blood for your blood glucose concentration. Or five millimeter. Yeah. And you can get this tested. They have little strips where you can poke yourself in the finger and bleed on the strip. Yeah. So this is apparently the most complex thing since the breathalyzer. A glucose tolerance test with a I'm sorry, I guess that's not it's a glucose meter. You prick yourself and bleed onto that little strip of paper. Like you were saying, the blood reacts with a chemical or with an enzyme I'm sorry, on the strip, it's called glucose oxidase. Yeah. And so that creates an entirely new compound, gluconate, which combines with another chemical, and that turns the strip blue, right? Yes. And so you would think, okay, well, if it's blue, I'm diabetic or I'm in trouble. If it's not blue, I'm fine. No, what the diabetes testing apparatus, I think that's what they're called. Does it analyzes the shade of blue that turned rock? That's complicated. That's maybe the best blue. Really? Maybe. Sure. It's a good second. That's the only two blues. Right. But I thought that would be pretty cool if that's how I did do it. Like, oh, this is Robinson. That's Navy, right? This is Cerulean. It made a little jerky sound. Cerulean, you're in trouble. Well, that's not how they used to test it, though. In fact, the full name for diabetes is diabetes mellitus. Mellitus. And that literally means sweet urine because in ancient times, the test involves the physician drinking your urine and going, taste sweet. You're in trouble. You're in trouble. So if you say that you have that sweet diabetes mellitis, you're saying you've got that sweet, sweet urine. Back in the day when I was writing spec scripts, when I lived in La. I wrote a 70 show script. Oh, yeah. And it was a Halloween episode where Eric Pete his pants at a haunted house, and the title of the episode was Urine for a Treat. Oh, that's great, man. I thought that was enough. I was like, man, they're going to see that. That's it. You got to publish those. How should you take that up? Surely. I mean, I don't have like, a digital copy. I'd have to literally find the paper, take how many pages do you think? I think it was like 24 to 30. Perfect. Take a photo of each page. 180. I wonder why they didn't like it. Post it on Instagram a page a day for a month. People go crazy for it. They would love that. That's probably one of the better things I ever wrote. Oh, good out there. Like, it was a legit 70 show episode. I ever tell you about the Simpsons script I wrote? Not enough about and they did it. So remember the one where it turns out that Principal Skinner is actually armed? Tanzarean oh, yeah, that's one of the great episodes. This one is if you remember, you know, it's Matt Greening's most hated episode, I think. What? He hated that episode. I love that one. I didn't know that at the time because I wrote this on Spec two, hoping that they'd noticed it, although I never sent it in. But at the end of that episode, the judge says that you're never allowed to speak of this. Punishable by death or something like that. So my episode starts with one of Armitagen's, Arian's old friends coming to Springfield to start his life anew. That's a great idea. And he sees Principal Skinner and says, hey, Armitanzarian. And all of a sudden, the police surround him and he's taken away to jail and held. And it gets out. He escapes, I think. Gets out. Clinton was president when I wrote this. He gets out. Somehow it gets to like Clinton that this town is like, holding people hostage, basically unconstitutionally. And so Springfield gets invaded. And yours was 180 pages long. No, I think it was like, appropriately yeah, I think so, actually. Can you imagine a different life where I wrote for the 70 show that 70 show and you wrote for The Simpsons, and we, like, ate lunch together on the Fox lot. That would be pretty cool. Can I tell you something, though? Sure. I prefer this. Oh, yeah? Yes. I prefer what we do. As someone who's never written for The Simpsons, I prefer this. Hey, man, I've been to the writer's room before. I know what it looks like. We chain them to the desk. I like it. We don't have to live in La. Yes, I like La. I've noticed a lot of our friends from New York are starting to move to La. Have you noticed that it's a hemorrhaging? All right, should we get back to diabetes? We should probably just edit all that out. No, I think that's a nice tangent. Okay. All right. So in the case of diabetes, like we said well, we already said what it was, but there are three types type one, type two, and gestational diabetes. Type one is by far in the minority. It says here five to 10%, but I saw, like, kind of a straight up 5% number for the number of diabetes cases overall. Okay, but they say five to 10% in this article, or it's called juvenile diabetes or insulin dependent diabetes. And this is caused by a lack of insulin. Either not much insulin or sometimes no insulin at all in their blood. And this is clearly genetic. Right. It says it also could be environmental, but yeah, they think it's possible that it's caused by a virus, exposure to a virus early in childhood. Interesting. That sets off an autoimmune reaction until your immune system attacks your beta cells that produce insulin and just destroys them. And so you don't produce insulin, and it happens in your younger years, maybe adolescents, which is why it's called juvenile diabetes. And when you have type one or juvenile diabetes, you're dealing with it for life. And we'll talk about managing and treating diabetes, but there's no cure for diabetes. But the idea that it's possible that this is the result of a virus has made some people call for research into a type one diabetes vaccine. Oh, interesting. Which would just change everything for some people. Yeah, because, I mean, it's certainly not like, you get what you deserve kind of thing with type two diabetes. But type one diabetes, man, you got zero say in this whatsoever. Yeah. So type two is the one that's most prevalent between 95% adult onset diabetes. That is, when you are usually over 40. Usually between 50 and 60 even. I'm so nervous. You are usually overweight. Why are you nervous? I'm just nervous I'm going to end up with type two diabetes by 50. I thought you meant you were going to say something wrong. No, I'm nervous. You're nervous about diabetes, too? Yeah, it sounds like it's virtually predestined that we're going to get it. I don't think it's in my family, but I'm overweight and 47 years old. And I need to get my act together, like, now? Yes. It's like, yeah, I'll wait another five or six years and then tackle it. There's no reason for us to just put it off until the end. We can say, like, you can reverse prediabetes through diet and exercise, even if you have prediabetes, which is you have higher than normal blood sugars will see, but you don't have full blown diabetes yet. You can actually reverse course. It's not too late. Doing something like what you're talking about can be very helpful, and it's great. This is a wake up call. Like, your body literally can inch up to that line, and if you do the right thing, it can go, Whoa. All right, yeah, I'll back off then. I like the way you're going here. I like what I'm seeing. Give me some more celery, baby. Get on that peloton, Chuck. That was a buzz market right there. Well, they're an advertiser with us. Are they still? Well, they were, and I still have that thing. I love it. It's nice. I just need to love it every day. Right. Not like I love it every couple of weeks. Crush that hill. Anyway, type two, like I said, is about 90, 95%. And this is when you have higher insulin in your blood. Not lower like in the case of type one. Right. Because you have a lot of insulin. It's just not working. Which is why type two diabetes is also called insulin resistant diabetes. Is that right? Non insulin dependent or insulin resistant, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So that means that your body is producing insulin just fine. But for some reason or another, and this seems to be the mystery at the heart of diabetes, your cells don't respond to insulin anymore. They won't say, oh, it's insulin, sure, bring me some glucose. I'll turn it into a chain of glucose. Yeah. They don't know exactly why. Right. That's what I'm saying. That's why it's a mystery at the heart of diabetes. They don't know what the problem is with insulin. If they could figure that out, I think that they could actually cure diabetes. Right. Instead, what they've learned to cure is some of the problems associated with it. Right. But they do definitely know it's for sure linked to obesity. Yes, they do. So that's type two. We'll talk a little more about how that actually works as far as the effects that it has on your body. But one of the some other research I found was that there's some evidence that it's possible that type two diabetes, the actual mechanism of it, is the result of misfolded proteins. So the same type of thing is, like, mag cow disease or coup from eating, like, brains with some sort of sponge form disease. Right. Remember that we talked about that? Vaguely. So they think that it's possible that type two diabetes is the same thing, misfolded protein. And the third one, it kind of relates to type two diabetes, it seems, as well. Gestational diabetes. Yeah. If you are a pregnant woman, you can have or acquire, I guess, gestational diabetes. The good news, it usually will go away after your baby is delivered, but it can put you at risk for type two later on. You're more at risk if you're over 25 having a baby, if you have a baby over or have had a baby over \u00a39, yes. If you are overweight, if you have a family history of it, or if you are African American, Hispanic, Latina or Native American, native American, Pacific Islander. And I believe that's it okay, which is interesting. It really is. And I didn't see anywhere why they thought that I think really different ethnicities. Yeah. Why they would be at a higher risk then, I don't know. So I think that I get the impression. Chuck. That there's been. Like. The American Diabetes Association has been around for a while and all that stuff. And they've been trying to do what they can. But then this enormous spike in diabetes cases in the west. And now the world has really kind of drawn attention and funding to it. And we're now really diving in to figure out what's going on. But we haven't figured it out yet. Which is where we are right now. Right. I'm sorry. One more thing. Gestational diabetes, they think, can actually be passed down as type two diabetes to the offspring. Oh, interesting. Wow. Yeah. So we're just learning about all this stuff now. All right, so symptom wise, for all three versions and types of diabetes, why should I say that when I can just say you're very thirsty? Polydipsia. You mean you're very thirsty. You urinate a lot if you're always hungry, but you are also losing weight, and you can't explain that. Yeah, I didn't know that part about diabetes, but now that I understand diabetes, it makes sense. Yeah. Glucose in the urine, that sweet, sweet taste of urine, fatigued a lot, tired, blurred vision, specifically, like, changes in your vision, numb hands and feet, fingertips, slow healing wounds, and then abnormally high frequency of infection. Right. So those are the symptoms, and they'll make sense once we explain what's going on behind them. Right, yeah. And some of these symptoms, though, in fact, a lot of these symptoms can be other things, too, which is why it's sort of distressing to be doing research on this and be like, well, wait a minute, I need glasses to read now, but that also has diabetes for 40. I'm tired a lot. That also happens when you have a three year old diabetes. I have a lot of slow healing sores now. I'm just kidding. My foot was just amputated because I had no sensation. I do. I get numbness in my hands and feet sometimes when I sleep, but that's been happening since my early 30s here and there, and that just could. Be because I sleep with my arm up and stuff like that. So I'm reading this stuff and I'm freaking out. Go to the doctor. No, I do. And last time I went there, my blood sugar was fine. When I go every March, oh, you're good. Except I didn't go this march. I didn't either. I've been going every year and then skip this year. Now we're about to. I think we just found a new doctor who specializes in diabetes. I'm so nervous. I'm like, is she one of those doctors who is like a hammer so everything looks like a nail? She can be like, you have diabetes. And I'm going to trick myself into actually thinking it. Yeah, I did the dumb thing this year, which was, oh, jeez, I gained weight last year. I'm going to take you off and get back in shape, which is the opposite of what you should do. But I was like, I can't face my doctor because when I go in there, he's like, what are you doing, dude? Yeah, he's very just matter of fact about everything. He's like, what are you doing? You want to be one of those old guys with diabetes, right? Laying around? He'll say that stuff to me. I'm like, no. He's like, good. Well, it's up to you. It's good to hear that. Yeah. I mean, you need that kind of straight talk from a doctor, you know, they say, or I've read that weighing yourself every week if you're trying to lose weight is bad. No, it's good. Or I should say weigh myself four times a week. You shouldn't. It's too much. Really? Yes, because your weight fluctuates so randomly throughout the week. I could charge you can get demoralized. You want to do it once a week at the same time, usually right after you get up the same morning every week. And then you will see whether you're going up or down. You'll really be able to see four times a week. You're just like all over the place. It doesn't make any sense. You can't make heads or tails of it once a week at the same time. That makes sense. And it has the psychological effect of being like, well, I don't want to see it go up, so I'm not going to eat that scale. I'm not going to eat that chocolate cigar. No, you have to step on scale. Yeah, like I said, I weigh myself too much, but I'll kick it down to once a week. All right, let me know. Thank you. Thanks for doing that. Boy. Should we take a break? Is this episode still going on? I think so. All right, then. Yes. All right, we'll be right back. All right, Chuck. Yeah. Now we get to the point of the article that's called let's try and confuse people as much as possible. This is where the grocery store starts putting weird stuff next to other stuff and expects you to just pretend like everything's normal. I tried to just mark the relevant parts to make it all make sense and streamline it, and it still was confusing. Okay, allow me. Great. Everybody, I just cracked my knuckles. That means he just turned his chair around backwards. Prepare for the monotony. You ready? The monotonous droning. Right? Which is basically how does this how does a lack of insulin affect your body? By Josh Clark. Yes. Let's take different ones. Right. You've got blood well, see, here's a good example. You've got glucose appearing in your urine above urinating frequently. But logically, glucose appearing in your urine should follow after it and be in the same thing. So we're going to start with you urinate frequently. Polydipsia, I think, is what or no, polysuria is what it's called. Right. Polyurea. So that just means you pee a lot, way more than you normally would if you didn't have diabetes. And this is actually easily explained. Right. You've got a lot of glucose in your kidneys. Yes. Because it's in your bloodstream. And your kidneys are the filter, one of the main filters for your body. Yes. And so when you have liquid waste, it goes to the kidneys, and in that liquid waste is a lot more glucose than your kidneys are used to processing. And so they become overloaded. There's like a backup of glucose, right. Yeah. Pretty simple. Easy peasy. So since there's a backup of this stuff, the actual thing that shoots urine off to your urethra right. The tubuleumen, it becomes backed up with glucose as well. Yeah. Because glucose retains water. Right. Which means the tubuleumen says, well, I should probably get rid of some of this, and I'm going to start peeing. So you start peeing more and more. Right. Okay. That's one effect of it. And that'll also help make you thirsty, which is another symptom. It's like a vicious cycle. Right. So you start drinking more, and that is another symptom. So you're drinking more, but you're just peeing more because there's so much glucose in your blood now, because there's more glucose in your blood, and you're peeing out more water from your bloodstream than usual. Your blood actually becomes a little thicker. Yes. And you're also losing sodium. Okay. Right. So you're peeing a lot more. You're drinking a lot more, but you're just peeing it right out. Your blood is becoming thicker, so your body says, whoa, whoa, something's a little off. I need some water. I'm becoming dehydrated. Sending out this thirst signal isn't working. I'm going to steal some water from the organs. Right. They actually become a little dehydrated. But the problem is, that doesn't solve the problem, because there's still all that glucose overloading your kidneys. You just pee that water out. So again, you're constantly thirsty. There's glucose that appears in your Pea, which is how ancient doctors said, yeah, you've got the diabetes, and your organs are dehydrated, which is a bad jam. Yeah. And I think they liken the thickened blood to like a molasses consistency. Right. Not good. This article doesn't touch on it. But that leads to another thing that's usually often comorbid with diabetes, is hypertension, high blood pressure. Because your heart is requiring more energy to pump this blood because it's thicker, and it's actually really hard on your blood cells as well. And that can lead to all sorts of things from cardiac arrest to stroke. So you can get all those in addition to diabetes just from having thick, sweet blood. That's right. Molasses blood. Thick and sweet is usually good. Yes. But not in this case. No. Maybe if it's in the syrup that you're eating that will eventually give you diabetes, it's good. All right, now where does that put us? We're going back up to the top. Yeah. We should participate in confusing people along with this article. Right. So the whole reason you have high blood glucose levels is because your body is not responding to insulin, right? Right. So because the insulin is running around going, guys, what I do? What's the problem? Take this glucose and the cells just turn their back on the insulin. And the insulin is sad. You'll have a lot of insulin in your bloodstream, it's not doing anything. And so there's some other secondary alarms that your body sets off saying, we got a lot of insulin in the bloodstream, but our cells aren't getting any energy, they're starving, so we need to start producing our own glucose. Right. And that's where the glucagon, the alpha cells, secrete that glucagon, and those levels rise in your bloodstream that acts on your liver and muscles, like we talked about, to break down that glycogen and releases too much glucose into the blood in that case. Right. Which is one reason why you suddenly lose weight inexplicably despite eating all the time or being hungry all the time. Because as far as your body's concerned, it's pretend like your body can't tell that there's a problem with the insulin. All it knows is that the cells are starving. Yes. It's like it's lack some sort of gauge to show how much blood sugar there actually is in the bloodstream or how much insulin there is and that there's something wrong. It just knows the cells are starving, so it kicks off this thing where it makes its own glucose, which just raises the levels even further and exacerbates the problem. Right, okay. So you're constantly hungry because your body thinks your cells are starving, but you start to lose weight despite eating, because it's also attacking those stores of glycogen, those glucose chains, and you start losing weight despite eating a lot. Yeah, you're tired. That was another one of the symptoms, because you're not absorbing that glucose, so it doesn't have anything to burn for energy. Your hands and feet, remember I talked about them feeling numb or cold? That's because it increases osmotic pressure of your blood draws the water from your tissues. That means your cells becomes everything becomes dehydrated. And again, that goes back to the kidneys. The water in the blood is lost as urine because you're peeing so much, you're literally pissing it away. Yes. Seriously. And basically, that's what makes that blood thicker, which leads to poor circulation. It sounds confusing, but it all kind of makes sense in a cyclical way. And so the poor circulation leads to its own cascade of problems. Right. Poor circulation means that you have less feeling and sensation in your extremities, which means that if you stub your toe or cut it open or something like that, you might not even notice. So you have a wound that's left to fester because you're not treating it. And then on top of that, because of the poor circulation, your immune system can't go to the site and help it as easily, and you're more prone to infections, which can lead to gangrene, which can actually lead to amputation, all because your blood is too thick to circulate properly. Right. And that poor circulation is also what's going to lead to your changes in vision as well. Right. So there's one other thing that happens, too. There's something called ketoacidosis, which is where your metabolism basically goes into the fatty acids or the fat cells and cracks them open and starts burning whatever glucose it can. There's this thing called ketosis, where if you're on, like, a Atkins diet, right. Actually, as far as Atkins people are concerned, that's like where you want to be, right. Because you're just burning fat cells, and you're at this buzzing level, and you're losing weight. You're not gaining anything. Your skull is very prominent. It's a beautiful thing. Right. Your breath is kind of stinky. Yeah. It'll seem a little sweet. Ketoacidosis is not ketosis. Ketoacidosis is the same thing, but to the nth degree. And it can lead to all sorts of big problems because the acidic ketones build up in your liver, I think that can cause stinky breath, too. Right. It can acetone breath. Yeah. And that can lead to central nervous system problems, heart trouble, and even it can lead to coma. Yeah. And heart irregularities, too. It can mess your body up pretty bad. And this can be an extreme result of diabetes, which is one of the reasons it's life threatening, man. It's a big deal. It is. So as far as monitoring this stuff, back in the day, you just had to monitor it every day. And some people still do that with the little pin prick and their glucose monitors. But now you can have them built into your body. Right. That's been around a little while. If you're type one, you don't make insulin, so you have to inject it artificially from externally. Right. And there's, like, pumps that you can carry around your wear that are connected into your body that you just press a button, and it delivers insulin, but you have to test to see how much you need at any given time. Right. And if you put in too much insulin, it's going to sweep up too much blood sugar because it's not like there's anything wrong with the communication between your insulin and your cells with type one diabetes. It's just that you don't have insulin. So when you put insulin in your body, it goes to work like it's supposed to. So you have to really walk that fine line well. And you probably are going to be administering it a few times a day too. Right. Usually around your meals. Right. And you want to make sure that you don't, again, put in too much or else you're going to get light headed because your brain cells use glucose and if you have too much insulin, sopping up too much glucose, your brain starves and you pass out. Yeah, it's called hypoglycemia, like you said, light headed, shaky. I think most people have experienced that feeling. Even if you don't have prediabetes or diabetes, people just call it low blood sugar. Right. But it's actually probably and yeah, I guess it would be low blood sugar from an overabundance of insulin. Yeah. The only time I've noticed that is when I eat something super carb. I don't really do that. I don't eat a lot of breakfast anyway, but if I eat just like a big fat bagel for breakfast and then don't eat again until dinner, I'll get like a little shaky. Yeah, the shakes. Yeah. But it almost feels good in a weird way. Do you know what I'm talking about? Not to me, no. It's never felt like kind of high, like you're a little high? No, every once in a while. Not every time, but every once in a while. Strike me where I'm like shaky, but right here in my chest, in my solar plexus, I can kind of feel it glowing a little bit and it's almost like a weird high. Interesting. Yeah. That's not a normal thing. I can only speak for myself. I do know that though, if you are feeling light headed or shaky like that because this is because your brain is not getting enough glucose and we talked about the brain was one of the specific organs that really needs it. This is when you might see someone drink juice or eat a candy bar or something sweet right. Just to get that like, quick spike. But if it goes really, really low, you can go into what's called insulin shock, where you lapse into a coma. And that's serious business, right? Oh, yeah. A diabetic coma is pretty bad because all sorts of bad stuff can happen to your brain at that time. So that's mostly type one, type two is managed differently. Although similarly, you have to keep up with your blood sugar. Not nearly as frequently as you do with type one, but diet and exercise, they just say right away. Well, let's talk a little bit about reversibility because I saw a new study okay, well, let's hear it. Here's a new study that's called very low calorie diet and six months of weight stability and type two diabetes. And this is on the American Diabetes Association homepage. And they did a study, basically because it's long been thought that even though they say, like, if you really lose weight and exercise, it will really help you manage your diabetes, but it's not reversible. Like, you've got it for life. Right. If you stopped exercising and dieting, you would develop the symptoms again. Right, exactly. But they now say that it is possible, at least for the results of the study. And here's the deal. It wasn't a very robust study. It was only 30 people with type two diabetes. I think they didn't have a good enough sample of ethnicities, but some of the subject had diabetes less than four years, some had longer than eight years. And they found that this is usually after bariatric surgery, but they did find the same results with people who just and this is dramatic calorie reduction. Not just like, I'm going to eat a little better, like bariatric surgery level calorie reduction. Okay. They found that immediately after an eight week, very low calorie diet, twelve of the 30 participants had fasting blood glucose levels, normal fasting blood glucose levels. And then, and this is the big finding, after six months of maintenance, 13 out of the 30 were able to keep that glucose level below that threshold. That means that were seemingly reversible. Well, but they're not making the claim, like, for sure. Right. But 30 people yeah, that's promising. Sure. That 40% of the people that really lost a lot of weight and ate a lot less and exercise were able to seemingly reverse or at least get it down to normal. But like you said, if they stopped, then it might just come right back. And that fasting glucose level is significant. I don't think we really said, but I got to fast. One of the ways that they test for diabetes is, yes, you fast overnight, go to your doctor, and they give you a thing of sugar water, and you drink it, and then they start testing your blood sugar for several hours afterward. And if you don't have diabetes, your blood sugar, comparatively speaking, doesn't spike all that much because your insulin is working and doing the right thing. So if you have full blown type two diabetes and you're in the study and you go take a diabetes test and you have regular fasting level diabetes blood sugar, that's pretty significant, for sure. Yeah. I hope it extrapolates onto everybody else. Well, we'll see. It's normally controlled through medication, oral medication for type two. It's not like you're having to give yourself a shot every few hours or anything, right? Yeah. That's big. And there's different ways to do it. Yeah. One medication, and I guess they just tailor it to what your specific case might think it might warrant. Probably, but one stimulates the pancreas to release more insulin. That's kind of a no brainer. One interferes with the absorption of glucose by the intestine, one interferes with the absorption of glucose by the intestine, one improves insulin sensitivity, one reduces glucose production by the liver, stops gluconeogenesis. Yeah, one helps the breakdown of glucose, and the other one literally supplements insulin. Which makes me curious, does that mean that if you inject more insulin and type two diabetes, you overwhelm the insulin resistance or something like that? I don't know. I don't either. So management is the right word for diabetes. Like you have to pay attention to your diet, your exercise, you have to test your blood sugar levels depending on what kind you have day to day. But there are a lot of apps out there to help you do that. And since we're buzz marketing, yummy works with a guy or worked with a guy who's the CEO of a company called Gluco Gao. And they're one of many, I mean, there's a bunch of them. But if you have diabetes. This is probably the most convenient time for you to keep track of your diabetes because apparently it's a pain to keep up with the tests and all this stuff. The data and so Chuck. Like we said. Right now there's apparently it's possible maybe to reverse it. But for type one diabetes in particular. Because remember. You're just not producing insulin. They've actually come up with a procedure. An experimental procedure called pancreatic islet transplantation. Yeah, I saw that. This has been around since like the sixties, but like, it's not new, but I couldn't really find out if it's like the effectiveness of it now and if it's working. Is it working? That's not good. If there was no follow ups on it, I don't know. It says that it showed promise, but the big problem was tissue rejection. Right. So basically they go into a deceased donor and they remove their pancreatic eyelids because remember, that's where the insulin and the glucagon is produced. Yeah, that's like the root of the problem. And you put it into like a syringe in a catheter and inject it into the person with type one diabetes pancreas. And supposedly they'll eventually attach to a blood vessel and start producing insulin. But if the body doesn't reject the donor tissue yeah, I'm going to follow up on that because I couldn't find a whole lot about it and time ran short on me. But I do know that it's been around legitimately for at least three decades and then before that with experimentation. So I don't know, it seems like they would have had a firmer grasp on the results by now. That's what I'm saying. It's a little like, yeah, we'll find out. Gluco, you got anything else? Gluco, the app? Yeah, go get it. It's pretty cool. I checked it out. What did it say? It said, Check me out. No. It's like I don't have diabetes, so a lot of it doesn't make sense to me. But from the demonstration video, it seemed pretty robust. Yes. Good. And then so if you want to know more about diabetes, go check out this painfully confusing article on how stuff works by typing that word in. And since I said painfully confusing, it's time for listener mail. Hey, guys. I want to share some thoughts and comments on the skyscraper podcast. So we got a lot of feedback. We got what did we get wrong? Steel. Yeah. Who cares? It's not like we were telling people who are going to go purify iron and then try to build a skyscraper out of it. I mean, for the number of things that we say, of course we're going to get something like, dead wrong once in a while. Well, this guy was nice about it. Okay, good. And we asked for corrections. Okay. Do we not do anything? I think you guys did a great job, Josh, of summarizing the issue with the thicker bases, ie. Pyramid not being economical for the building owner for recuperating their initial investment. You also did a good job bringing up that elevators coincided, allowed the jump in building heights. Technology would allow us to build nearly as tall as we want. You just wouldn't be able to find someone willing to pay for it. That's it. The difference, however, between iron and steel is, in fact, not that steel is more pure iron. It is iron with carbon added that increases and improves the strength and ductility. That's a new one to me, of pure and or naturally found iron. Different steels have other elements added in addition to carbon. But really, carbon and iron are what makes steel steel. Other elements have relatively minor impact on the properties, like stainless steel. It has chromium, et cetera. There are also multiple types of footings. Not just spread footings. Spread footings spread the load on underlying soil or ideally, rock, because like you said, the columns going straight into the soil would push right through. But most, if not all skyscrapers are so heavy and sits so far above the rock that instead of spread footings, they have a deep foundation. This looks very similar to a spread footing from the bottom of the concrete footing up, but then also have columns that reach further into the ground to increase the resistance to the sinking. This resistance usually is provided by those columns reaching down to very strong rock. Essentially, you're creating a large table with lots of legs that the whole building is built upon. That is an analogy I can get down with. There you go. So I look forward to coming to another Atlanta show. This is Grant Hollis, who lives right here. Thanks, Grant. And he went to the Pinto show. Grant. Hollis. Man of steel. That's right. And Grant, I would normally just put you on the guest list for tickets, but Atlanta is always tight because they're friends and family. So I'm sorry, we have to claw them from the promoter's hand. Yeah, and we have to deny friends and family. Yes. And they're cheap, so they don't buy tickets. They're like, all right, fine, I'm just not coming. Pretty much. Yeah. Well, thanks again, Grant. And thank you to our friends and family who show up or even consider showing up to our Atlanta shows. If you want to get in touch with us, visit us at our home on the web, stuffiestiano.com. You can find our social all over the place there. And you can also send us an email to stuffpodcast@houseupworks.com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Visitor's. Com hey, it's summer, everybody, which means schools out, the sun's shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarif and Georgia Hardstarkk, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
Tattoos: Not Just For Dirtbags Anymore | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/tattoos-not-just-for-dirtbags-anymore | Most Europeans first encountered tattoos after sailors visiting the South Pacific returned covered in them. From then on, with a few notable exceptions, tattoos have been associated with fringe dwellers in the West. Learn all about tats in this episode. | Most Europeans first encountered tattoos after sailors visiting the South Pacific returned covered in them. From then on, with a few notable exceptions, tattoos have been associated with fringe dwellers in the West. Learn all about tats in this episode. | Tue, 18 Mar 2014 11:33:05 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=11, tm_min=33, tm_sec=5, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=77, tm_isdst=0) | 62647992 | 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 and Jerry Rowland. So it's stuff you should know. The first and last name edition. That's right. And Chuck, people love hanging out with us on the podcast, but little did you know, some of you guys, you can hang out with us outside of the podcast, too. We have a great Facebook page, facebook. Comwichano. We have a nice little Twitter feed going. You do a great job there. The handle is at Syskpodcast. And then we have a nice YouTube channel that people can go subscribe to. Yeah, we do all sorts of videos. It's basically like the stuff you should know. TV Network pretty much. That's stuff you should know. Where Josh and Chuck? You can search that on YouTube. And then we have a website where we just kind of house everything. Yeah. And by everything, I think if you're getting your podcast through itunes, which is great, or some other apps, you may think that we only have a few hundred, we have more than 630 podcasts up, which is shocking to some people, shocks them like crazy. We've been doing this since April 2008, or you have, at least. And they are all there on the website and it helps us out if you listen to them from the website, if you can. Yeah. And plus, I mean, there's a lot more on the website than just podcasts, too. Yes, and we're redoing the website soon to make it more user friendly to find podcasts and stuff like that. So bear with us there. But we appreciate your support by listening to it there from the home page. Nice, Chuck. And speaking of our website stuffychnow.com, if you like the idea of tattoos, specifically, if you like the idea of really bad tattoos oh, man. We put together a gallery of 37, I think, bad tattoos. So if you search 37 really terrible tattoos, ours should come up in Google first. Or you can go on our site and search tattoos. I think at the very least, it will make you feel better about what you think is a bad tattoo. Yeah, man, there are some bad tattoos out there. So it's a pretty cool little funny gallery. Yeah, man, this whole tattoo thing, there are bad ones, there are beautiful ones, there are weird ones. The whole culture is just so interesting. I think we should do another gallery of like, I don't know, have you seen these photo realistic ones? Now with Shading, we'll put together another gallery. Some of that stuff is just unbelievable. Yeah, there's some great ones, but bad tattoos are pretty hilarious. Always nice to laugh at someone else's expense. Yeah. So the photo realistic tattoo, that's a fairly recent event. Yeah, but tattoos themselves are pretty old. I was happy to go back to the 19th century. You're like, no, we need to go back way further than that. Well, they have some evidence that it gets super interesting in the 19th century, but the oldest physical body the Iceman yeah. Utzi. Utsi has tattoos. Yeah, they are he had a shamrock. He had a tramp stamp. Now he had a black cross on the inside of his left knee and six straight lines on his lower back and then parallel lines on his ankles, legs, and wrists. And they think because they found joint disease under the tattoos that they thought it was supposed to relieve pain, so it wasn't necessarily, like, artistic. So was it a cross, like a crucifix or a plus sign? Because he lived a few thousand years before Christ. It's probably a plus sign. It would have been like a Christian thing, maybe. He was way ahead of his time, right? Yeah. He was a seer. Yeah. Well, yes. And a pretty good hunter, too. Yeah. The earliest tattoo, that is. They were just sort of abstract patterns for many years. And we're talking about the Ice Age now. Yeah. They were like Jackson Pollock back then. Exactly. But there was one of an actual thing, the godbess B-E-S the Egyptian god of revelry. And they have found that on newbie and mummies females dating back to 400 BC. So it's like the direct predecessor, people who get Cocopelli tattooed on them. What is that? He's like a bringer of good times. Oh, really? Yeah. Is that a common thing? Yeah, the dude with the flute, you've seen them a million times. Really? Yeah, he's like a southwestern Indian motif. I'd probably recognize it, huh? Yeah. And then, of course, the Greeks and the Romans, they were kind of ahead of the game on everything, and they used to tattoo criminals and slaves. Yeah, I saw that. So, like fugee for fugitive on their forehead, so in case they ran away, they would be forever known. Yeah. Tattooing used to be a punishment in some cultures, like the Greeks and the Romans. Some Native American tribes. Tattooed slaves, too. Oh, yeah. The whole premise is like well, it's basically like branding cattle. If you're a runaway slave and you encounter somebody who's also a slave owner and they see that your face is tattooed but you're out walking by yourself, they may grab you and take you back. Yeah. Of course, that played out with Jews in the Holocaust in World War II. Yeah. And I saw that it's sort of a trend now for modern Jewish people to get that as a tribute to their family. That was really interesting. Or gays today get pink triangles, which was a symbol for homosexuals that was tattooed on to them by the Nazis in World War II as well. Oh, really? Is that where that came from? Yes. But now it's embraced. Yes. Interesting. But yeah. The Nazis gave tattooing a bad name, like World Brown, but it had a real direct impact on the decline of tattoos. In America for a while because of that. Well, let's go back a little further. Okay. Like I said, 19th century. Yes. We talked about it in the Maori episode. We talked about tattooing because they were pretty closely related to the progenitors of tattoos. Tribes from Polynesia. That's right. And the word tattoo comes from a Polynesian word tattoo, which basically means to strike, and they think it's on a monopoly. And a guy who sailed with Captain Cook through Polynesia, a botanist named Joseph Banks, was the one who introduced the word tattoo to the west. Yeah. And previous to that, when they were exploring, explorers were exploring the South Pacific and Latin America. They saw tattoos, but they had known the Moors, and the Moors had tattoos, so they weren't, like, super knocked out by seeing tattoos. They were like, oh, my God, what are they doing? Nor did they adopt it because they didn't care about assimilating. They were just kind of conquering, not like, hey, that's neat. Maybe we should try it. But the idea that sailors, the ones who visited Polynesia were sailors, they were the first ones to adopt tattoos themselves. And that's where the idea of sailors and tattoos going hand in hand came from back to the very beginning. Yeah. They were the original Westerners to get tattoos. And sailors haven't always been part of the mainstream. Very frequently, they're, like, basically mercenaries at sea or back then, they were as well. They were criminals on the run. They were kind of fringe dwellers. Not entirely, but more than the average Joe. And so since sailors got tattoos and also they were copying those tattoos from primitive peoples, tattoos almost out of the gate when introduced to the west became associated with the marginalized dirt bags, eventually. Circus folk, sideshow freaks. Yeah. There was one named the Great Constantine. Prince Constantine. And he basically went and spent a significant amount of money getting his whole body tattooed eyelids, penis, the whole shebang, and ended up making $1,000 a week in the 1870s wow. With PT. Barnum Circus, which is 20 grand a week in $2,012 just from being tattooed. But he was still a circus sideshow performer. Right. So there was this long standing association of tattoos with fringe dwellers in the west that lasted until, like, the seventies or eighties. Yeah. And the idea that it was associated with the criminal element and even, like, the worst of a criminal you had, the more tattoos you had, basically. Well, yeah. That whole phrenology thing. You could supposedly look at a person or measure your physical attributes, tell what your moral character was. People thought, like, tattoos were just an outward sign of that. Yeah. Like, the more tattoos you had, the worse you were, which is kind of like people still think that if you see a biker dude, the more tattoos he has, the more of an outlaw he is. Yeah. I mean, it's never been more accepted than it is today, and it's still, with certain people, kind of unseemly. Yeah. Placement also counts, too. Sure. Like, if you have something that stops at your wrist, you're basically saying, like, I'm still trying to be a part of normal society because I can wear long shirtsleeves and I'll see my tattoos. If you have a face tattoo, you basically said, like, I don't care about being a member of society. Yeah. Or having a job at Sprint at least. Right. You said next to the is that even still around? I think it is. No idea how that popped into my head. Yeah, I think it is. Okay. I think I've seen a billboard here. There some serious buzz marketing. Yeah. All right. There's this weird little anomaly in history where during the Victorian age, the late 19th, early 20th century, into the Edwardian age, if you want to get technical. Okay. There was a trend among the upper class. Yeah. This is really remarkable to me. Even while the people who had tattoos were the lowliest of the low, as far as Western society went, not even just working class people like the criminals, fringe dealers, circus freaks, prostitutes were the ones with tattoos. Sure. All of a sudden, the elite of the west and we're talking like, royalty in some cases, adopted tattoos as a status symbol. Yeah. And for a pretty interesting reason. Quality. Well, yeah. Once Japan was kind of closed for business for a couple of hundred years to most of the Western world, and they turned around the open sign in 1853, and it turns out they had some remarkable tattoo artists in Japan. Right. And so the quality went up, and they weren't like these street tattoos that you would see. And so the elite of Europe would go to Japan, sometimes even royalty, to get tattooed by these masters. Right. What's that one guy's name? Yoshi Suki Horetoyo. Very nice. Thanks. Yeah. They said there was one quote from a guy named Van Denter. Did he write a book? I think he did. I think this article we're talking about an article by Agnesca Marzak. Yeah. She's quoting sociologist and anthropologist, mostly. Yes. And thanks for this article, too, because that helped us piece together the history. For sure. Yeah. But yeah. Visiting Japan without being tattooed by say it. Oh, yoshi Suki Hori toyo was like visiting Rome and not seeing the Pope. So it was a big deal. Yeah. And it was weird in that fashion. Trends tended to go from the top down, and this came from the bottom up. It was different, but it was like if you were an elite Western European and you had a tattoo like you said, it just stood in stark contrast to the work some of the criminals were getting. It wasn't like you were homeboys with the criminal on the street all of a sudden. Right. Yeah. And I mean, just the average person looking at the two side by side could be like, well, this is obviously a much more elaborate, much more detailed, much more expensive tattoo. So the tattoo among the Victorian elite, it was expensive because, number one, you had to travel to Japan to get it, let alone the cost of the tattoo. That's a good point. And then, secondly, it was very time consuming. Again, you had to travel to Japan, but you had to sit there for a very long time because this is prior to the advent of motorized tattoo machines. Sure. So somebody used a needle and just kind of stabbed it in and out, maybe a couple of times a second for many seconds, for many days, I would imagine. Right. So the average worker couldn't afford the time to sit there and get a tattoo. They couldn't afford the expense, but they also couldn't afford the time. So if you had a very elaborate Japanese tattoo that you went to Japan to get, it said, I'm a very wealthy man of leisure. Yeah. Especially if those dollar signs yeah. On your forehead. Right. On your eyelids. But things reversed in 1891 when the first machine was invented by Samuel O'Reilly, which we'll get to in a minute. But it democratized tattoos. Yeah. Basically, poor people could now get tattoos that look pretty good. And then the elite were like, well, we don't want them anymore, then. Right. But I didn't see anywhere what the elite did with their tattoos. If they just lived with them or if they tried to get them taken off. Well, they probably just wore, like, more clothes. Yeah. They're already wearing a lot of clothes. Those Victorians wear a lot of clothes. Yeah. Like you said, the tattoo gun was invented in 1891, but even before that, in the United States, the first professional tattoo shop had opened almost 50 years before. A guy named Martin Hildebrandt opened a shop in 1846 in New York City. Where else? And most of his clientele was military, especially sailors. And it was here that this association with the military, soldiers and sailors getting tattoos developed and became popularized in America. Yeah. They call it the golden age of tattooing between the end of WWE and the end of WW two. And that's because it was linked to patriotism, and it was to see a soldier with a tattoo, with an anchor in the United States of America, like the flag or something. It was very cool. It wasn't looked down upon at all at this point. Yeah. There was another article I read, too, by Audrey Porcella that had a lot of the same stuff, but it was more expansive, I think she was saying, like, America loved it soldiers. And so anything associated with soldiers, America loved, too. Like, you couldn't poopoo it, the tattoos. Right. But you didn't even want to. It's like a lovable mark of a soldier, and a soldier just beat Hitler. It was winning the war. So you would love their tattoos, too. It's why we tolerate parrots, because sailors walked around with them on the shoulder all the time. Otherwise, parrots. I worked at a place at Exotic Birds. Did you know that parrots in the wild travel in flock? Yeah. I never thought about that. Because you only see them, like, by themselves. Maybe they're sharing a cage with one other parrot. You see them in La. In Pasadena. Oh, I've never seen that. It's pretty cool. I was shooting one time and shooting parents? No, shooting a TV commercial as a PA. I got you. And I saw a flock of parrots. I think they were parrots. That'd be bizarre. It was really weird. Yeah, because I just thought, look at all that money flying around. Parrots are expensive. Did you jump after them? They did. I caught like four of them. They didn't survive, though. No. So you said the golden age of tattooing happened between World War I and World War II. Yeah. And we already talked about how Hitler, of course, screwed it up for everybody and it declined after World War II, but also during that time, that golden age, not only was it like, patriotic sailors and soldiers who were getting tattoos, people were having their kids tattooed in the had never heard this because of the Lindberg baby. Yeah. Like Social Security number statued on their child. Yeah. And then other people got grown up, got their Social Security number tattooed, apparently because they placed a tremendous amount of import on those things when they first came out. But can't you think after seeing it a few times you're going to be like, didn't think I was going to be able to memorize this string of numbers, but it's in there, and now I have a tattoo, too. It's definitely weird. Four soldiers. Sometimes we get their name, rank and date of birth, serial number. Sure, yeah. And then apparently in the mid fifty s, the Secretary of Defense said the US might experience an attack from the Ruskies. So just to make sure that everybody can get the medical care they need, maybe we should all get our blood types tattooed on us. Some people went out and did. Is that why you have O negative on the back of your neck? Yeah. Pretty cool. It's a band reference, actually. Are we going to talk about our tattoos at any point? No. Okay. I'll talk about mine later. If you want to hear about mine, all you have to do is go listen to Judge John Hodgman. That's true. I can't remember the episode number, though. Sorry, John. All right, so let's move on to the 1960s. Things went downhill fast because outbreaks of hepatitis and tattoo parlors were shut down. Like, in New York City, they were banned between 1961 and 1997, and in Massachusetts they were illegal. Tattoo parlors were illegal up until 2000. Yeah, which is hard to believe. And remember in skateboarding, we said, like, once skateboarding came around in 1959, it never, ever really went away. It just pushed underground. Sure. Same thing with tattoos. True. And every time it fell out of the mainstream, getting a tattoo became even more of a symbol of rejection of society, which made it even cooler. And while it was forced underground and made illegal by those bands in the taken up by again, fringe groups like biker gangs, chicano gangs. Remember the zoosuit riot? Yeah. It was one of my favorite shows that we've done. It was a great one. Yeah. I don't remember if we talked about it or not, but there was a whole aspect of it where gang tattoos or tattoos became associated with gangs from the zoosuit riot. Like, the press reported on these groups of chicano boys who all had chicano style tattoos, which is beautiful stuff, by the way. Did you look it up? Oh, yeah. It's like that lettering with the amazing flourishes. Yeah. Mostly just black. Right. Or like photorealistic shaded black and white. Well, just black, like you said, images of, like, the virgin Mary or praying hands. It's awesome. Or a fallen gang member. Right. Like it looks like a photograph, basically. Yeah. Is that what photo realistic means? Yeah. Okay. But that became associated gang tattoos, especially like Hispanic gang tattoos or Latina. Yeah, sorry. They became associated from the zoosuit riot. Yeah. That's pretty cool. You should listen to that podcast. Was it just called how zoot suits work? No, it was like, did zoot suits start arrived? It was one of those dumb ones where we ask the obvious question that we're going to answer. It was really good, though. I think. It was one of those where people are like, zoot suits. A podcast on zoosuits, it turned out really super interesting spot in the history of La. Which has a lot of black spots on it. Yeah, it's a good point. So in the 1970s, things came around a bit because of the counterculture and civil rights movements and black power and gay rights movements and women's lib. And there are all these causes now that people began to tattoo on their bodies just to show unity. Or just the hippies, of course, with mushrooms and marijuana leafs and keep on trucking our crumb stuff. Yeah, the trucking dude. Yeah. Rainbows and flowers and all sorts of things like that. So it became a little more common. But it was still on the fringe, I think, right through the 80s. Really, don't you think? Pretty much. And then all of a sudden, America just kind of loosen up about it a little bit. It seems like it. I think what happened is it crossed that threshold that all things that are part of the counterculture cross a co opting of it to where it's no longer part of the fringe of enough people do something. That generational shift happens. Yeah. And more than ever, it's become part of the mainstream. Like there is going to be an enormous amount of tattooed grandparents in like, 30, 40 years. Yeah. Neck tattoos. Just plain old grandparents with neck tattoos. I can't wait. Yes. I can't either. Right? I don't want to live that long to see all that, but yeah, it's become extraordinarily tolerated more and more and more ever since the 80s or 90s. But up to today, it's just like I can't imagine there being more of a critical mass of people getting tattoos than there are now. And as a matter of fact, I predict it will probably become passe in the next couple of years because so many people are getting tattoos. I think it's already getting a little passe, don't you? I don't exactly have my finger on the pulse of hipsterism, but I can see it. I do know one of the new trends, and I hadn't heard of this either, are UV sensitive inks. Dude. So, like, you have a tattoo that you can't see unless you're under a black light at a rave. I saw a very cool tattoo with that technique, and it was not photo realistic, but an amazing illustration across the upper back of a person of Yoda brandishing a lightsaber. And the lightsaber had the UV ink. Everything else is tattoo, but the lightsaber glowed under black light. That's pretty awesome. It was amazing. Yeah. You don't have to send me that. I don't know how new this is, but breast cancer survivors that undergo mastectomies sometimes will have reconstructive surgery and have 3D nipples tattooed on their newly reconstructed breast. So it's like a combination of scarification and tattooing. Well, basically, when you get the breast reconstruction, you don't get a nipple with that. Right. So they'll just tattoo one on. But how do they like 3D perspective or they raise the skin? 3d perspective. I got you. Okay. Yeah. Just like artistic talent, I guess. I have no idea how they do that stuff, so that's kind of cool too. Yeah. All right, so that's a pretty good overview of the history. I would say so. And I guess let's get down to the nitty gritty about what a tattoo is after this message. Break. All right. What's a tattoo? It's actually pretty simple, and it's exactly what you think it is. Tattoo is basically just a needle that's delivering ink through the needle into your dermis. It goes through your epidermis, a couple of millimeters into your skin, into your dermis, because your epidermis, well, you shed it. It's full of dead skin cells. Eventually, and regenerating skin cells, your dermis is comparatively stable. So when you stick it with some ink, the ink is going to stay. Yeah. And so you're seeing through the outer layer of your skin because remember in the myth busting episode, we talked about how blood looks blue? Yeah. Because you can see through your skin. Right. That's how you see a tattoo. It does fade a little bit over the years. Of course your tattoo is going to look great when you first get it. And over the years, it's going to look worse and worse. You can get it touched up, but apparently the elbows, knuckles, knees and feet are more likely to fade over the years. And I don't think we even said the needle, it runs like a sewing machine. Yes. There's a motor and you've got a foot pedal and you've got basically between 53,000 times per minute. This needles bobbing up and down like a sewing machine. Yeah, I guess you want the one that's going 3000 /minute, not the prison model at 50. That's probably pretty painful. Well, it's funny, you bring up prison like, can we talk about that for a second? Prison tattoos. Yeah. So Chuck, in prison you don't have a tattoo gun that goes 3000 punctures per minute, I guess is what you'd call it. Punctures per minute. Yeah. Instead you have things like a toothbrush with a staple that somebody took out of a magazine attached to it or a mechanical pencil and use like pen ink or maybe they harvest the ink from a newspaper. There's a lot of really horrible ways that they give prison tattoos. Yeah. There are prison tattoo guns that you can make. It's not always just like one individual puncture at a time. Like they'll take an old tape player and use the motor from that to make one. But you know how fast the tape player motor goes. Right. Even and fast forward. Yeah. So that's not great. And I've seen where they use burn boot polish and get the soot or melt styrofoam. Yes. That does not seem like it would take to the human body melted styrofoam or plastic. It would be poisonous. And most of them are gang emblems or they all generally have some sort of meaning, like why they're in there, maybe, or who they are associated with or don't want to be associated with. The opposite gang with like a circle and a slash through it. That's a common prison tattoo. And then for needles, they'll use everything from springs from a pen to like a guitar string. Yeah, guitar string is big. Yeah. It's just kind of very DYI. Yeah. Why? For the most part, those of you out there listening to this podcast are not going to be getting prison tattoos. If you get a tattoo, you're going to be going to a tattoo parlor and they're going to use that gun that was invented first in 1891 by a guy named Samuel O'Reilly. And he actually modeled his invention after an invention by Thomas Edison that was basically like an etching pin. And this guy said, you know what, if I just modify this a little bit and have some ink go through some tube system, we could use this as a pretty great tattoo gun. And bam. Even today it's basically the same. Yes. It hasn't changed that much. No, I saw that somebody invented one in 2000. It's Pneumatic. It uses compressed air, and it seems like it's very lightweight. You can take the whole thing and just throw it in an autoclave and sterilize it whole. You don't have to take it apart. Is that the next wave? I guess, because I think most of them are electromagnetic now. Most of them? Yeah, I think that's the only one that's not interesting. Yeah. All right. I guess we should talk a little bit about sterilization, maybe. Yeah. We just explained tattooing. Aside from the artistic talent, I know it's not a whole lot to it. Well, no, part of the artistic talent is when you're drawing on a sheet of paper. All of the shading, all of that stuff. It's all on basically flat, two dimensional surface. When you're dealing with skin, you have to be aware of how deep the needle is going. You have to select your needles based on what kind you want. Like, needles have different tapers, which makes them pointier or not pointy, different diameters. And then they can be grouped together depending on what you're trying to do to create big lines, rounded lines, all that stuff. So you have to understand what you're doing with needles. Oh, sure. You have to have artistic talent, although not by law. Yeah, that's true. And then you have to be, I guess, well versed in using human skin as a canvas. Yeah. I think sometimes they'll practice on, like, watermelons and cantaloupes and things like that. There's an artist for themselves. I can't remember his name. Vim Delvoi with the W and his website address is vim Delvoy. It's one of the better websites on the Internet right now, frankly, next to stuff you should know.com. But he has an art series of Texadermy pigs that he's done, like, elaborate chicano style tattoos all over. Oh, really? It's really neat looking. You got to practice on something. Yeah. This guy's selling what he's practicing on. You know what I'm saying? Okay. It's like you can buy one of tattoo pigs for tens of thousands of dollars. That's weird. The point is, a tattoo artist has a lot to take into account, including safety precautions, too. Yeah. All right, but let's go ahead and just talk about what's going to happen when you go in there. Okay. You're going to walk in there, you're going to be drunk. Not true. Supposedly, it's illegal to tattoo somebody who's intoxicated. I don't think that's true. I think it's up to the shop, from what I've seen, people I've asked tattoo people, would you tattoo a drunk person? And I guess it depends on who it is, but the ones I know have answered yes. I think there are some states that it's against the law to somebody inebriated. Okay, so you're not drunk, you're sober, you go into your tattoo. Maybe you have a design already at the Go. That's what I would recommend. Or you can go in and. Look at the myriad posters on the wall of what they call flash, which are all the clip art of the tattoo world, just kind of ready to go, like, hey, I like that barbed wire arm band. Or I like that Japanese symbol for something that I don't understand. Yeah, that's very dangerous, supposedly. Yeah. And then you'll pick out your design or you come in with your own, like I said, and then they will draw it on your arm or stencil it or draw it with a medical grade pen. Sterile medical grade pen. This is before the tattoo. Right. A good tattoo shop should give you the pins because they're not going to reuse them. They're supposed to be sterile so you can take it home. So they draw it on your skin. Then they start tattooing basically just going over that outlining. It is the first thing they do. They call it black work. And the reason also that they draw it or stencil it on your skin first is because your skin stretches during the tattoo process. So as long as they're following that line, it's going to go back to the way it looked before the skin stretched. But if they don't, and they just do it without a stencil or without a drawing, it's going to turn out weird. I imagine there's some free drawers, don't you think? Artists that are like, really so good that they can just invent something? Sure, they can in the moment, but then they should stencil it onto your skin because you can't predict which way the skin is going to stretch. Yeah. I guarantee you there's people out there that don't stencil. I wouldn't go to a non stenciler. Okay. So Josh is all about the stencils for good reason. So they're going to do their black work. They're going to outline it. It's just a little single tip needle at that point. The ink is pretty thin. And this is basically just to get your basic outline going. So, you know, it's not super. It's not shaded or outlined or thick at this point. Right. Then they use a different needle, often a combination of needle that will be stacked or flat around or whatever. And they commenced with the shading. And the shading, it connects all of the black work. It fills in any lines or gaps. There's a gap in the work is called a holiday, though. That was kind of funny. And that's like, either it didn't take or the artist missed that part. And the shading part is supposed to cover that up, right. And connect all that to make sure there's no holidays. Yeah, but we should say if you pay attention to the tattoo artist, if it's a right handed tattoo artist, they're going to start doing the outlining, the black work from the bottom right and work their way upward to the left. And the reason they do that is because as they're doing the tattoo, they need to clean off the blood. Yeah. They're constantly wiping tattooing. Exactly. And if you do that, you're going to wipe off the stencil. So they work their way up the stencil rather than down where they would smear the stencil, and it would be problematic. That's right. In between each step two, you're going to get it cleaned and wiped off, and then they're going to restart again, like, for the shading. And then what comes next, which is the coloring, depending on what you want. If the Jacona style is not always colored in, sometimes it's just like, outlines, but sometimes you got to have that thing fully colored in, and that's when it gets super painful. Right. They're going over this thing over and over, and you think, my God, is it not fully colored in yet? And then they say, we're almost there. And then you feel a little light headed, and you feel like you might want to pass out. Depending on the tattoo, if you're getting, like, a huge piece done, they may just do, like, the outlining in one and then the shading in another, and then the coloring in another. Like three different sessions? Yes. Over a span of days, perhaps. Or weeks or months. Yeah. It depends on what you want. Yeah. So then after all that, after they do each process or each session, they're going to clean your tattoo and bandage you if you go in your way. And like we said, it depends on how you tolerate pain. Some people say it doesn't hurt at all. Some people have a really hard time with it. Well, it also depends on where the tattoo is. Yeah. That's hugely important as far as pain is concerned. Yeah. Bony areas are tough and hurt. And I found the inside of the armpit, like a really fleshy area, is super painful. Is it like if you get an armband or something, the inside of your arm hurts a lot, but on the outside, like, over muscle, it's not nearly as painful, not as much. Like, I would say, like a shoulder and upper back. Like, those are not going to be as painful, but it feels like somebody is drawing on you with a b stinger. Sort of what it feels like. And it's fairly mild. But like I said, it depends on who you are. Some people are just like, it's no big deal at all. I remember the first one I got, I got a little light headed, and he said it was common. He said, it doesn't mean you can't tolerate pain. It's just like an unusual bodily reaction. It's just like, stop. If I pass out, you'll stop letting me. Yeah. So after they banded you up and send you on your way, they're going to issue some advice for caring for your tattoo. It's not like you just go home and forget about it. There's a process that takes place, and you kind of need to be on top of it. Depending on the tattoo parlor you go to, you could get very different and sometimes contradictory advice. But for the most part, they're going to tell you to remove that bandage that they put on after an hour or two to let the tattoo breathe. You're going to want to keep it clean and wash it every once in a while with lukewarm water and a little bit of antibiotic soap. Antibacterial soap? Yeah. But you want to do it gently, and when you dry it, you want to pat it dry. You don't want to rub it. Don't want to rub you don't want to take a bath, at least. You don't want to submerge your tattoo. And you also don't want to let the shower just beat down on it. No. And if it starts to scab up a little, just sort of let it run its course. You don't want to start picking it scabs. It definitely come out. Yeah, exactly. But it should scare it flakes over. Right? Yeah. And when that happens, then you're supposed to put on lotion. I was always told, like, you put on neosporin or something similar the whole time, but apparently these days they say don't use any kind of ointment because it can actually leach the color out. Yeah. I've gotten two different sets of instructions, and that's why it's a little distressing. Right. Like who's. Right. Yeah. These are from, like, pro tattoo parlors. Some say use ointment, some say don't. The ones who say use ointment, they say keep a thin layer on at all times to keep it from scarring. Right. Others say don't do that. Just keep it clean and dry. And then as it starts to flake, you can put on a nice light lotion to keep it moisturized, and then it'll help the flaking process. And then everything will come off, and your skin will literally flake off, scab off. And once that happens, your tattoo is complete. A few weeks after you went into the tattoo parlor. Yes. But in the meantime, you want to stay out of the sun. You don't want to go into pools. Sure. And again, you don't want a bunch of water. Dousing your tattoo now. And you're also going to have to start buying clothes that show off your tattoo. Right. You're going to want to go cut off the sleeves of all your T shirts. That's right. You're going to wear a little half shirt if you have the very popular lower back tattoo. Basically, you want to start dressing like Mac from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Exactly. You want to go buy your first pair of dickies. Yeah. What else? That's about it. Okay. Maybe wear hair products, too. Tattoos range in price greatly from depending on what you want, obviously, and how detailed it is, to how good of an artist you're working with. Yeah. It's one of those things where it's like, you pay for what you get exactly for sure. I've got a pretty bad tattoo on one arm from this lady in Arizona, and I don't even want it anymore. Yeah, you can get them removed. I know, but then it's like, why? Like, what's the purpose? It's under my short sleeves. It's like, no big deal. Yeah, but I'm definitely of the 17% that regrets it. And it's not a regret. Like, I don't wake up every day and wish I didn't have it, but I kind of wish it wasn't there. When you're lounging at the pool. Yeah, that's as far as I'll go with that. You could always wear, like, a black armband and just if anybody asks if one of my friends died yeah, get over your two of one. No, just cover it with yeah, just got bad luck. His friends are always dead, but they can be, like, $50 to $100 for a little tiny one. If you want to get that Georgia peach on your butt inch big. Supposedly, I saw $100. Yeah. I saw a 2013 Pew survey. Sound like the average cost of a small tattoo is $45. Yeah. But if you want, like, a revered tattoo artist, like, you go to La. Or New York and you want Cat Von D to give you a tattoo, I can't imagine how much her hourly rate must be. Yes. She probably charges by the hour, don't you think? Well, most of them do, especially for a big piece. Really? Yeah. See, the ones I've seen, they'll just look at the piece, or maybe they just have a sense of how many hours it'll take. Right. But if they're doing, like, a whole sleeve or something like that or your whole back, and it's going to take multiple sessions, they charge by the hour, and it reaches into the hundreds easily. But then you get to walk around and say, cat Von D did my tattoo. Right. I met her. Yeah. Because she tattooed my back. I gave her $6,000. Right. Good for her. That's what I say. So that's the cost. That's right. And when you get a tattoo, unless it is one of those ones where you're in a state where they can tattoo you drunk legally and are willing to and you go in and just get a tattoo while you're drunk, if you're planning on getting a tattoo, it's a good idea to do some research. Yeah. Really think about it, folks. Well, I mean, if you've thought about it and you want to get it okay. Yeah. You want to find the best tattoo artist you can afford. Yeah. Because it's going to be on there for a very long time. Not only are you paying for artistic ability, you're paying for technical ability, too, ideally. So somebody who can do a really good tattoo can make it look exactly like you want it, but can also make it stay, keep it from fading over time. Just basically keep it looking sharp as well, yeah. So like you said, you get what you pay for with tattoos. Typically. Yeah. And that goes for safety, too. We've been dancing around this, so I guess we should just go ahead and talk about it. Yeah. Since you're working with needles and there's blood, there are dangers, of course, like hepatitis. That is a real thing that has happened. Any kind of blood infectious disease could be spread. There have been zero reported cases of HIV via tattoo at this point, the CDC says. But that doesn't mean in some random situation that could possibly happen. But if they're following the protocols of safety, which is a three pronged approach of sterilization, disposable materials, and then hand sanitation and just basic sanitation, then it's a pretty low chance of any kind of hepatitis or anything like that. Right. You shouldn't be scared, but you should be aware of the kind of tattoo probably you're walking into. It's not just like bloodborne pathogens. You can also get, like, a skin infection from a dirty tattoo parlor, too. But any tattoo parlor with its all is following the same bloodborne pathogens rules that hospitals and doctors offices use. Yeah. So if you go into a tattoo parlor, what's going to happen when you sit down and you start to get your tattoo done? There's going to be a whole lot of stuff laid out on a tray that looks basically like a surgical tray, surgeon's instruments tray. Yeah. A good artist will explain all this stuff to you as well. Right. Exactly what they're doing, why they're doing it. Yeah, exactly. And most of the packages, the needles, the ink, the ink cups, all of this stuff are all prepackaged in sterile packaging that is opened in front of you. Yeah. And they're all single use. Right. It's all supposed to be thrown away afterward, and then in between uses the stuff that isn't reusable, like the tattoo gun, the tubing system, all this stuff is supposed to be put in what's called an autoclave, which uses heat, pressure and time to totally kill any organism on this stuff, on this equipment, like nothing's left alive. So there's like a process where they put this in auto clay. Some of the least expensive ones look like an Easy Bake oven. Yeah. That's a pressure cooker that sits on the oven and they'll put it in for a certain amount of time. Something like, I think, 250 degrees for 30 minutes. Yeah. You've got two methods 250 Fahrenheit under \u00a310 of pressure for 30 minutes, or if you're in a hurry, you can crank up the heat a little bit to 270 under \u00a315 of pressure for 15 minutes. And both of those will kill everything. And it's pretty interesting. They put the different parts into special pouches that you seal up, and the pouches have these indicator strips that show whether the stuff is sterile or not. And the indicator strips are actually made in some cases of little microbes that will germinate, I guess, due to the steam that they use if it doesn't reach a certain temperature. Really? Yeah. So if the strip and when they germinate, they change color. So if the strip is a certain color after X amount of minutes or whatever, that means the temperature wasn't reached and those instruments aren't sterile. Wow. Isn't that cool? Yeah, it's very cool. The FDA doesn't regulate tattoo inc. I was a little surprised by that. And apparently you could experience burning with an MRI because of metallic pigments. You have to take out, like, piercings and all that stuff when you're going into MRI, because it's a huge magnet. Yeah, I just had an MRI yesterday. What? My first one. What? Yeah. Are you okay? Yeah, my lower back okay, but have you ever had one? No. It was really weird. How long were you in there for? About 25 minutes. And the thing is no more than, like, three inches from the tip of your nose. So bad news if you have any kind of claustrophobia. Well, there's open MRIs, but I hear you pay for them. You know what I mean? This one is closed. I would probably lose it. And it cost me $150. That's not bad. No good insurance. And of course, the first thing I wanted to do was scratch my nose as soon as I went in there, and you just have to suffer through it. But the thing that was remarkable to me was the noise. Isn't there, like, a clicking sound? Dude, it sounded like you were in a German dance club. Yeah, yeah. And it varied. There were all these different noises, but it would literally be like and it's super loud. They give you earplugs. Really? Yeah, man, I had no idea. I didn't either. Like, they slid me in there and there would be, like, a but super loud now. And then something else would come in and go, this is nice. Yeah, it's really cool. And it would change sounds, like, every couple of minutes. Right when you got bored with it. It's like it knew it was just weird, man. I had no idea it made noises like that. And what I couldn't figure out, I have to look into it, is what that noise is. Yeah. Is it a mechanical thing going on? I don't know. Have we ever done one just on MRIs? No. I'd like to now, though. I know we've done it on, like, using MRIs, like lie detectors and stuff like that. Yeah. So could you feel your tattoo? Is it burning? No, but I don't know if they were concentrating on the lower back, and I don't have a tramp stamp, so that was no problem. The reason it burns is because some pigments, some tattoo pigments, are metallic. And so the MRI, being a huge magnet, draws the metallic pigments, I guess, toward the top of the skin. That creates a burning sensation. Crazy. And also, apparently there's makeup, permanent makeup. Yeah, you can get, like, eyeliner tattooed or what have you, and that supposedly can actually mess up an MRI of a person's brain because it's often metallic pigment. So if you get a cosmetic tattoo of eyeliner, then you're screwed for your I just don't have any neurological problems. All right, that's good advice. Anyway, if you want to go get blood, there might be some restrictions depending on how recently you've had your tattoo and what state you're in. The American Red Cross, if you've had a tattoo in the past year, doesn't accept your blood unless your parlor is state regulated, and apparently most states don't regulate them, so it depends. I saw that there were a lot of regulated states. There are three that have just do whatever you want. North Dakota, New Mexico and Washington, DC. Are all just basically like, we have no regulations whatsoever. Interesting, a lot of states don't have state regulations, but they'll have local ordinances. Yes. Almost all states forbid tattooing minors without a parent's consent, and in some states, it's even a felony if you tattoo a minor. And then other states have state regulations where, like, the Department of Health regulates tattoo parlors. And in most regulated states, which is most states, a tattoo artist has to be licensed, which basically means, like, you go take a health class and then pass an exam, and then you're a licensed tattoo artist, which means, again, there's no study of artistic ability, no testing of artistic ability. If you can pass this health exam, in most states, you are a bona fide tattoo artist who can charge money and make people very angry when you finish your shoddy work. Yes. Well, you can't regulate that. You can't say you can't open this art gallery because you're not a good painter. No, it's true. And how it affects other people. I get that. Right. But it's subjective, right? It totally is. I understand what you're saying. The good news is that as tattoos have become more and more widespread, and hence more and more lucrative, a lot more people have been coming out of art school and getting into tattoo. Sure. They're not necessarily self taught. They're formally trained artists who are doing tattoos. You can probably make more money quicker as a tattoo artist out of art school than you can selling your paintings. I'm sure the income is more steady, for sure. All right, there's a few more things we can talk about. You hit the cosmetic tattoos if you're vegan. There are vegan tattoo parlors. Good luck finding one because they're not super abundant. I bet those are so expensive. But a lot of tattoo ink is made with bone char, and that is burnt animal bones. Sometimes they use the resin of shellac beetles and the ink and sometimes, like, the soap and stuff they use. If you're, like, really vegan, you're not going to want them to wash your skin with something that has been tested on animals, even. Yeah. Sometimes they'll prep the area by rubbing a piece of raw chicken breast on it. You'd be very surprised. You would never notice it unless you're a vegan, though. I wish people could have seen you sound good. And then, of course, you've got the henna tattoo. Very popular in Indian culture, but also apparently very dangerous, too. I didn't realize this. Well, it can be natural. Henna is derived from a plant, and that's henna dye and that's light orange and kind of like kind of a rust color. And that is safe because it is natural and it's a temporary thing. It's a temporary tattoo. My friend Sima, when she got married, before her wedding, the day before, all the bridesmaids got these amazing Hannah tattoos. And she gets the most the bridesmaid's got some, but she was, like, all over her face and arms and hands. Really gorgeous stuff. And it's a big part of the culture and heritage. Right. But black henna contains synthetic ingredients, including PPD. Are you going to try and pronounce that? Pfeenylendyamine diamond. That's not bad. Phenylene diamond. I did it Pfeenylenediamine. All right. Three times CPD. And that is Koltar. It's found in coltar and it can cause permanent scarring and really bad reactions. So if you go to get a henna tattoo, use natural orange. Hannah. Yes. Or if you're a kid, get some Cracker Jacks. Have you seen Octopuses? The James Bond movie? I never have. I saw it the other day again, and maybe the worst movie tattoo I've ever seen. It looked literally like a Cracker Jack's tattoo that they put on this lady. It's an octopus, and James Bond has her in bed and remarks about it. And they had a close up shot of it and it's literally, like, peeling off at the edges. Did they dub in, like, a warrant? Warrant? No. His Bond movies have not aged well, by the way. Which one was it? Roger Moore in that? Yeah. I love those. I think they're the best. I know we talked about this, but I urge you to go watch Octopusy. No. But I watched Live and Let Die the other night. That was pretty good. Yeah, he's like, inexplicably Surly in that one. Oh, really? Yeah, he's, like, really weird. Like David Foster Wallace being interviewed by Charlie Rose or something. He's, like, looking at everybody out of the corner of his eye. It's weird. Interesting. Yeah. There's something wrong with Oxford Ward during the shooting of that one. I've got a few stats and then I guess we can cover removal. Yes. About 1.65 billion is spent in the US on tattoos each year. This is Pew, by the way, too. That's a 2013 Pew poll. Oh, it is. So, you know, it's quality, it's reliable. 14% of all Americans have at least one to two if you're between 18 and 25%, 36%. And I'm surprised it's a little bit older. 26 to 40 year olds have the most 40% now of 26 to 40 year old Americans have tattoos. Yeah. 40%. Yeah. That's pretty high. That's close to half forecast. And I mentioned that 17% have some regret. I think 5% cover up the tattoo with another tattoo, and 11% try complete removal, which is what we're at here. We're almost there. There's 21,000 tattoo parlors in the US. Yeah. So again, take your time to go find the best one that you can afford. Sure. And not just the best, artistically, but make sure when you go in, everybody's wearing gloves. All of the stuff is sterile. Like they're not joking around with the bloodborne pathogen rules. Yes. Like they're being serious. Because it is serious, because you're getting punctured several thousand times a minute, and every one of those puncture wounds is an opportunity for an infection. You don't want a skin infection, so don't take it lightly. And don't go to a tattoo parlor. That takes safety lightly, too. Yeah. And I don't want to discriminate against new businesses, but in the case of a tattoo parlor, maybe you should look at one that's been around for a little while and has a good reputation. I don't know if I'd go to one on opening day unless they're giving out a real great discount. Yeah, they might. So, Chuck, 17% of people regret their tattoo. Have some regret. I don't know if that means because only 11% have it removed, so I guess the other 6% are like me. They're like, I guess I'll just keep it. Yes. So, Chuck, prior to the still wanted tattoos removed yes. But there weren't lasers available. Lasers are what we use today. That's right. Prior to this, getting your tattoo removed basically meant you're just going to scar over that area. Pretty much. Dermabrasion is basically sanding off your tattoo slowly, not to be confused with microderm abrasion, which is still in use today. Dermabrasion is basically like using a cheese grater. Didn't most is like, come at somebody with a cheese grater to get rid of their tattoo. That sounds right. Yeah. Cryosurgery, which is where they freeze it off. Sounds pretty painful as well. Yeah. And then there's just regular old surgery just cutting it off. Yeah. Where they cut out the part. And if it's a big old tattoo, they're probably going to have to do a skin graft. Yeah, but at least you don't have the tattoo anymore. Yeah, but thankfully now we have lasers. And you've even used this, right? Yeah. Laser removal hurts like the dickens. Does it really? It hurts as bad as getting a tattoo. If not, maybe a little more, depending on what's it feeling. It feels like somebody's frying bacon right next to your skin. It doesn't smell like it. It hurts like the bacon grease is jumping off onto your skin. Okay, it hurts bad, but I mean, it's nothing that you can't tolerate. But a lot of places that do laser tattoo removal will also offer, like, a local anesthetic. I'm too cheap, right? I just buy my thumb yeah. And I can make it through it. I'm not like some huge pain tolerance guy or anything like that. I say I'm average as far as pain threshold goes. Your average pain. And you're on the cheap side, right. It's me in a nutshell. How many treatments did you get? So I've reached a point where I'm, like, it's faded enough that I've shown that, yes, I want to get rid of that tattoo. The problem is the place I was going. And here's a little key for you. Basically, anybody can buy a laser and charge whatever they want for tattoo removal. Oh, yeah. Fortunately, we have a friend called Groupon that these laser tattoo removal places frequently used. So look for a Groupon first and get, like, a package. You can get them for as cheap as, like, two or three sessions for 50 or $60, which isn't bad at all. Right. I went maybe six times so far. Okay. And I would say it's two thirds of the way gone. The problem is the last laser place I went to said we've reached the limit of lasers. You should do microdermbrasion. I don't particularly believe them, but I haven't gone and found another place yet. Got you. So you're deciding now what your final steps will be. Well, my final steps will be, like, getting more laser removal. It's not guaranteed. Any place will tell you, like, I can't guarantee I'm going to get this all the way off. And if it doesn't come all the way off, then I'm out a bunch of money now looking for a place where I feel comfortable trusting their expertise, and that place says, yes, we can get this off with laser. If not, then I've got to look into Microderm appraisal. And then how does the laser work exactly? Doesn't it just bust apart the ink so it disperses? That's exactly right. The laser is attuned to the pigment. Apparently, green is the hardest to get rid of. Blue and black are the easiest to get rid of. And the lasers there's different lasers use different crystals, I guess, to target pigment selectively, and it's just your synthetic pigment. It shouldn't affect your body's natural pigment. Okay. And it goes in and breaks it up. And those little pieces of pigment are absorbed by your immune system and spit out in your sweat, along with all sorts of the detritus from your cells and all that. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Awesome. I think I might look into that again. The pain is not intolerable. If you go in the first few sessions, they're going to get rid of it. Like, it's going to go away dramatically. It's just as it gets further along, it gets more difficult. Right. And you have to have somebody that really knows what they're doing, knows what kind of laser. To use what pulse setting to use it on and isn't going to overcharge you. All right? So really think about it before you get one, folks, because it's going to cost you money and pain going in. And then later on, money and pain if you want it removed. That's right. And that's tattoos. If you want to see some really weird stuff, you can look up Gregory Paul McLaren, or Aka Lucky Diamond Rich. He is the world's most tattooed man. He is 100% tattooed. Every part of his body, including eyelids inside of eyelids, inside of eyelids, under his foreskin, inside of his ears, mouth. Wow. He's completely tattooed. Do you remember those two twin hit men breaking Bad? Yes. One of them has tattoos on their eyelids in real life. And I read an interview with him and he said they used a plastic spoon over his eyeball and pulled the eyelid over it and then tattooed it. I'm like, I think that's worse than the tattooing part, like having a plastic spoon against your eyes with your eyelid pulled over it. But that's how he did it. And if you want to see something even weirder, go look up stalkingcat or Dennis Avner. Avner. And this is a guy who's dead now, but he had plastic surgeries and modified his body, along with facial tattoos, to look like a cat, like a tiger. Oh, yeah. Have you seen that bagel? Body modification? It's big in Japan. They go in and pump something in to create this round protrusion on the forehead that's hollow in the center. So it's like a bagel head. It's a war. It's very odd. I've always wanted a bagel head. There's like this strange trend in Japan that's like, yeah, we should do one on just body modification. People take it to, like, super extremes these days. Let's do it. It's got whiskers. Wow. Like implanted. So it's basically like Rob Lowe in behind the candelabra. Exactly. Weird. All right, well, that was tattoos. Everything there is to know about tattoos. Again, go check out our website. Look up 37 really terrible tattoos and it'll bring up a pretty cool show for you. And if you want to know more about tattoos, search tattoos in the search bar at How Stuff Works.com. And it'll bring up this article by Tracy Wilson. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this horrific amputation from Amber about her father. Hello, gentlemen. I just finished listening to the podcast on amputation. Of course, it was wonderfully, informative as always. But I have a bit of anecdotal information which you may or may not enjoy. While I'm not an amputee, my father was. You discuss how they prep the patient in terms of anesthesia. For a digit, you get a little numb. For a limb, you go all under. In 1988, in Columbus, Ohio, my father had the lower half of one leg amputated due to complications from diabetes. Since he was a diabetic who did not take care of himself, his heart was not strong enough to be put under. And so at the age of 38, he had the heart of a 98 year old. Oh, my gosh. And what they did, instead of anesthesia, was perform a spinal block and then put him headphones on his head so he could not hear the saw cutting through his bone. He did make it successfully through that surgery, but sadly passed away that November as a result of his diabetes. And this was in the 1980s. And that is from Amber Nicole, and she said, feel free to share this. It's pretty awful. Yeah. Well, thanks, Amber. We're sorry to hear about your dad, but yeah, thanks for sharing it with everybody. Sure. On the path to diabetes. Maybe this will make you think twice. Seriously, if you want to warn your fellow stuff, you should know listeners based on your own experience. We're always happy to pass along good info. You can tweet it to us at syskast. You can join us on facebook. Comstepychano. You can send us an email stuffpodcast@discovery.com, and you can hang out with us at our website, stuff.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com." | ||
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1220641799640sysk-importance-of-sleep.mp3 | Is sleep that important? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/is-sleep-that-important | Sleep is one of those funny things about being a human being -- you just have to do it. Have you ever wondered why? Check out our HowStuffWorks article to learn more about the importance of sleep. | Sleep is one of those funny things about being a human being -- you just have to do it. Have you ever wondered why? Check out our HowStuffWorks article to learn more about the importance of sleep. | Tue, 09 Sep 2008 12:03:41 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=12, tm_min=3, tm_sec=41, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=253, tm_isdst=0) | 12135938 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Howdy and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Sitting across watching me is Charles. Chuck Bryant. It's the usual day here at House. Stuff works. Thanks for joining us. What's going on? Chuck? Chuck? Chuck? Hey, buddy. You ready to punch in? Mommy. No. Josh. Oh, Mommy. Yeah. Hey, Chuck. I'm right there with you. Chuck is a little sleepy here today. So am I, actually. I'm a little sleep deprived. I can tell. I don't like it, Chuck. I feel a little dirty. I smell a little bit. I got this weird thing growing on my jawline that won't go away. Yes. I just feel unhealthy from not having had enough sleep lately. How about you? Yeah, I was actually just funny people. I wasn't awake. I'm sorry. I didn't really I was just finding people. I wasn't really asleep. But I am a bit tired going out of town this week, so I've been staying up a little later, getting things ready. And I'm the same way. A little rundown, little foggy headed. It's kind of funny that we should both be this sleepy on the same day. We're going to discuss an article you wrote. Is Sleep that important? Right. You would almost think that we'd planned it. Yeah. I actually didn't lose sleep in preparation for this. If you did, hats off to me. Yeah, exactly. So, Chuck, what I got from this article that you wrote it's fine. Pine article, by the way. Thanks. The University of Chicago is the place to be if you are interested in dedicating your career to sleep research. Yeah. Is that the case? Yeah. Well, yeah, they do a lot, but there's tons of sleep research out there. This is one of those articles that almost wrote itself because there's one thing that scientists like to study. It's sleep. Yeah, and the funny thing is, though, is we still don't have any definitive answers for exactly why we sleep. Yeah, I mean, it sounds kind of odd to pose that question, but we don't know why we sleep other than to say I know I mentioned the article. One of the old jokes that doctors say is that sleep is secure sleepiness. Yeah, and that's really the best answer they have at this point still. And it makes sense, too. But lucky for you, after having been assigned to sleep, that important for the site, you are able to find out that we know plenty about all the bad things that happen when you don't get enough sleep. And there are lots of them. Give us a couple, will you? Well, I know. Just let me quickly say before this is all in the last 50 years or so, because before the early 1950s, scientists thought it was just shut down mode and that like, your brain slept and it was just your body's just catching up on all your organs. They might even let your organs shut down except for your heart. Not true. No, that's a really bad thing, when your organs shut down. Yeah, that's not true at all, because the doctor, years later, hooked his son up to a brainwave machine. Eugene Azarinsky surprised the University of Chicago, Chicago, and he found that the brain actually there are periods where the brain actually sped up its activity. Oh, really? Yeah. Which is REM sleep. REM sleep. Rapid eye movement sleep, exactly. Got you. Okay, so all of a sudden, what that's just like this huge hyper speed launch forward in sleep research, right? Yes, at the time it was. They found out that during REM sleep I'm sorry, your eyes would twitch and the limbs and facial muscles would move. It's kind of unsettling to see somebody in REM sleep. Yeah, it is. Yeah. I would agree with that. Yeah. So we figured out basically that not only are we shut down, but we're more active in some areas of our brain. But most of the research since then has been done on what happens if you don't get enough sleep and the health impacts. Right. Well, one of the things that I understand about REM sleep is there's a theory that basically that's the stage where our brain is sorting through all the information we've taken in throughout the day yeah, that's one theory. And kind of filing it away. Sure. That seems pretty logical to me, actually. Yeah, that one makes sense. Unfortunately, it's nothing they can really prove, but I think that's a pretty good theory because you take in things all day long, and the analogy I'm making, the article is like a computer desktop, and you're just filing everything away. And then when we sleep is when our brain kind of does the big master file moves whatever needs to be in the recycle bin to the recycle bin, and everything else is put on the hard drive, basically. I think Chuck and I subscribe to that theory because we both share a common hatred of a cluttered desktop. Right. Yeah. It's terrible. It's really annoying. Yes, it is. It throws me off. Well, you know, REM sleep after that discovery really kind of became the superstar of sleep studies, didn't it? Right. And for a long time, they assumed that if you don't have REM sleep, you are going to suffer memory loss and all sorts of other terrible things, it sounds like, from later studies. And actually this terrible accident that happened to an Israeli man who was hit in the head by shrapnel, suffered a brain trauma and was incapable of achieving REM sleep, was still able to go ahead and move on to graduate from law school. Which kind of undermines the idea that not getting REM sleep impairs your memory. Not getting REM sleep does screw with you physiologically, though. Right, right. I know. Just sleep deprivation in general is no good for you at all. And we're talking will shorten your life. Tell them about the three week lab rat study. Oh, yeah, the infamous three week lab rats. That kind of so unsettling. Yeah. The lab rats that would normally live for three years would die in three weeks without sleep. And, you know, there's only one way to find that out. Definitively poke these rats and keep them alive for three straight weeks. Can you imagine a worse existence? No. And I can't imagine being the poker of the rat, either. That's probably no funny. Well, think about it. They had to have pokers work on shifts or else there would be pokers who had to stay up for three straight rights. So maybe people were poking the pokers. Think about an unfair advantage. It's an endless chain. Yeah. So sleep, not only will it kill lab rats, and that's if they don't sleep at all. Right, so that's the far end of the spectrum. But it's still surprising. Three weeks equals death. Yeah, that's pretty scary. But some of the ways of death, some of the things that you can develop like what, hypertension? Yeah, hypertension, I think Parkinson's disease you can get if you sleep more than 9 hours. Too much or too little. Yeah, the trick is I mean, everyone's a little bit different, but the trick is to get that right amount of sleep. And they say it's generally for adults between six and 8 hours. And too little can lead to a bunch of problems. Too much can lead to a bunch of problems. I found one, yet another University of Chicago study that basically followed, I think, ten healthy men in their think they were college students, and they got 4 hours of sleep per night. And after six days, they were in a pre diabetic state after six days of just getting 4 hours of sleep. Wow. So, yeah, apparently it can have some pretty bad health effects on you. Yeah. That's crazy. I know. I was also looking into polyphasic sleep, which is aka DaVinci sleep, which I know a lot of people know about. DaVinci was famous for taking 20 to 30 minutes naps over a 24 hours period, and that was how he got his sleep. Did you ever see that seinfeld where Kramer tries that? I did. It does not pan out well for him. No. I know that mainstream science doesn't endorse it, although a lot of people are big believers in it. They have websites about polyphasic sleep where they just think it's the best thing since real sleep. Well, that's kind of one of the things that you pointed out in the article was that sleep is so different for everybody in demand for sleep or not needing it that it's almost impossible to really conclusively study sleep right. And come up with answers across the board. Correct. Right. But there are some generalities. Right. How many hours of sleep do I need? I'm 32. You need between six and eight. I mean, that's the wheelhouse for everybody. If you get less than that actually, Parkinson's is less or more than that. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure. It can make you stupid. Students perform less on test scores if they don't get enough sleep. Well, check and check for me because I get like, nine or 10 hours a night and probably a little much. You need to wake up earlier, my friend. Okay, thanks, but yeah. Aside from all those things, fatalities, 55% of all Drowsy driving fatalities occur in kids basically under the age of 25. So it's not thinking about old people falling asleep off the side of the road. This is happening more with kids these days because kids are sleep deprived. You go to college, you're out from under the thumb of your folks, and you don't sleep. You're a partying all night. Right. Well, plus, also, I mean, it's kind of a common knowledge that older adults need less sleep, hence early bird specials, and they're up and at them a lot earlier, that kind of thing. On the other end of the spectrum, babies need, like, newborns. What do they need, like, ten to 16 to 18 hours a day? Yes, 16 to 18 hours. The first year of life. Yes. And then I think the three month mark or so is when babies start to recognize the circadian rhythm, which we've talked about, which is basically day is day, night as night. You sleep at night, you're up during the day, but they're still sleeping ten to 12 hours and then napping a few hours on top of that. And I noticed the tone in your article made it sound like you're a little envious of babies getting to sleep that much. Are you sleep deprived? I wake up pretty easily, and I'm an early riser, so I'm pretty good. Do you experience daytime sleepiness? Like, do you hit the wall at like, three or four in the afternoon? Not really. You really don't? See, I read an article that found that only 40% of people I think it was in your article, actually 40% of people suffer from daytime sleepiness. Right. What are the other 60% doing that they're just feeling so good all the time? I don't get it, because I hit a wall at, like, three, I have to start drinking coffee again for the second time that day and not the second cup. I'm talking the second time, and each time consists of, like, three or four cups of coffee. Right. What am I doing wrong? I don't know. Maybe they're taking tons and tons of happy drugs or something. I don't know these people. Maybe so, because I generally get to get a little sleepy during the day as well. Okay, good. Thank you. I said it. Thank you. Chuck, I don't understand why you couldn't have been upfront at the beginning. Well, that's it for this one. Obviously, Chuck is nodding off and frankly, I'm about to hit the wall again myself. So why don't you go check out his sleep? That important. Believe Chuck and I it is. Stick around, though to find out what article makes Chuck and I hungry for you to me follow right after this. Chuck, you want to tell him? Can you come to again? I'm going to just bring you up to date. I asked the people to stick around and find out what article makes us hungry for Swedish meatballs. So we already podcasted? Yeah, we're homeless at the end there, buddy. Just hang in there. Just tell them what's the article? I think most people probably this is a giveaway. Anyone who's ever been to Ikea knows that they serve up and sell some yummy Swedish meatballs. And Chuck and I are not paid in any way, shape or form by Ikea for this endorsement. We just like their meatballs that much. Although I think I speak for Chuck as well as myself when I say we kind of secretly hope Ikea will send us some for mentioning them. That would be great. Yeah. Well, they can go ahead and email us at the podcast if they want our address. In the meantime, you can go check out how Ikea works. Great article on Howtofworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstep workss.com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast@housedefworks.com. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you." | |
How Radiation Sickness Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-radiation-sickness-works | Fortunately, science has very few instances where humans have been exposed to acute radiation poisoning to study for clues to treating radiation sickness. They have found, though, that those few instances have been grave. | Fortunately, science has very few instances where humans have been exposed to acute radiation poisoning to study for clues to treating radiation sickness. They have found, though, that those few instances have been grave. | Tue, 12 Jul 2016 18:25:04 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=18, tm_min=25, tm_sec=4, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=194, tm_isdst=0) | 45300168 | audio/mpeg | "Are you looking for? An escape? An immersive getaway experience? Well, there's a place for all your wildest dreams. Perhaps you enjoy wrapping along the paperboy, or you believe that blessed be the fruit. Or you dream of one day smashing a glass while stealing. Who's. Ah. Whether you're sworn to Team Kim or you just want a good old fashioned mysterious murder, there's a place that has it all. From Atlanta to only murders in the building, it's all on Hulu. So check into your obsessions. Hulu subscription is required. Terms apply. Visit hulu.com for plan details. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry over there. So this is, as they say, me. Okay. Me. Got you. No one else calls it this. Everybody calls it that. What do you call that? Right. You know, the one with the dudes. Right. Go on. Tangents. Oh, stuff you should know. I have a family member that even not blood relative. I'll just say that who a couple of years ago were like, you guys, you need to get to the point. Sometimes there's, like, six to ten minutes of stuff where you can start talking about the thing. Yeah. It's like, I know, sir. Glad you enjoy it. Yeah. This is not someone I see a lot. Just trying to be vague. Would he know? He probably doesn't even remember saying this at a party or something. No, I'm banking on that. Okay. Maybe if I see him again, he'll say, I know what you were saying. I heard your message. I know you were talking thinly veiled message. Right. It came on the heels of the neighbor's dog telling me to do stuff I didn't want to do. All right, here's. Messages everywhere. That's what I'm trying to say. He's not the Son of Sam. No. David Berkowitz. Right. Yeah. We should do a show on him. We really should. Well, you know what? We should do a show where we talk about all the ones that we said we would do a show on and just forgot. Just a list. Yeah. 30 minutes to read the words. Yeah, that'd be neat. David Burkowitz, number 28, to start some Andy Kaufman esque thing to see how much will people take right before they hate us. I read a really cool Rolling Stone profile of them from 1981. Maybe something like that. Oh, really, really good. Nice on Andy Kaufman. Yeah, he's a really interesting cat. I know. He was basically just doing it all for himself. Yeah. That's why he was into comedy, just to amuse himself, nobody else. Yeah. So it takes a lot of comedy, and I think he inspired a lot of people who ended up bastardizing what he did. I think a lot of people that thought they followed in his footsteps brought a mean spirit like Bob Newhart to things, to their work, like Gilbert gobfre, no. And stuff like that, where you're masquerading as someone to get a rise out of somebody. But the joke is really on that person. Yeah, I got you. I mean, I like Borat, too, but I don't think Andy Kaufman, I think he always had a sweetness about him. I see what you mean. I don't think he was ever mean spirited and tried to make other people look dumb. Yeah, that's my dumb opinion. I think the joke wasn't between him and the audience on another person. The joke was on the audience, and the joke was to himself. Between him and himself. Whereas with like Sasha Baron Cohen everybody's laughing at Ron Paul Right. Well, did you see man on the Moon, the movie? I was seen in a long time. It was good. When he first did the wrestling thing with his future wife, and afterwards she was so mad, and he was like, Wasn't that great? You were so terrific. You were wonderful. And she's like, what? What's going on? He's like, that was such a great performance. And she was like, oh, I thought you were some jerk. Was that Courtney Love? Yeah. What a bizarre casting. I know. So that's radiation sicknesses intro, man. Well, we had to mention something light, because this isn't no, this is rough stuff. Yeah. Pretty heavy. The one good thing about radiation this is a Grabster article, by the way. Yeah. Is that the one good thing about it? Yeah, the one good thing about radiation sickness is it's surprisingly tough to get. Yes. Most people who just go about their average day exposed to sunlight or even microwave in their coffee yes. Or tuning in their favorite radio program while it's around still, or talking on their cell phone, that's another controversial one. Sure. You're not going to get radiation sickness, and the reason why you may get cancer from these things, who knows? But you're not going to get radiation sickness because the energy, the radiation coming from these things, like your cell phone, from the sun, from the microwave, are of a low enough frequency and a low enough energy that they don't have the potential to ionize create ionizing radiation, which is well, that's where radiation knocks an electron off of an atom. That's right. Creating an ion. And ions can wreak serious havoc in a human body in particular. Yeah. In fact, even the cancer that you might get one day due to long term exposure to your cell phone, if that's even a thing that's not called radiation sickness. If you worked at a power plant that leaked and ended up getting cancer, that's not even considered radiation sickness. Or if you're an X ray technician and you get radiation poisoning or cancer years later yeah. Still not radiation sickness. Radiation sickness is where you are hit with such a huge immediate dose of ionizing radiation that you die pretty quickly from it. And you're going to also experience immediate symptoms. Yeah. Or you become the incredible Hulk. Right. In the case of gamma rays, it was gamma, wasn't it? I think so. Right. Yeah. He wouldn't have turned into a monster that's fictitious. He instead would have possibly lost consciousness, maybe had diarrhea, vomited. He probably would have had blistered skin that would have never fully healed and would have formed scars under the skin called kelloids. Scars that eventually are outside of the skin. Yeah. And then it would have just gotten even worse. So we're getting ahead of ourselves, aren't we? Well, people should know what they're getting into. All right. So radiation sickness is an acute situation, and it's accumulative effect right. After you get that acute dose of radiation poisoning is another way to call it. Yeah. And there are three kinds of ionizing radiation. Or is this article that the grabster. He had a couple of nice little clips in here. Did you notice the Neil Young? No, I never would. I would have to say Neil Young after it for me. You still wouldn't get it. No. Well, one of his paragraphs is entitled Ionizing Radiation and the Damage done. I think he was playing on the needle and the damage done. Maybe. Probably. Neil Young song, he's a Cool cat, grabs through it. Probably. So, like he says, it comes in three flavors alpha particles, beta particles, and the aforementioned gamma rays. Alpha particles. The good news is they're the least dangerous for external exposure. And the other good news is your T shirt. Well, you're not wearing a T shirt. I'm wearing one underneath my undershirt. Well, then you're doubly protected, my friend. Because your clothing is even strong enough to stop an external alpha particle. Right. They just bounce harmlessly off of your clothing. That's right. And go, wah wah. Right. So you would think that they're not dangerous at all. Not true. Because you can still inhale this stuff and ingest it in the form of radon gas. And that's where things can get bad. Yeah. When you ingest a radioactive particle, an ionizing particle, it gets into your body, it gets transported around, and as it does, it goes through and is like, hey, Adam, good to meet you. I'm going to knock this electron off. And now you're a free radical if you're a water molecule, and that's the way we say molecule from now on, by the way. Sure. And you're going to go off and wreak havoc on other stuff, right? Yeah. Because when the radioactive particle interacts with an atom and knocks the electron off, that's not the only damage done. Now, when that electron is released or knocked off, energy in the form of what, 33 EVs are released yeah. And that weakens the chemical bonds holding the atom together. So it just totally alters the structure of the atom. Right. Yeah. Well, when you're altering the structure of an atom, atoms make up molecules, so you alter the structure of the molecule when you're talking about molecules, these things make up the basis of everything from the proteins that are expressed in your body that carry out functions to the cells that house these functions that act as factories. And all of a sudden, you have all these weird alterations and, like, flawed and damaged processes in your body, and it leads to systemic malfunction, which leads to your at least severe illness, if not death. And all of this has to do with these little particles going through your body and bombarding and knocking electrons off of their atoms. Yeah. And we'll get into the specifics of how much is too much in a bit, but to continue, the beta particles are next up. They move very fastly with a lot of energy and can travel a few feet when they're emitted from its source. The good news here is that they can be blocked out by solid objects. Not your clothing. It's not solid enough. No, but like, concrete or formica, if you were hiding under your kitchen counter, probably would block them. I like, Where my kids still it still has its marble or quartz or something? No, my dining room table is wood. No, your kitchen counter. Oh, like if you got into a cabinet. Yeah. You know, I don't know what my countertop is. I should I thought it was something, but then when I redid my kitchen and went to cut it it's black and stone. Right? It's sort of this brownish thing. Stone? No, I don't think it's a real stone. Okay. You went to cut it and did it just like, completely mangle your axle? No, because I got the right kind of blade. I did my research. Okay. But it was not what I thought it was, and it's impossible to find this stuff now. Oh, yeah. Are you going to redo your countertops? Well, at some point we have to. Are you going to redo them? No. Okay. I was going to say that's. Wow. That's project right there. I tried to make my own concrete countertop. Yeah. Cool. And you can do it yourself. I didn't know that. Yeah, you build a frame and you pour the stuff, but it turned out okay for the first try, but not good enough. Yeah, you don't want OK for the first try for your kitchen counters. Man, that stuff is heavy. Yeah, it's concrete and breaks easily if you drop it or if you just, like, are carving a turkey. If you have too long of a piece and you just have a person on each end, it can snap in half. You need a short person in the middle. Yeah, with a hard head. Anyway, beta particles, like we said where were we? What they can move through. The problem with the beta particles is they're tiny, 8000 times smaller than the alpha particle, and that means it can penetrate through your clothing into your skin. This is the stuff that, if it enters the local food supply or the groundwater, and it gets in the body, that way you can inhale it, then you're in big trouble. Right. Anytime this stuff gets into your body, you're in big trouble. Yeah. Do you want to talk real quick here about the difference between a radiation and contamination? Did you see that? Yeah. Well, let's finish gamma quickly, because I feel like gamma is just sort of sitting out there sad. Yeah. Gamma smash gamma rays. They're the most dangerous, very high energy, and can travel through most anything, which is why anything with gamma rays is going to be lined with, like, a few inches of lead or several feet of concrete or both to block those gamma rays. And this is the stuff that gets in your bone marrow and your toast. Yeah. This stuff just goes right through your body, all the way through. And as it does, just think of, like, these radioactive particles as tiny bullets that are ricocheting around electron seeking bullets, or just going after your atoms with a vengeance. They're dying hard with a vengeance. So contamination versus irradiation, that's two ways that you can be dosed and they're both a little different. Yes. Contamination is what it sounds like. It's where you actually have some sort of radioactive material, maybe like a liquid or a powder or something on your body, on your clothing, in your body's. Even worse. Yeah. But you are, for all intents and purposes, radioactive. You can transfer that radioactivity to other people. You're contaminated. And like you said, it's still pinging around in your body. Yeah. When it gets into your body, it can be transported through your blood, through other processes, the transport processes in your body. And it's just wreaking havoc everywhere. And it wreaks the most havoc on places where cells regenerate the fastest because the damage is done and spread more quickly. Right. Yeah. But that's contamination. You are radioactive. You can spread the radioactivity if you're contaminated. Radiation is different. Yeah. That's when, like, when you go to get your chest X rayed, you are technically getting irradiation. The difference is you're not coming into actual contact. And when the sources, when they shut off that machine, it's over. Right. You're not radioactive, so you can't make other people radioactive, and you're not just sitting there with radioactive particles in your body. No, it's done. It's done. Leave it in the past. That's right. It's the motto of a radiation. Why are we still talking about it? So they're different. Right. And there are different ways you can get contaminated. But I mean, if you stood there in front of an X ray machine long enough, you wouldn't be contaminated, but you could still have and you could still develop acute radiation poisoning because the length of exposure would be long enough. Yeah. Because you're just standing there like a jackass in front of an Xray machine, turned on your problem. Move to the side and Xrays are safe. But I still get a little weirded out every time I go in there and they put the lead vest on and then run out of the room like they detonated a bomb. Yeah. I'm always like, oh, wait a minute. Especially, like, the mouth one in your teeth, which I've gotten obviously a lot of you are supposed to, and I know you're in a ticklish situation in that case, but dentists like to take a lot of X rays. Is that because they can charge and get insurance money? 100%. I'm sure there are plenty of instances where they do need a new set of Xrays or whatever, and you do need to get them, but you should be a lot more prone to calling your last dentist if you're moving dentists and saying, I need you to transfer those X rays, and they should do it for free, willingly, so you don't have to get another set. If you change dentists within a single year, you shouldn't have too many X rays. No. Cut down on that whenever you can. I've always had the suspicion that they give you the maximum allowable number of Xrays that they can bill for. Yeah. I didn't know if I was just being cynical or if that's a real thing. No, and I feel like Dennis, as a profession, have really gotten into upselling in the last decade. Really? Upselling? I'm not saying anything you had done was upselling, but there's a lot of offers and there's a lot of marketing that goes on during the average dental visit now. Yeah, but it's coming from the dentist. There's a special liquid that maybe fluoride, now that I think about it, some thing that they say, now, here's your thing. And they say, Rinse with this for a minute, and then you go leave. And it's like, $50 for this rents treatment. I'm like, you didn't even ask me if I wanted that. So this last time, I went at school four times a year now because I have short routes, which is my worst nightmare, to have to double the amount of time at the denim because I hate it. And that's not including any of my stupid tooth stuff. This is just for cleaning. Oh, I see. I just have to go in four times a year now for cleaning. Do you have your own chair? I do. I should. I certainly bought one at this point. But I went in this last time, I was like, all right, I'm going to decline that rent. I was so ready to fight with this lady, and she didn't give it to me. I think they can sense that. I think they can sense when you're paying attention. When is a good time to upsell? You got to know when to hold them and know when to fold them. Is the new model for dentistry. All right, well, we got on this because of X rays and we're going to take a break and stop venting our frustrations and come back and talk a little bit more about ionizing radiation. 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. You know what really stinks to dentist? Just kidding. So ed points out, if you're going to talk about radiation poisoning, what you're looking at is the total dosage. And that includes different factors, like what it came from, like we talked about with the alpha, beta, or gamma rays, how much it was, how long you were exposed, how much was absorbed. It's not an exact science. It's taken as a total accumulative effect. Right. But the seabird, which takes all those things into account, it's pretty close to exact science as far as measuring human absorption of radiation. Right? Yeah. And so based on these calculations, which I couldn't find anywhere, how you calculate sea verte specifically, but apparently there are people who know how to do this. Right. And when you calculate sea vert, you're able to say, okay, well, just flying in an airplane gets you x number of milliseeverts or microservices on a five hour airplane flight or something like that. Right. And we've come to realize that just living on planet earth, we are exposed to background radiation on the order of something like, I think 3.6 milliset per year. Yeah, that's 00:36 CVRTs. Right. And that's fine. You can totally deal with that. It's when you start getting closer and closer to a full seaver, because if you'll notice radiation exposure is measured in milliseeurs and even micro receivers, a millionth of the Severt, which we love those numbers. We should say if you're getting an x ray at the dentist or something like that, you're getting a low level of exposure to potentially deadly radiation. If you were standing next to what's producing the x rays outside of an x ray machine, and you are holding that, you'd be in big trouble. The fact is, you're not exposed to it like that. You're exposed to doses that, as far as we understand scientifically right now, the human can take, and it's not going to have any adverse effects. It's when you start getting closer to a full sea vert that you really run the risk of acute radiation poisoning. Yeah. Like zero 75 severts will get you sick and weaken your immune system. Three CBD, you need medical attention or you will probably die. Yeah. But you will probably live. If you do have medical care. If you get a dose of ten seabirds at once, you are dead. Even if you do get medical care yeah. That's like a death sentence, basically. But you're not going to encounter that at all. So you don't need to worry about that unless you work in a lab or something and there's an accident. Yeah. Which we'll talk about some of those that have happened. Right. But Tim Sebert is really bad news. Ten Sebert, you toast. Yeah. Between one and ten, you got about a 50 50 chance of dying within a month. Right. And if it's not just one big blast and it's over time, then your odds are a little bit better. Totally different. That's a totally different, like, prolonged exposure is different than the kind of acute exposure that creates radiation sickness. Right? Correct. And Ed points out, too, that the factors that are included in the formulation of a radiation dose, they're not absolutely. It's not like, hey, buddy, here's ten doses, or here's ten seavers of radiation, your toast. Right. It would be slightly I think that actually probably is absolute, but let's say two. Yeah. It's going to be different depending on where you were exposed, what part of your body, how old you are, what kind of immune health you have, and a number of different factors, the type of particle that you're exposed to. So it's different, but for the most part, once you get higher and higher along the seabird scale, it does become kind of absolute as far as human mortality is concerned. Yeah. If you do get exposed, you are going to get sick very quickly. I mean, sometimes it's like you immediately start vomiting or lose consciousness. Yes. Your body is just so immediately poisoned. Yeah. It's hardcore. Nausea, diarrhea, headache, fever. Like you said, you can be knocked unconscious. And I looked everywhere to find out what happens that makes you lose consciousness, and I have the impression that they don't really know. It doesn't make sense. Okay. What about radiation makes you lose consciousness unless it just completely alters the effects of the action of your neurons, I guess. Yeah. See, you get a little more inquisitive about that stuff. I hear that. And I just think, yes, your brain just overloads. Well, now I'm like, what happened? Why did that person just lose consciousness by being exposed to an X ray machine? That's not good. What's the science behind that? That's what I sound like in my head. Burns on the body. We talked about external exposure, bad scarring. There's something called the latent period after that initial set of symptoms. Yeah. This is just mean, where you don't have symptoms. Yeah. You get better. Yeah. Things going to go away, but I don't think anyone thinks they're going to get better because they know about the lull now. But I'll bet the first few people who died from radiation sickness are like, wow, this is miraculous. Yeah. So the initial symptoms are very obvious and very bad. And then there's that latent period. Like you said it was a lull. Yeah. And apparently what's going on at that point is the damage that has been done immediately. And I mean, like when, for example, your DNA is altered, it happens in the billions, trillions of a second that damage is done. If a free radicals created, it still takes on the order of like a second to do this damage. So it's very quick, but the effects of that damage take a little while to appear. But when they do appear, it's like, oh, man. You're having multi organ failure right now because you were exposed to so much ionizing radiation. Your cells were so totally altered, and your DNA was ultimately altered too, that your body is not functioning properly. And some parts of your body are definitely more susceptible than others. Like I said, the ones where cells replicate more frequently, like the lining of your gut. Right. And that's a big problem if your gut is messed up because you're prone to infections. Yeah. This is not good. You don't want a gut infection. Yeah. You had one of those. I did. You had staff, a staph stomach infection. And I've never seen a human being sicker than you were and you had to fly home. Do you remember? Yeah. You had to get on a plane as that was hitting you. I felt so bad, dude. Pretty bad. You were green. Yeah, green. Your face was green. Like the Hulk, like the whole you had a gamma ray burst of radiation. I had a gamma ray burst in my shorts. That's so gross. Standing up, standing up, sitting down, lying down. I got you everywhere. So that latent period, if it's the smaller the dose wait, shorter the larger the dose. The latent period. Yeah. And in fact, if you get dose with more than ten, there is no latent period at all. Right. It doesn't take a break. No. Just one way toast. Yeah. So like you said, after that latent period wears off is when it's really clear what's happened inside your body. And one thing we haven't specifically talked about yet is your bone marrow, which is a very bad place to get radiation poisoning because where you produce blood cells to make your body better. Yeah. And it basically shuts down your immune system because there's so much damage, and now you can't even make yourself better or try to make yourself better. Yeah. It either directly damages the cells and kills them. Right? Yes. So therefore, you're just not making as many cells. You don't have as many white blood cells, and then it also can damage the DNA in your cells, so that when it is making more white blood cells, it's not making them correctly. So there's malfunctioning white blood cells. So, yeah, your immune system is toast you're anemic at that point. Yeah. Well, that's from the red blood cells being affected as well. And then again, when your gut gets assaulted, you got a lot of bacteria in your gut, and it's beneficial so long as it's in your gut. When it leaks into the rest of your body, you can get blood infections from that because the stomach lining is not protecting your stomach like it's supposed to any longer. Yeah, it's bad news, man. It is bad news. All right, well, let's take another break, and we'll talk about some of these tragedies and accidents when we get 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, 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. So, Chuck, we know actually, fortunately, very little about the effects of ionizing radiation on the human body because there's not that many people who have died from it. Basically everything we know comes from industrial accidents like Three Mile Island or Fukushima, and then the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yes. Which, by the way, anytime that comes up, I feel it's totally worth mentioning. Going to see the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. I think everybody in the world should have to go to this. It's so well done. Really. It's so ghastly. Some of the stuff that they're showing oh, I'm sure it's basically Hiroshima saying, this happened to us, so we're going to take this terrible gift that was bestowed on us and. Turned it into a way to keep it from ever happening again. That's what they did with it here in Japan, make a trip to Hiroshima to check it out. We'll talk about those then. Since we're there, I ran across a cool article on our website called Today I Found Out, which is a neat site. You've been there? Oh, yeah. It's pretty cool. And this was called why can people live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki now, but not Chernobyl? So here's a little background, and I think it should have its own podcast at some point, for sure. Which one? The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Okay, but here's the short version. On August 6, 1945, the bomb Little Boy was a uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. \u00a3140 of uranium. But these were detonated. Both of them are above each city. It's like 2000ft above Hiroshima. Only \u00a32 of the \u00a3140 underwent nuclear fission and then 16 kilowatt hours of explosive force. So because Hiroshima was on a plane, it caused a lot of damage. Estimated 70,000 people were killed on that day period. 700, another 700 injured, and about 70% of the buildings gone for Fat Man, which was a few days later on Nagasaki on August 9, only \u00a32. This was plutonium, and only \u00a32 of that underwent fission. And that was about 1600ft in the air. But because it's a valley, a lot of the city was protected. Still killed about between 45,070 thousand people immediately. And I get the feeling that a lot of that stuff was just the blast impact for these were just so immense, or the burns were so bad. Yeah. So bring in Chernobyl, because this article compares the conditions there, these places. Chernobyl was a preventable disaster, nuclear disaster. The way they say in this article was that the reactors had a built in instability, was the quote. So basically, when the reaction got hotter and hotter, the coolant would decrease and just make everything less stable, and they couldn't control it. So they went to do some test one day on April 26, 1986, to see how long these turbines would run after the reactor was down. So in order to do this, they had to turn off all these safety controls and remove I think we talked about the control rods and how nuclear meltdown works. Yeah, how nuclear meltdown works. So these control rods absorb the neutrons and limit the reaction. They had to remove how many? Only all but six of the 205 control rods for this test. And they shut down the safety system. So it was just ready for disaster, basically. Why were they doing that? Just for fun? No, they were trying to see how long these turbines would run once everything was shut down. In order to do that, you had to do all these other things. That's like figuring out how much weight a bridge can take by driving increasingly heavy trucks across it. So it collapses. Yeah. And systematically weakening it as you do it. That's insane. Yes, it was not a good idea. And they said it all came down to the hubris of the people who designed it, and we're working there. Wow. It was totally preventable. So a lot of these graphite rods, they tried to put them back in there and they fractured because there was a design flaw in them. And there was an explosion. It basically just blew it up. Seven to ten tons of nuclear fuel were released that day. Only 28 people died immediately and over 90,000 sq mi of land were contaminated. How many people died immediately? 28 that were just like in the area I got you. And of course, you can't get accurate numbers on fallout since then because they're not really sharing that information. But by 2005, there were 7000 cases of thyroid cancer in the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia alone. So obviously it had an effect. But nowadays people can live in Japan and those two places, and they say that the levels of background radiation are basically like anywhere else in the world. But Chernobyl, they have a zone where you can't live there at all anymore. Yeah. So the difference is basically the amount of fuel only \u00a32. As I said, of each of those bombs, only \u00a32 underwent fission. And there was 180 tons of nuclear fuel released at Chernobyl. That's crazy that there's any Chernobyl even left. Yeah, they just blow up the whole town. Well, and they're studying well, I think the explosion wasn't anything like Nagasaki or Hiroshima. I got you. It was just up into the air. Yeah. I got you. But they're studying that area now because it's a big like you said, you don't have this opportunity to see what it means for the ecology of that area and the ecosystem. And they found some things have adapted and are thriving. And lately there have been reports that are like animals. They're living bears. Yeah. Like normal animals that aren't three eyed bears and stuff like that. No, blinky the fish. And the other difference was that it was on the ground and the bombs are detonated 2000ft in the air. So while it's airborne, it just has a bigger impact, obviously, if it's like literally ground level. So that's sort of the deal on why you cannot live in Chernobyl anytime soon. Yeah. They're finally in tuning the reactor, they tried before, but they did a pretty terrible job of it and it was already leaking and cracking. So now they're building I think other countries are helping them with it. They're building like this huge tomb to go around it. Wow. So nobody can enter for, I think, at least a century. Jeez. Yeah. Well, there have been some scientists too, though, that had minor well, not minor for them, but minor accidents and labs that were exposed heavily, like the stuff that created that led to their deaths were just so small. Yeah. With anything else, you would probably even barely notice that you'd messed up. But these guys died because of it. Yeah. Two dudes, notably working on the same core, plutonium core, but not at the same time. Like a year apart. Yeah. And it came to be called the demon core for that reason. Because it killed two people. Yeah. One guy was a physicist named Harry Kay Dagleyan Jr. He got a 5.1 seabird exposure in 1945 not good. And died 25 days later. Who's the other guy? Lewis Slotten. Yeah, Sloton. He was basically messing with the core with the screwdriver, from what I read, and the screwdriver just barely slipped just a little bit, and I guess it allowed the cover to come in contact with the core, and the core went sub critical for half a second. Wow. He luckily was able to throw the core off, so it didn't really lead to an even bigger problem. It killed more people, but it led to his death. And he got a 21 sebred dose. We've been saying ten is almost instantly fatal. He lost consciousness and threw up immediately. And he died, I think, nine days later. Yeah. I can't believe it took that long. But the air turned blue around him and there was like a visible wave of heat. Yeah. And he was immediately after his death, I think he was kind of praised for containing the accident, but then later on, even after that, they were like, yeah, but he did something wrong that led to it to begin with. Oh, yeah. So you did a good job, but you shouldn't have done it. Well, it said it also killed somebody else. A guard who was in the room died years later from cancer that they're like that was definitely from the exposure. Yes. Don't surprise me. So what happens if you I mean, how can they treat this stuff? Surprisingly, they can't treat it. Like, if you think about radioactive particles entering your body, you just think it'd be like, well, here's the morphine. I hope you had a nice life. Right. But there's actually stuff they can do to treat it. And one of the first things they do if you're contaminated is they wash you off. Right. Seems like a good step one, because you can get some of that stuff off, but if it's in your body, they have to give you drugs that are known to actually bind to radioactive materials and then flush out of your system. Like, Prussian blue dye is actually good for caesium and thallium poisoning. It's like it's a blue dye that goes in and it binds to the stuff and holds it so it's no longer going through your body, wrinking havoc. You're coming with me. Then you poop it out. Yes. There's another one. You're going to try this one. Oh, diethylene. tryamine pentasic acid or DTPA. Pinta acetic acid. That was the easier part. Yeah, let's call it that. So that one's good for plutonium, among other things, and they inject you with that. And it is basically the same thing. It seeks out those radioactive particles, binds to them, and then you pee it out. So it is possible to treat people who have been contaminated with radioactive stuff. I just want to point out, every time Josh said binds to him, you hug your stomach. What is that all about? I don't know. I haven't really noticed. I'd done that, but it's true both times. What else can they do? They can prevent infection. If your immune system is compromised because of the bone marrow, you could have a bone I'm sorry, blood transfusion. If you only have a little bit of bone marrow damage, that could help you out. But if it is too severe, you would have to have a complete bone marrow transplant. Right. And even then, you're not guaranteed to be okay. You're in pretty bad shape if that's going on. Did you read about this Goyana, Brazil accident? I did. It is nuts. It's crazy. So back in 1987, there were, I guess, some people who were just wandering around an abandoned hospital in Goyana, Brazil. Yes. Two dudes, scrap salesmen. Okay. Like scavenger salesman. Okay. So they found, I guess, maybe an X ray machine or something like that, and cracked it open, and there was a cake of glowing blue cesium inside. And they said, well, this looks pretty. Let's take it with us. And they did, and they sold it to people, including some children who rubbed it on their skin so that they would glow in the dark. And a lot of these people died very shortly afterward. Yeah, it wasn't just the raw stuff. They took the machine in a wheelbarrow and then spent the next few days trying to take this machine apart to get to this glow. Right. Because they thought it was, like, supernatural. They didn't know what it was. These dudes started vomiting and stuff, of course, went to the doctor, and they're like, It's food poisoning. Here's a Coke. Go home. Clams. Clams. So one of the guys finally freed some of this glowing blue goo. He thought it was gunpowder and tried to light it on fire. It didn't. Light gets not flammable. And then he sold it to a scrapyard, like you said, for $25. And this guy, the owner of the scrapyard, I think was his uncle, was like, man, everyone come and see this. And he invited for three days, like, family and guests could all come over and look at they call it Carnival glitter. And like you said, it's really sad, but this guy's daughter was, like, rubbing it on her skin and her bed sheets, and they were just enamored with this stuff. So, again, a lot of people died from this. Well, four people died still. It's a lot. No, four people died, but 249 people had significant levels of material in their body, and 112,000 people were examined, and they demolished several square city blocks. Just gone. This is contaminated. We have to get rid of it. They just leveled parts of that city? Yeah, it was crazy. All because some guys broke into an x ray machine, because somebody just left it in an abandoned hospital. Yes. I think there were guards, but the guard was off duty or something. There still shouldn't be, like, X ray machines in an abandoned hospital. Yes. I think they ended up there being lawsuits. I would hope so. Man that's it, right? I got nothing else. I don't either. That's radiation sickness. We hope that this saves you or someone you love. If you're ever going to an abandoned hospital and you come across an x ray machine, don't crack it open. Just observe it from afar. Well, we always talk about exploring abandoned structures and super dangerous. Yeah. They're all fraught with dangers. They definitely are. And probably when you wouldn't think about something like this. Yeah. Have I ever talked about grossengers? I don't think so. This is one side about grossengers. It's a cat skills resort that was abandoned in the eighties. Now it's almost completely reclaimed by the forest. But about five to ten years ago, somebody went and documented it at, like, peak decay oh, wow. Where the structures are still there, but just totally coming in. So creepy. Is that so fascinating? I don't know, but I can't remember what the name of the site is, but it's Gross and Jersey. And this guy went many years, many times over the years and documented it. And I think his dad was the caretaker there as the place was shutting down. So he knew the place really well, and he has, like, old photos from while it was still in use to compare and contrast. It's just amazing. Wow. Yeah. I thought you were going to say it was completely overtaken now by forest fairies and imps. Yeah, that's what I meant. Okay. And the Hulk. Have you ever seen Hulk hodgman? What? It's a Twitter account where it's like stuff Hodgman says it would say. Yeah, but as the Hulk. Wow. I mean, I've heard the Hulk for other things, but not there's one for Hodgman. I'm not sure how he feels about it. Sounds you got to check it out. Mine is swirling. All right. Did you say listener mail? Oh, no. If you want to know more about radiation sickness, you can type those words in the search bar, how stuff works. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener. Now, I'm going to call this something I never really thought about before. Hey, guys. I'm a loyal listener from the very beginning. I've listened to every podcast and watched all of your TV shows, episodes wow. And most, if not all of your Internet roundups. How about that person is yeah. I'm writing about a very serious topic and one that is dear to my heart. The high rate of physician and medical student suicide. This is one of the highest stress careers in terms of training, debt, work schedule, and trying not to take on the stress of every one of your patients that you see. You are not allowed I'm sorry, we first person, we are not allowed to have any mental health weaknesses where we risk being labeled a liability by the medical board, our employers, our peers and even our own patients. I never really thought about that. Go with doctors. Whatever. I want our school see, I want a wacky doctor like Patch Adams. Yeah, like a whoopi cushion or joy buzzer every now and then our schooling and training are grueling. It can be emotional roller coaster. We're sleep deprived, made you feel inadequate on a daily basis and often humiliated and belittled in front of our peers. She said it was tougher than eleven years in the army. We're supposed to convince our patients to seek help when they need it, but we are certain to harm our own careers if we personally reach out for help. So she said that in recent years she had a hit close to home classmate, committed suicide before graduating, and his parents have spoken out and have gotten together with a filmmaker to create a documentary called Do No Harm exposing the Silent Epidemic. So they have a lot of support. You can go to their Facebook page, facebook.com do noharmthefilm. And they have a Kickstarter that you can look up if you just google kickstarter Do No Harm documentary. They're really close. It's great. Just a couple of thousand away from their finishing funds. Nice. So I think they are going to maybe even by this time it will be done. But if anyone out there felt like throwing a few dollars their way, they'd be great. So that's from Brooklyn Burtels, a fourth year medical student. Thanks a lot Brooklyn. That was a great email. It took a really turn at the beginning. Yeah, right? Yeah. So thanks for that. And if you guys want you can go help that Kickstarter out. If you want to hang out with us, you can hang out with us on Twitter at xyskpodcast and the same for Instagram. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyshow. You can send us an email to Stuffbodcast at how stuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyoustheto.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com. Hey everybody. 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Interpol: World Police | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/interpol-world-police | Interpol is an international police agency that helps other law-enforcement agencies track criminals who operate across national borders -- but how does it work, exactly? Join the guys as they delve into the world of global law enforcement. | Interpol is an international police agency that helps other law-enforcement agencies track criminals who operate across national borders -- but how does it work, exactly? Join the guys as they delve into the world of global law enforcement. | Tue, 15 May 2012 19:22:16 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=15, tm_hour=19, tm_min=22, tm_sec=16, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=136, tm_isdst=0) | 30932397 | audio/mpeg | "With no fees or minimums on checking and savings accounts. Banking with Capital One is like the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Kind of like choosing to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with their top rated app. You can deposit checks and transfer money anytime. Anywhere. Making Capital One an even easier decision that's banking reimagined what's in your wallet terms apply Capital One in a member FDIC this July. Don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical. The Musical. The series season three Zombies. Three Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographics. America the Beautiful. From the awardwinning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus, brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housestepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. And since you put the two of us together with microphones, as we are now, and press record, you get stuff you should know. That's right. A little podcast. Just a little podcast. Receive little podcast. How are you, sir? I'm pretty good. Your papers, please. No. Notice that Interpol. You sounded like the little Asian man who gives the box to Pinhead. The man who eventually becomes Pinhead watches y'all plaza. That's kind of who you're reminded me of. Well, then that's what I was doing. Good. My first good impression yet. The guy has Interpol written all over him. Oh, yeah. He's got an orange notice out on him. I'll bet you a green we'll get on that later, Chuck. Yes. I'm pretty much 100% sure you had nothing to do with this, so you may not have heard about it. Okay. Back in 2011, about this time, March 2011, interpol, the international police organization, cracked a child pedophile ring. Nice. The biggest one ever. Really? Centered on a website, I guess, appropriately enough, called boylover. Net. Wow. Run out of Amsterdam. Boylover.net is just a straight up legitimate gay porn site, but there was a forum there with, like, 70,000 members with that, like, said, well, hey, you're into this kind of thing, too. I got a video that you're going to love, and I also have a little boy that I'm going to mail to you. So this wasn't affiliated with the website? No, they're just using one of the forums as a meeting place for pedophiles. But Interpol busted these guys up, rescued 230 kids, arrested 184 suspects. Just in the first sweep, they sent William Nissan in pretty much in 30 countries. Wow. Yeah. Good for them. It is good for them. It's just one of the many victories and triumphs over pederasty that Interpol can boast. That's right. And not just pederasty. Like, all sorts of huge international crimes. Anytime there's a crime syndicate or a ring, you need to watch out because Interpol is watching you. Interpol is right behind you. What is your pleasure? And this is actually fan generated. This came on Facebook, like, three days ago. Oh, really? I wish I would have got the guy's name. Some kid was like, hey, can you do an Interpol? Yeah, sure. Are you sure he wasn't talking about the band? He might have been. Are they still around? Yeah, they're still around. Yeah, they are? Yes. I don't know what they're doing these days. I'm not a fan. How do you not like Interpol? I listened to their music and it didn't sit right in my ears. I'm surprised. I thought everybody liked Interpol. Yeah, they're just good. Yeah, you think? All right. Interpol the International Criminal Police Organization, or ICPO. Or if you're in France, where they're headquartered, you might call it the organization International de Police Criminal. Very nice. Which is pretty much the same thing and different word order. I didn't know this, but criminal is feminine. Yeah, I didn't realize that. They like the ladies. Yes. All right. So as you said, Josh, they are an international, fully autonomous, not affiliated with any single country organization. I think they're 186 countries. 190 now. Oh, really? And they all contribute to the budget, to the kitty, based on their size and their GDP and some other factors, like crime. It's very fair, but it's very important, like you said, that they are not beholden to any one country and that they remain neutral, and they don't engage in any investigations into political stuff, things contributing or being centered on race or religion. That's right. My brain is not working today. That's all right. My brain is so what they do, Josh? You just said what they don't do. What they do do terrorism like nobody else. Sexual abuse, especially with children, which is what you just talked about. Organized crime, international fugitives, computer crime, stolen art, money laundering, human trafficking, illegal drugs, smuggling, environmental crime. Anything that crosses international borders, almost. You're going to find Interpoling out with you said the magic phrase, helping out. Like, Interpol doesn't have they don't run around like arresting guys, bad guys. It is inner pole. And they don't have Interpol jail, as Grabanowski points out. Yeah, but what they do is they serve as this international meeting point for already established national agencies. Right? Yeah. So let's do a little scenario. I am FBI Agent Todd Ridgeway of the Des Moines, Iowa field office and your Agent Vinny Tusverty of the Polyzia Destato in Italy. And I believe a terrorist is hiding out near your field office in Geneva. So I'm calling you up. I'm like, hey, ring, ring. This is Todd Ridgeway. I'm with the FBI in Des Moines. Hey, Todd. This is Vinny Teste. Verde. Right. So, and see, what Chuck just demonstrated was how it doesn't work, because Vinny Teste Verde doesn't speak a lick of English, and Todd Ridgeway doesn't speak any Italian. Right. And not only that, he shouldn't have been calling Vinny Testaverde. He should have been calling Giuseppe de Bacono, who's with the local police, because that's what the Italian police bureaucracy protocol calls for. But Todd know this. He has no idea. No. So what does he do? He calls into port. That's right. And they step up, and they're like, you know, you need to get in touch with you need to get in touch with Venice's Verdi's cousin, who works for the state police over there. The police, right. Because they're who's handling this case. Here's their number. In fact, let me go ahead and pat you through. But not only that interpreter. I'm going to translate for you. Sure. Yeah. So the interpol has what are called National Central Bureaus. National Country Bureaus? No. National Central Bureaus, NCB. And that's like an FBI field office, but they have them in different countries around the world, and they serve as liaisons for the local or state or national police with their counterparts in other countries. It's the big one. Yes. It's complicated enough within the United States with jurisdictions and protocol, but when you open it up to the world, boy, it gets all kinds of crazy. So, luckily, Entepul is there they've been any peeing contest? Well, they probably tried to, but I'm sure they exist. Sure. Their big deal is their databases, because the FBI and the CIA why, they might all have, like, in whatever your country's databases are, crime databases, they probably just extend to that country. Unless it's like some sort of database on terrorism. Right. Interpol's databases are way extensive. They circle the globe, and they can track criminals pretty much anywhere and everywhere fingerprints, mug shots, wanted people DNA, you name it. They have a database just of lost and stolen travel documents. It's got more than, like, 12 million files to it. Yeah, I think I saw somewhere today, too, that they said most people don't try and recover those, which I thought was interesting. Yeah, well, I imagine, like, if you lose your passport, you're probably traveling abroad and you're not getting that back. You never know unless you go to they could have your stuff, because who knows? That could have been stolen to be used in some trafficking syndicates. It's true. And your name could be all drug all through the mud on boylover. Net. That's right. The database is that they maintain are their own, but they're open and they are accessed through this communications network called I 24/7. That's kind of cool sounding, because Interpol is they're open 24 7365. Even on Christmas, they're fully operational. Really? They don't close down like all the police do here on Christmas? No, because think about it, man. Yes, I get your joke, but think about the skeleton crews that go down. I think dinnerpole is open all the time because they cross all time zones at all times. Yeah. So they kind of have to be ready to go all the time because while one guy sleeping, the criminals in one country are sleeping. They're wide awake and carrying out bad activities in another. That's true. What else can they do, Josh? Oh, they serve the I 24/7. There's also a place where you can access another country's databases. Right. So those nationally bound databases become international through this portal. And Interpol oversees all of that. Yeah. So they know what's going on. Let's say there's an international disaster of some sort, like a terrorist attack, assassination. They can send an incident response team, generally coordinated through the UN. If there's some sort of actually a natural disaster like the tsunami efforts, they can send people down there to help identify people and look for missing persons, protect kids. Because I can guarantee you there are a lot of pedophiles who traveled to Indonesia after that tsunami. That's right. That's crazy, man. I know. That's awful. Imagine, like, losing your parents, being seven, suddenly an orphan. And then now there's some guy who's like, hey, you're coming to Holland with me right now. I'm not. He's like, yeah, you really are. You understand what he's saying? He just offers you the lolly. Right. In a car ride. Very sad. But thanks to Interpol, things like that are being thwarted. Right. I saw, there are two types of incident response teams. They have the criminal type and the disaster type, but they both serve in an advisory capacity and they show up with their database like, I can get you into I 24/7. You need me. They can act as Central Command, though, if local authorities say, hey, we need your help to active Central Command, help us out with logistics. I think the grabster said in 2005. They did that twelve times. Yeah, once a month. Not bad. Yeah. Dust off the old work and shoes. Yes. Get out of the field. Yeah. Time to get out of bed. How's it structured, Josh? Well, I'll tell you. Inner pole is made up of a General Assembly in which each of the member nations has one delegate and one vote. Makes a lot of sense. They meet once a year and they vote on all the big stuff, which kind of makes it a slow, lumbering bureaucracy. Unless they invest a lot of authority into the Executive Committee, which is a 13 member committee that basically carries out all the administrative functions of Interpol. And they are elected, as is the Secretary General, although it says in here appointed. That's all. Elected. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, he's elected because I saw this guy. Ronald K. Noble. He got an overwhelming majority of the vote for his second re election. So he's in his third term. First time ever. Yes. Which is I think he's running from 2010 to 2015 under this current term. And he is the first American secretary general, if I'm not mistaken. Right. Yeah. And he's the first three times secretary general, too. Then a lot of Frenchies. I think I saw one Englishman, and there's definitely one German, because there was some controversy with that. I believe the president is Korean now. Oh, really? Okay. Not to be confused with the secretary general. Right. The president is beneath him. Right. The secretary general is who actually runs the day to day show. Right. And he's headquartered in the general secretariat, which is the main headquarters in Leon, France. That's right. And then there's other regional offices. There are six of them, the 6th of which is in New York. And that's the special liaison of the UN. Because Interpol very wisely got in with the UN. Because this body has some staying power. That's right. We're going to become friendly with them. You can also find these place offices in Argentina, el Salvador, Thailand, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and cottage are very nice. Thank you. Did you practice it? No. It's such a lovely name that I've said it many times. It just rolls off the phone. It means the coast duoir in French. Okay. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office when you could be using stamps.com? Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses. Because stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and ups shipping services you need, right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary. And you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. You mentioned that all member countries chip in for the budget. The budget is not a lot, though, compared to any budget in the United States. I think in 2007, the gravestor pointed it at roughly $61 million US. Or \u20ac44 million. I wonder what that's equal to now. But it's a big change. I should have looked up the current budget. Actually, I failed to. It's okay, Chuck. Let's talk about the notices. So this is their other big thing. They don't just sit around and wait to be asked for help. They also disseminate information, and they do it through color coded notices. They've got let's see what is the 9867. Okay, so they have eight now because they added another one after this. After this even? Yes. Oh, wow. And the different color codes mean different things. So you're going to get via teletype, possibly fax or maybe even email. Yeah. You'll get like, some sort of maybe a PDF document of, say, orange. Basically says, like, hey, we have a pretty good idea that there's an imminent threat, and it's this guy, and he's wearing this coat, and he's got a dirty thing. A bomb. Yes. So if you get an orange one, your head better perk up, and you need to look closely. That's right. Black is unidentified bodies. That's a sad one. That's the saddest of all notices. Yellow missing persons. Yeah, it's probably the second saddest. Green general information and warnings about major criminals. So this one is kind of pretty vague. Well, it highlights another function that they have that wasn't explicitly stated in this article. But I gleaned using my powers of deduction that they have analysts who crunch all this data, who pour through databases, look at crime trends, look at criminal trends, and then come up with basically just general notices. When they're sitting around with some time on their hands, they issue green notices that say, like, hey, here's another angle to a case that you might not have thought of. Interesting. Have you met this guy here's? All the bad stuff he's done. He may be in your neighborhood. Right, that kind of thing. And the local authorities say, yeah, interval. We know you got some time on your hands. Very nice. Thank you. The blue notice, Josh, is individuals of interest related to a crime, including possible witnesses or suspects or persons of interest is a good umbrella term for those kinds of people. For a crime that's already been committed, people who ran with the wrong crowd, were at the wrong place in the wrong time, and didn't stick around on an international level. That's right. Recently, Mr. Julian Assange was issued the red notice, which means you are wanted. And it's sort of like a worldwide APB. You got to keep that. You print it out and put it on your wall. What a red interpol notice on you? Oh, yeah. Got you. Although Assange wasn't too fond of his, kept his. I'll bet he's one of the few who did. With photoshop, though, I mean, you can never tell if it's real or not. You or I could make our own. I mean, we should do that. Why not? I have a feeling when it's coming your way. Interpol notice, which is not a color. That was scary to me because it was the only one that's not a color. Unless the new one you talked about is not a color. It's a color. Okay. The interval notice means it's a UN security Council special notice, meaning groups of individuals involved with Al Qaeda or the Taliban are at work. Yeah, people who have UN sanctions on them. Then there's now the purple notice, which basically it's kind of like a green notice. It's like, hey, be aware of this kind of stuff that's going on. But it's about what people are doing, like international criminal trends. Do you remember? I think they were like pen guns just a few years back. There was like a pen that could shoot, and it was very low powered. But I think Interpol sent out a notice on this, like, hey, you guys need to be aware that this thing's out there, I just saw that in the movie. Okay. Well, Interpol probably inspired the writer. Interesting. It was a comedy, too, I guarantee. Inspired the writer. It was pretty funny. It was Fred Ward. Fred Ward or Fred Willard. Fred Ward. Okay. The Timewriter remo Williams. Yeah. Okay. He had a pen gun and shot a dude in the neck. It was kind of funny. What movie was it? 30 minutes or less with Danny McBride. And it was good. The guy who played Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah. Jesse Eisenberg. They were both in that. It was sort of funny, but not highly recommended. But that scene was funny because Redwellers, like, you think it's a pin and all, suddenly just shoots the student the neck with it. That's funny. Yeah. That's high comedy. Yeah, very much. I watched Inside Man again last night. That's such a good movie. Which one's that? Spike Lee. Heist movie with Clive Owen. I never saw that dude. Really? Yes. You may have not seen it either. I made her watch last night. She's like, this is a good movie. That's one of the few Spike Lee movies I have not seen. That all right. Have you seen 25th Hour? Yeah, that's a good one, too. Yeah, I think inside Manhattan beat. All right. So, yes, purple is just basically, like, information on new types of criminal activity that people need to be made aware of. Like pen guns. Got you. And Fred Ward. But the pen gun was a real warning or a real purple warning notice. I don't know. I'm just assuming I'm using sample. Got you. So let's talk about the history of Interpol. Chuck has a strange tumultuous history that closely follows the tumulti of the 20th century, if you ask me. Yeah. And it kind of breeze right over the whole Nazi part of it. There's been a lot of controversy over that, actually. Oh, yeah. Why are they accused of colluding? Well, let's back up. 1923, they were formed in being Austria during World War II. Ed says they were interrupted when the Nazis took control. Deposed as secretary general, moved to Berlin for a short time, but then after the war, everything was rebuilt. They moved to Paris, and that's kind of all he said. Right. I looked a little further into it, and it's pretty controversial. Those years when it was under Nazi rule, obviously, they shared headquarters with the Gestapo officially operated as a division within the Nazi Security Police. And two Nazi war criminals were the agency's presidents during the war time. Plus, they overspent on Christmas parties. And then I read a Times article and some of the comments back to the editorial said, you guys even kind of whitewashed it because after the war, they refused to take part in the in any of the Nazi war crime hunting, war criminal hunts. Crazy. Wow. I had no idea. Chuck, I'm really glad you did this. Really? Yeah. And then in 1968, their president to 72 was Paul Dickoff. And he was an SS officer. No, he was and remained president despite them finding out about this and knowing about this. And that was pretty controversial, too. Jeez, I'll bet you don't usually want Nazis leading your organization. Former Nazis either. No. You know what I'm saying? Once a Nazi, always a Nazi, in my opinion. Well, Dipoff, he was the president for over four years. Wow. And a lot of people say Interpol is like run without oversight. And they have all this access, but no one has access to their real. Like how they do things, the opposite of how Greywicky tells it. Yeah, it's a little more controversial than I thought once they start poking around. Well, I guess it was probably the VHS tapes that started to bring them out of the dark and into a brighter role. Remember the Interpol warning on old video cassettes? No. Was that interval? Oh, yeah. Now it's like an FBI warning, but before. And every once in a while you'll still see it like Interpol warning. And so again, copyright theft and piracy. Wow. But yeah, apparently now they've shed themselves of Nazis and have a third term secretary general who's busting pedophiles in Amsterdam. I think that's good. I'm saying. Oh, no, of course. Yeah. They've apparently tried to clean up their image a lot since those days. That is crazy, man. And did you hear about the executive order Obama signed in Nine? It was pretty controversial among conservatives because little background. The International Organization and Immunities Act in 1945 was signed into law. And basically that meant the president could say certain organizations, international organizations that worked in the US. Are exempted from certain things like taxes, search and seizure laws. And pretty much every president has said, you can be a part of this. Like the Red Cross. Reagan in 1983 included Interpol as part of that group songs like four different sections dealing with property taxes, Social Security, federal taxes, customs duties, and having property and assets searched and confiscated in nine. Obama said those four things. Now you're immune from as well, so you have full immunity, interpol does in the United States from these things. And conservatives got up in arms about the fact that Obama had signed this. They tend to get up in arms about anything he signs, like his dinner check. Sure. But then people rallied back and said, well, you know, I thought you wanted someone tough on crime. And he's basically saying interpol has more rights to do their thing in the United States, so which way do you want it? Or do you just want to complain about everything that he does? And the Obama administration said that, you know what, this really didn't give them any more free reign than Reagan had already given them in 83. It just sort of finished up what he started. Who knows? Regardless of which side you sit on on the political aisle, obama is the new Reagan. The End 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. You got any more some successes? You talked about tsunami in 2004. Yeah, that was one. Your pedophile scenario. It's pretty big. Not yours. 30 countries. That's pretty huge. They helped identify and capture a Serbian war criminal, milan Lukak. Lukich? I bet it's Lucach. Yeah, in Argentina. Coordinating between Argentina and Chile. And Bosnia Herzegovina. Nice. And let's see, they also had one. Do you remember the Madrid train bombings? And I had forgotten about those. 2004 killed 190 people and they managed to catch at least one guy. They found 21 guilty, but Interpol caught at least one guy through coordination between Belgrade, Baghdad, and Madrid offices. And did you know the 21 people who are found guilty of that got to combined 40,000 years in prison? Really? Yeah. He'll probably never get out. No, I don't think they're going to get out. And then grabster pointed this one out. A response team obtained and disseminated fingerprints and photographs of Abu Musab al Zarqawi. Yeah, which sounds kind of whatever, but then you're like, oh yeah, how would you get that guy's? I guess so. Yeah, I thought the same thing and then I thought twice now. I guess it is a pretty big deal. Yeah. It's worth mentioning. Yeah, sure. I didn't find a lot of stuff, though. Search for more. Yeah, same here. And I think they're sort of behind the scenes. They're like, we're not going to have any big arrests because we don't do that. But we are involved in a lot of those on the back end on their website, which is a pretty cool, user friendly website. Agreed. It's like, here's a lot of information that's very vague. Yeah. Like, we have two kinds of response teams, criminal and disaster. And that's all we're going to say about that kind of thing. And I'm interested to hear if anyone knows any more about their controversies. I'm curious. Yes. Does your dad work at Interpol? We want to know. Interpol. You got anything else? No. So if you want to learn more about Interpol and read a very glowing review of their life and work, very glossy whitewashed review, you can type in Interpol. Interpol. And did we say where they got the name? I don't think we did. I don't think so. With the advent of Telegraph Communications, they were like, man, we need to shorten this or else people aren't going to waste the money with Western Union talking about us. Right. So they shortened their name to Interpol. Instead of the longer ICOP, they should just call ICOP. Yeah, I cop. Yeah, well, don't type. I guess you could type I cop into the search for probably some Mac Apple app now that allows you to make citizens arrest. That's a good one. Thanks. We should go make that type ICOP in the search barhousesupworks.com. And I said, search bar. I just didn't you know it. Which means it's time to listen to mail. Josh. I'm going to call this Mcbrewer for Anheuser Busch. Wow, it's a big time. Hey guys, just finished listening to the beer podcast and felt compelled to write. I used to live in Atlanta and missed the beer senior. I dream of the Brick Store pub every third night. I'm a beer geek home brewer and also happened to now brew beer for Anheuser Bush, also now known as AB InBev. As was mentioned in the podcast, it's a pretty sweet gig. That all started for me by Home Brewing in my Atlanta apartment closet. Crazy. I enjoyed the podcast a lot and you were pretty spot on with the info on Brewing 101, except for the mention of forced carbonation. I have worked because I think we said that the big breweries like force carbonate, everything. Yeah, not so. I've worked in a couple of craft breweries aside from my current job at AnheuserBush and I had never seen this before. I can't speak for the other big guys, but our beer at Anheuser Bush is made pretty much the same way as other small craft beers. We just have much larger equipment and more automation. That Anheuser Bush. After primary fermentation, our beers are lagered in a tank for as long as 21 days. In the case. Of the famous Budweiser. I've heard of that. 21 days during the aging process, the beer is still fermenting slightly and builds up CO2 in the tank. This is how our beer is carbonated, all natural, similar to the priming home brew and bottles. And that's it. He says, have a 420 on me and I'll pick up the tab next time in Atlanta. No, you send us the money first and then we'll go have a 420 on you. That's what I say. David. Thanks, David. We appreciate in advance the money you'll send us for our 420. Yes, and also I wanted to point out when we were talking about our favorite beers, I was sort of snobby with all my IPAs and all that stuff. I do love all that. But the triumvirate for me has been my staple since college, which is Budweiser, Miller, highlight and pats. Yeah, I like all those. I'm fine with those. Yeah, and I don't drink those as much anymore because I love the taste of like a delicious IPA, but I certainly don't turn my nose up at a Budweiser. Okay, well then you're definitely not a beer snack. No. You like to drink your poo. You remember those kids in college? Did you know anybody in college who could recite what it said on the next label of the Budweiser bottle? Like what it says? No, the writing. I didn't know anyone. This is Budweiser, the finest beer ever produced. Blah, blah, blah. I used to go to school with kids who could recite that, like by heart and I always thought it was kind of sad. Yeah, I've never even read the bottle. Yes, it's easier if you have like a beach towel because the lettering is way bigger. Oh, and I also got called out by a fan for being a hipster for drinking. HAPS. I'm like, dude. Yeah, I've been drinking PBR since I know. Like, 1993. And it amused me when it became a hipster beer. I was like, really? It blows my mind how much we share ourselves and how much we have in the 400 and plus episodes. And there's so many people out there who do not know us at all. Yeah. So I guess if you want to offer us money for beer, that's cool, or you can just send us beer. We're not done with that call out yet. I'm not ashamed over money. Sure you can tweet to us to get in touch with us at syskpodcast facebook. Comstuffusenknow or an email address is as follows stuffpodcast@discovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? 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. 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How Population Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-population-works | Population may not seem like the most scintillating topic in the world, but Josh and Chuck beg to differ. Join them as they explore how population works, from demographics to population control, in this episode. | Population may not seem like the most scintillating topic in the world, but Josh and Chuck beg to differ. Join them as they explore how population works, from demographics to population control, in this episode. | Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:38:12 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=18, tm_min=38, tm_sec=12, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=316, tm_isdst=0) | 27601260 | audio/mpeg | "You know you're the best pet mom. When you growl back during playtime, give epic belly rubs and feed them halo holistic made with responsibly sourced ingredients, plus probiotics. For digestive health, find us at Chewy, amazon and haloopets.com. Com. This July, don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the Series season three Zombies, three Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographics. America the Beautiful. From the awardwinning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and the Disney Nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. That's right, Chucky. And welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Clearly Chuck Bryant here. And let's talk about punk and chunkin. I guess you just kind of forced our hand, Chuck. Yes. The road to pumpkin chunkin and pumpkin chunkin. So that's on Science Channel 08:00 PM. Eastern time on Thanksgiving night. Yeah. You can see some pumpkins get chunk. Pumpkins get chunk pumpkins. Yeah. Okay. Again, Science Channel the road to pumpkin chunkin starts at 08:00 p.m. Eastern time. Pumpkin chunkin itself starts at nine. Great. Thanksgiving night. Yes. Science Channel on with the show. Yeah. Chuck, have you ever belonged to a population? No, man, I'm like, I'm totally independent. Screw population. You're like that guy who lives on the commune, right? Right. Yeah. Well, the joke is on him because a commune constitutes a population. That's right. This sounds kind of boring. And you would think it is how population works. It actually started to pick up. I actually didn't know what it was even going to be when I saw how population works, I was like, what? You know, it's awesome. This was my idea. This article was I pinned it. Oh, really? Why didn't they let you write it? I don't know. Church. I know, but The Grabster did a good job with it. Oh, yeah, the Grabster is always good. Yeah. Classic ed grabanowski, by the way. Right. So human beings tend to congregate. Yes. And segregate. Interestingly. That is an excellent you just blew my mind. Good Lord, Chuck. Well, let's get back to what I was saying. Right. Unless you want to go on the segregation. Right. We'll get on that later. Humans congregate and segregate. But let's talk about congregation in that most of the time, I would say our early ancestors and probably even other species congregate because there's safety in numbers. Sure. And it helps. Like with farming, collecting water and food power numbers. But even before farming, 100 gatherers lived in bands. I think 30 was about tops. They figured out somewhere along the way that groups of more than 30, there tended to be a lot more hostility and inner group problems, have you ever tried to kill a mastodon by yourself? That's another good point. Too. There's cooperation. Sure. Mastodon. Let's say if you are farming and your crop fails. Well. You're not standing there like. Well. I'm in trouble. Yeah. You can say. Hey. Neighbor. I'll totally give you favors of some variety. If you will let me have some of your grain. Right. I'll give you a chicken. Let's say. Sure. You can trade. Yeah. Barter there's a lot of reasons people live together. So it's my theory that people aggregate together naturally. Yes. And then there are people out there who get their jollies by studying these groups of people. They're called demographers. So we have populations. Natural or otherwise. And let's say a natural population today are people who live in a certain state. Georgians right, that's where we are, so that you have natural populations and demographers study them, right, sure, and they look at things like, say, how many people in this natural population are Republicans or Democrat, or how many are Caucasian? Right, or how many live below the poverty line? All kinds of things you can study right. By looking at a population. And are these groups segregated, like you brought up? Like, if you study where different races are living, are they living mingling? If so, then that's probably a fairly harmonious place, hopefully, if not, why are they living apart? How do we fix this? Because it's probably a problem, sure, who knows? But yes, so demographers study populations, natural or otherwise, right? Yes, the problem is very few people have the ability to hover over the earth and use super binocular vision to study populations by sight, very few people? Yeah, like three or four, I think, tops, does that count as a statistic? I think so, okay, richard so measuring populations, is that you're going to talk about how do we actually determine this kind of thing? Yeah, that was my city quit, that was a good segue. There's a couple of ways. Josh. One is by counting them. Literally counting them. Like I said. Counting every single person. Right. And that is called complete enumeration. Yeah. Remember we talked about that poor guy who was killed or possibly killed himself in Kentucky. The census taker. Right. Oh. I didn't know that suicide was a possibility there. I got a cryptic email from somebody I never followed up on that said that he identified himself as a doctor and I think said that he was part of the group that was the medical examination team and said that they strongly suspected suicide. Really? My problem with it is how do you bind yourself in duct tape? I don't know, how do you bind your own wrists in duct tape? I'll show you later, okay, so my point is why? He threw me off with that one, my point is that he was called in a numerator yes, literally counter, and that's the people who work for the census whenever they have their drive and they count. Right. And that's one way to determine it. Well, let's talk about the senses. It's gone on every ten years since 1790, right? Yeah. And the reason they do it every ten years is because it's a real pain in the ass to count every person in America. Yeah. The real reason they do it is so they can well, there's a lot of reasons, but no review. Taxes. That is the reason why anyone has ever conducted a census. Yeah. Well, plus they determine the number of House representatives for your state based on population and stuff like that. Oh, yeah, there's that, too. But come on. Taxes. Did you know that the census information is kept secret for 72 years? Yeah. Aside from the numbers, I believe. Right. The public cannot see that information for 72 years. Right. I wonder why. 72? That's odd. It is odd. I wonder if that was the average lifespan at the time or something. Dude, that's got to be it. I'll bet you're right. Okay. The other way, Josh, is to do something called sampling, and that is when statisticians use a mathematical formula to determine the minimum number of people that must be counted, and then they multiply that out and basically end up getting the full population. And sometimes I didn't know this. That's even more accurate than an actual head count. Right. You see that margin of error. It's like plus or -4% yeah. You got to have a margin. Of error there whenever you're sampling. Right. Because you're not actually going around asking every single person in America, are you left handed? To determine how many people are left handed. But let's say you have a population of 1000, and some statisticians been like, you need 100, do it, but do your egg head voice. Yeah. You need 150 people, the 150 people that are left handed. And you can just multiply that out to determine that there are, in fact, how many people? Let's say 10% of the population. 10% of the population, right. But, hey, your sample is perfect. Your sample has to be a random sample to be an effective sample. Yeah. And you know how they used to do that? They used to just pick it out of the phone book oh, I know. And call people I know. That makes sense to a certain extent. No, back then, it made a little more sense. I would think it made less sense, especially if you're talking, like, 1950. Well, it depends on what year. I'd say in the 1980s, it was probably a good way, but now there are cell phones. People in college probably don't have a phone. Poor people who don't have phones at all. People who don't have phones. Sure. So that's not a very good way, because what about Freight Train Riders of America? What's that? They don't have phones. Oh, yeah, good point. Yeah, they're not allowed. I don't think they want them. So the same thing. It's a little harder than it seems. Yeah, right. Especially coming up with a random population, random sample of the population. So far we've talked about people and where they live. Right. There's other ways to define a population. There's other attributes that people have that we use to lump in the population. Yes. It's not just a geography. When people think populations, it's not just a city, population or state. Yes. Or age. You can have a population of age or continent. A demographic. Right. What else? Location, of course. Socioeconomic population. Let's talk about age. Why would you even want to know age? Who cares? People are old, people are young, whatever. Right. Well, there's a lot of factors. Like take the baby boom, for instance. After World War II, all these babies were born, so there was a bulge in the population. And I'd just like, say the word bulge. You got to do the air quote. Air quotes, yeah. So what that will show them then is, wow, we got a bulge here. So that means probably in 25 to 60 years, there's going to be some serious buying power. Right. Borrowing as much money as we can right now. Right. But it also means in 70 plus years that they may be a medical burden and a burden on Social Security and that kind of thing. So let's start borrowing as much money as we can right now. Yeah. Same result there. I like that. And we'll get to bulges again in a little bit. Yes. But let's move on. Like you said, socioeconomic data, right? Yeah. Why would they want to do this job? This one, I find this the most interesting of all data. Okay. You can look at a bunch of people who are maybe related geographically right. But other than that aren't related in any other way. Sure. And all of them suddenly have this horrible cancer, and there just so happens to be some manufacturers nearby. What did you say? High tension wires. Sure. Which has been proven, I think, to not actually have any effect on people, not in my buddy. So now all of a sudden you have this information, thanks to your demographer friend who went and collected it, and you can say, okay, paint factory, you guys better start giving away some free paint. Yeah. Or we're going to sue you. Yeah, true race. Yeah. That's a little more hanky, because technically there is no such thing as any difference in different races. I remember watching MTV years and years and years ago, and the VJ was interviewing the BC boys, and he was like, mike D, I hear you're dating a black girl. What's it like dating somebody from a different race? Which is just an asthma question to begin with. But I remember Mike D. Going, there's only one race, the human race. And I was like, he's right. That's wife words, Mike D. That was clearly before he was down with the Ioni. No, that was ad rock. Sorry. Yeah. Ad rock's down with the Ioni. Yeah. They're divorced, though, so he's not down with her anymore. Poor Ione. So, yeah, race is a little hinky, but you can't actually determine some useful things when you study populations of race because it's important for people to be involved in their culture and to hang on to that for sure, I guess. Racial profiling. Again, I don't know if I should say again or not, but it's such a hot button issue, right? Yeah. I don't know. We need to talk about it collectively. That's my answer for everything. Everybody needs to get together and decide what we want to do. Okay. Well, the other thing with race, though, is if there's a medical problem that's specific to that race, that can help out. Exactly. Sure. 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 roll up their own sleeves. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com It automation. 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 City Advantage. All right, so, Chuck, we've got all these different factors. Yes, attributes, variables. We've used the word demographer several times, so we know that people study populations. One of the reasons why we study populations is to see how big it's getting. And I got to tell you, buddy, the human population has kind of exploded on this planet in the last several thousand years. Yeah, but you know what? They're reading these stats. There were a lot more people here way back when than I thought. Yeah. Again, favorite book of all time, 1491 charles C. Mann. He basically points out that there is probably 100 million people in the Americas in 1491. That's awesome. Which is a fifth of the world population is way more than anyone thought. And the reason why is because 1492 Columbus shows up, smallpox just ravages both continents, and by the time the European settlers start coming for real, the place is decimated. It seems like there's nobody there. Well, he had the whole genocide too thing. Did you ever know about that? Columbus? I hear his men used to sharpen their knives on the skulls of live natives. Well, there's the cause. Genocide we talk about later on in the article, but there's speculation that Columbus may have been responsible for the worst mass genocide in human history wow. By completely wiping out the Tano Indian people. Really? And that was in hispaniela, which is modern day, I think. Haiti and Dominican Republic. And some people say there were only like 500,000 of them, and some people say there were as many as 15 million at the time that were decimated to about 2000. Decimated through violence or through disease? Yeah, well, through violence, because Columbus came over, set up a camp in Hispaniologo for about 40 people, and then left, came back on trip number two, and found that the Indian tribe there had killed all those people. So he went on to kill crazy rampage, basically, and completely wiped out the population. And they're saying it may have been, like, double the size of the Holocaust. Wow. So happy Columbus Day, everybody. Seriously. But we do mentioned that because genocide is a way that a population can change rapidly. Well, let's talk about population growth. Yes. All right. So I guess about 10,000 BC, they estimate that there's between one and 10 million humans. So we're starting to slowly grow because by 1000 BC, there's 50 million, and then by 600 Ce, we're at 200 million. So that's a lot more than I thought there would be at the time. Yeah, I think there was about 500 million in the mid 15th century. Crazy. So let's say there's 500 million in the mid 15th century. The 20th century, the industrial revolutions happen. There's been great leaps in science and medicine. That's when populations really grow during those big booms. Yeah. Because it lends itself to fertility. Higher fertility and longer lifespans. Good times, breed kids. So the 20th century hits, we're at 1.5 billion people. Indeed. And then this century, the population of the world has quadrupled. I know that it sounded like there should have been a drum roll there, but there was. By that. Jerry might have put one in there. Our producer, Jerry, we'll find out later. And Josh, you're projecting the US. Census Bureau projects that by the year 2050, there will be 10 billion people. Right. So the reason for this is what we call the Malthusian growth model views. Malthus was an 18th century clergyman. Yes, Thomas. He actually I guess, inadvertently became one of the great economic theorists, and he figured out that population grows exponentially. Right. So if you have 1 million people and they have enough kids to double the population, but the next generation, you have 4 million people. So in one full generation, you've gone from 1 million to 4 million people. Right. Yeah. That's big. It is. Especially when the planet is finite in size. Right. And we don't have the ability to go colonize other planets yet. Right. But it's not necessarily that incremental and steady because of what we talked about, which are bulges or spikes and bottlenecks. Like genocide. Right. Yeah. So it doesn't always grow steadily. And actually, Chuck, have you heard of the replacement rate? No. The replacement rate is how many kids a woman has to have to have a high statistical probability of having a daughter so that she, in essence, replaces herself. Got you. And right now, it's 2.33 is the replacement rate worldwide. And the point of it is to trend toward zero population growth. Right. So for every woman who dies, she has a daughter that can reproduce and continue on and continue on and continue on. So you have, overall, as many people dying as are being born. So there's no strain. Right. And there's also no dearth. Well, it's equilibrium. Reading this reminded me of when we did our big econ audiobook. It's kind of population kind of wants to seek equilibrium, I think, just like economic stuff. And it doesn't always happen organically, I should say. It probably rarely happens organically. But let's think about, like you said, the baby boom. Post war success in Europe and the US. And Canada, I guess, led to a huge boom in the population. Nobody went to war to grow the population. It was just an indirect effect. So all of a sudden, we had a population spike that created a bulge, a bulge, if you will. Things can go the other way, too. Right. Which is a bottleneck. Right? Yeah. God, if I say genocide one more time, we should do a podcast in genocide. I wonder if there's a drinking game where every time you say genocide, that's great. Genocide, drink, famine, disease, something called the plague, I think, wiped out, like, half the world population at one point, or half the population of Europe. They suspect that in the fifth century that would be ce. The Plague of Justinian may have killed as many as half the world's population. 100 million people. Unbelievable. Can you imagine walking around at that time like, holy crap, the entire half the world is dead. Just died in the last couple of years. It's crazy. Well, and the Black Death killed 20 to 30 million Europeans. Yeah. So what can happen there's? Also, I was talking to an evolutionary geneticist this is my way. Sure. Today, recently. And he was talking about a study he authored where they found two evolutionary bottlenecks, one coming out of Africa they suggested 50,000 years ago. And another one that happened along the Bering land bridge. Right. And he wasn't saying like, all of a sudden a bunch of people died. But these bottlenecks turned up because big groups of people separated smaller groups of people, which accounts for a loss of genetic diversity. Got you. So you have the founders effect, because as he put it, if you go into a town and grab the first 15 people you meet and say, let's go find a new town, that new town isn't going to have a representative sample of all the surnames in that town. Sure. If you do that enough time, some surnames are going to be lost because people didn't reproduce or whatever. Same thing happens with genes. Genetic diversity. Look at you. Good stuff. Thanks. Can I mention this place in Hong Kong? Yeah. We're talking about well, we should mention population density is the number of humans per unit, area, whatever unit you choose to call it. Right. And the highest ever is believed to have been a place called Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong. And at one point, evidently, there were 50,000 people in a mega block, which is 500 by 650ft 50,000 people stuffed in there. And apparently it was a lawless district. The grabster said, of course. You're kidding me. 50,000 people could conceivably get along. Yeah. Hands Across America style. Did you know that in Athens, when Widespread Panic played that free show, there was an estimated 100,000 people there, not one fight? Really? Yeah. That's because they were all on the dope. I wasn't there. Were you there? Yeah. I never got into them. Although I did hang out with that guy, the bass player. Day schools. Yeah, I hung out with him a couple of times. Just through friends. Sure. Anyway, that park is no, I'm sorry, it is now a park where the walled city used to be. Yeah. Which is the opposite of the highest population density. Exactly. Yeah. Ironically, just a park. Maybe the highest population of grass, but that's it. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate covered goodness with real time data driven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM let's create Learn More@ibmcom consulting Josh, my friend, do you know where your passport is right now? Well, you better dig it up because adventure is around the corner and there's a card that's going to get you closer with the city Advantage Platinum Select Card. Every swipe earns you advantage miles and loyalty points and two times Advantage miles at restaurants and gas stations so your everyday purchases can take your travel to new heights. Plus, card members get access to built in travel benefits. For example, your first check bag is free on domestic travel, so you and your family have room to pack for every possibility, like coming home with extra souvenirs and with preferred boarding, you'll be in your seat sooner, ready for takeoff into Adventure. The hard part is deciding where you'll go first, because when you earn 50,000 advantage bonus miles after qualifying purchases, adventure is on. So fasten your seatbelt and put away your tray table because there's so much world to see. And the city advantage. Platinum Select Card is your ticket. You can learn more at Citi comAdventure and travel on with Cityadvantage. So, what do we got here, Josh? We got population control is something that we've referenced before with our China One Child policy. Yeah. And we talked about why you would want to control the population. A huge group of people put a strain on resources. Sure. When resources go away, you have resource conflicts, like in Darfur. Again, genocide. Right. Sadly, there's all sorts of problems that come from too many people are living in one place because of the strain it puts on resources and resource allocation. Right. And yeah, you can control the population eg state mandated reproduction, ie. China. Right. And that actually works as China shows, although much to the detriment of some people. Thank you, Chuck, for that. Look, not everyone thinks some people think we should add more people, though. Well, yeah, there's Japan. In other countries, there's a problem of population decline. So we talked about the strain people put on an area that's carrying capacity, which we've talked about before that's also from Malthus. Right. That eventually human population is going to outstrip advances in technology or our resources, and we're screwed. Right. On the other side is shrinking. Population shrinking. What's the problem with that? Well, you don't want the population to shrink too much because you need those hands to go to work and to contribute to the economy and to grow the grain and sow the flour and all that good stuff. And apparently in Russia, Japan, and Australia, they all have, like, little incentive programs to make little babies. Sure. How about that? Which is the way to go. Remember John Fuller's famous quote when he was pitching an article about that program in Russia, and he's talking about Putin giving away a TV? Yeah, that's right. That's really funny. Yeah. Have a baby, get a TV. I think you had to be there. And, Chuck, the reason why some of these places are seeing a population shrink and are having to, I guess, give incentives to reproduce started in about 1960. Birth control. That's so crazy that it had an effect that much of an effect. That pronounced of an effect. Yeah. Well, it would seem like it would, though. I guess so, because it's called birth control. Sure. Before that, it was called have as many babies as you possibly can. Right. It was called no control. Right. All right, so clearly there's a lot of reasons to study people. Yeah, it's way more wild than I thought it would be. There's a lot of stuff to study too. Indeed. You can find out whether or not we're going to kill the planet or whether people need to stop using contraceptives or what your chances are of Putin giving you a free TV. It's all in there. Demographers know everything. All there for the taking. So when your friendly enumerator comes knocking on your door, don't chase them off your land with your dog or a gun. Right. Put them in, give them some laminate, maybe some cookies. Yeah, well, check their laminate first. Yeah. Before you let them in. Coach. Good going. And if you want to know more about population, you could read Grabanowski's. Great article on the site. Just type in population in the handy search bar how stuff works.com. Which of course leads us to listenermail. Josh, I'm just going to call this your turn at listener mail because I think you have to talk to my money. Good. Yeah. I don't necessarily have too much listener mail per se, but I just wanted to give a shout out to a couple of fellow Toledo ones. One who's a longtime resident, one who's a recent transplant. Christopher is holding the fort down in Toledo for me, keeping it real. He has officially lobbied the congresswoman from Toledo to get me the key to the city. How awesome would that be? Yeah. So Marcy kept her. If you're listening, I would like to if you get a key to the city, we got to go for a ceremony. And I at least want to get like, a key chain to the city. Okay. And you can have the keychain. We'll see what we can do. All right. So, yeah, Christopher has officially petitioned her. He suggested that I'm the third most famous Toledo one of all time after Jamie Far. Jamie Farr. Danny Thomas, the great entertainer. Sure. And then me. And I was like, I think you're forgetting Katie home. She's from Toledo. Is she? And he's like, no, you got her be kate Cruz, you mean. Oh, is it Kate Cruz now? Yeah. Give me a break. So anyway, thanks a lot for the effort, Christopher, even if it doesn't come to fruition. If it does, you will get a firm handshake and a free friendly Sunday of your choosing from me. I love friendly. Yeah, we'll be going to friendly if we go to Leadover. And then I also want to say hi to Colin, who is a recent transplant, as I said, from Colorado, I believe, who moves from Colorado to Toledo. He moved to Toledo to attend Bowling Green State University at Chau Falcon. My brother went there and Colin did so in an 88 Dodge Colt that's having a couple of problems. One, the rear struts are completely detached and the axle is holding on by. A tread, he says, and the mechanics didn't want him to leave when he took it in for service. They're like, you're going to die in this thing. And the other problem is it has ants. He said, I've never heard of a car having ants. I had an incident car when really you can't get rid of them when they well, that's probably when you were living in the car, which was probably always parked on the ant hill. This is actually prior to that when I lived in the car. But yeah, no, it's a real problem. And Collins basically just put the bullet and said, well, I have ants in my car now. He loves his 88 Dutch cold. He said he loves Toledo. He's enjoying? He went to Tony Packos as I suggested. I got to try that one day. I also told him to go to Russia's jazz Cafe. It's authentic as it comes off, so hey, Christopher. Hey, Colin. You guys enjoy yourselves. Be safe in Toledo. Heck yeah. Go muddy for the winter. Go Mud Hens. And thanks for writing it. And if you want to say hi to me or Chuck or both of us, chuckers or Jerry, right? Chuckers, Jerry, Chucker. I mean, Chucker. Me. Chuck and me. Right? You can put that in an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Want more housestuffworks? Check out our blogs on the housetofworks.com homepage. Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. 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." | ||
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-09-07-sysk-cricket-farming-final.mp3 | Are crickets the future of food? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/are-crickets-the-future-of-food | Crickets are part of a larger insect-based diet enjoyed in most parts of the world. Loaded with vitamins, minerals and protein, and green to boot, crickets could help solve some of the world's food problems if Europe and America get on board. Learn all ab | Crickets are part of a larger insect-based diet enjoyed in most parts of the world. Loaded with vitamins, minerals and protein, and green to boot, crickets could help solve some of the world's food problems if Europe and America get on board. Learn all ab | Thu, 07 Sep 2017 13:58:05 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=13, tm_min=58, tm_sec=5, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=250, tm_isdst=0) | 42091917 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, friends. You know, dating is a journey with ups and downs, for sure, but all the effort is worth it when you meet someone special, right? And when you decide it's time to find a meaningful relationship, eharmony is here for you. Eharmony is passionate about creating real love for all, rooted it in compatibility. Eharmony's process reveals truths about yourself, like, I don't know what you want in a relationship, and it helps you connect with a uniquely compatible partner who is right for you. Don't believe it? See for yourself. So start for free today, because every 14 minutes, someone finds love on Eharmony. Hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself with no must, no fuss. Turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, a simple checkout process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to squarespace. comSK, and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code SYSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh W. Chuck Clark. There's Charles. Malcolm Bryant. And there's Jerry the wiz. Roland, that sounds like an Aaron Cooper poster gone bad. Yeah. Already. Yeah. We will have, like, the swirly face, like the weird people in Jacob's ladder. It's funny, we had an office visitor a couple of weeks ago, and I don't think you were here. In fact, I know you weren't here because you would have been in here, right? But there's our great Step Brothers. The movie Step Brothers. For those of you out here. Out there. There's a promo of John C. Riley and Will Ferrell with an Owen Mills type posed photograph. And Aaron Cooper, a buddy from Kansas who does our great Photoshop stuff, made us into. I was John C. Reilly, and you were Will Ferrell. And the guy came in and was looking around and was like, oh, man, these are great. And he went, look at that. I don't know. It looks like it could be, like, something like the Movie Step Brother or something. That's exactly what it is. Yeah. I tried to make him not feel bad. That was nice of you. That was very gracious of you as a host. Yeah, he didn't quite zone in on all of them were us. I got you. He should have, like, clapped loudly beside his ear. Man, I had a little scary thing today. What happened? If I may, this is kind of part PSA. This has nothing to do with cricket farming, okay? But we're getting our basement waterproofed because for 13 years, it's been leaking water, like, really bad. Someone showed that we have mold now. Oh, yeah. Black mold. Yes. Oh, no. We're also getting mold remediation done at the same time, man. So, needless to say, that's a fun way to spend a lot of money. But I come home today, and my carbon monoxide alarm is going off because these yahoos are using a gas powered concrete saw in our basement. No. And it's, like, full on saying, get out of the house, and my animals are in there. Oh, man. And I just happened to go home after I went to a coffee shop to study because I needed to grab something, but I literally could have come home to dead animals, man. And dead workman in the basement. Yeah, those guys, too. Wow. I'll bet they're not the sharpest tax in the box anymore. It was weird, man. And they were down there. Not only did they not have on so much as a dust mask for the gas, but, like, concrete dust is really dangerous, too. They're like, I don't care. I've got Obamacare. So weird, man. And it freaked me out to the point where Emily, she wanted to fire the guy. He wasn't even there. Like, the foreman or owner of the company subs were there. Yeah. And she wanted to be like, man, if he doesn't understand that this is dangerous, and he said, Open up your windows. It will be clear in 15 minutes. And it took 2 hours for that alarm to stop going off. Oh, my gosh. Wow. That is really scary. It was really bad, man. I was out on my deck, basically, for the rest of the morning until I came in with my dogs and my cat in a crate, man. That's, like, how some people commit suicide. I know. Yeah. And these guys are just doing it grotesque for you. Yeah. Anyway, so I'm slightly shaken. Yes. I'm glad you made it, man. You look good. You look okay. Thank you. You look healthy. Your pallor isn't gone. I think you're okay. I just got to calm down here. The sound of the crickets on our miniature cricket farm here are soothing me, at least I know they put me to sleep. I'm glad we set that up. That was pretty good. That was one of our better segues, sadly enough. Thanks. Yes. We are talking crickets, aren't we? Yeah. We covered into mafiji. I meant to look up wind, but it was seems like a long time ago. Right. And that's eating bugs and insects. But this is focusing specifically on crickets because by all accounts, they seem like sort of our best bet at trying to get something like this going in America. For real? Yeah. They're pretty easy to raise. They don't require much space. You can set up your own cricket farm at home. And really, we should say the point of all is the whole reason anybody would want people to start raising crickets at home is because the Earth is about to collapse, and our food supply is in real danger. Right. I've got some stats for you, Chuck. Okay. So meat consumption per capita has increased into the developed world. Actually, it's doubled in the last 30 years. And that's thanks in no small part to the rise of the brick countries. Brazil, Russia, India and China, who have huge, massive populations, and as they entered the capitalist global economy, have generally become enriched. And the more money they have, the more meat a civilization tends to consume, at least these days. Right? Yeah. So that doesn't seem bad in and of itself until you look into what kind of resources it takes to actually raise meat. Are you ready for this one? I don't know. I'm afraid to produce \u00a31 of meat, that's a half a kilo, basically, of meat. Beef. Beef, sorry. Yes. It requires about 2400 gallons of water. I've heard stuff like that before, which is, like, absolutely nuts, even when you consider that not only are you watering the cow, you're also watering the crops that you feed to the cow. So there's double water consumption. But one of the reasons cattle beef requires so much water is because you only consume 40% of the cow. So 60% of the water is going to sustain parts of the cow you're not even eating. Right. So there's a lot of wasted water even if your water delivery system is 100% efficient, right? Yeah. That's just water. 51% of the greenhouse gasses that are emitted on planet Earth come from animal agriculture. 51%. And one third of the world's adequate or high quality cropland has been lost to erosion or pollution in the last 40 years. That's a huge problem whether we are all vegetarians or not, because we're talking cropland. But we use way more crop land to feed our livestock than we do to feed ourselves. Right. Something like 56 million acres of land are used to grow crops in the United States to feed animals. 4 million are used to grow crops for human consumption. So there's a lot of resources that are used up just from meat based diets. Right. A lot of people say, well, just go to plant based diets, and other people say, you can't get enough protein from plant based diets, which apparently is not true from what I'm seeing. Other people are saying, Fine, you want some protein? I got something for you. And it's crickets. Yeah, I'm kind of not surprised. But it goes to show you the population boom if meat consumption has increased that much in the face of probably more vegetarianism and veganism than ever before, too. Well, that's kind of heartening, I guess, if societies follow. Yeah. We've been dancing around doing episodes on vegetarianism and veganism for a while, so we should probably tackle that at some point. All right. I'm kind of curious about the history because it seems like probably since the onset of America, and then I'm talking off the top of my head here, but until probably the seemed like everybody was just like, meat. Well, it's definitely associated with wealth, right. If you can afford to eat a nice steak, kind of indicates you have a certain amount of status in your society. Right? Well, like, the seems like they would eat steak for lunch. Right? And I can't imagine, like, a steak for lunch. That seems so indulgent. Yeah, I think it is, you know? Yeah. Just give me the 20 ounce ribeye for lunch. Right? I don't know. I can't imagine that. But in three martinis I don't argue with that part. That is pretty indulgent. Three martinis and a 20 ounce rib by four lunch. I mean, that was Don Draper, you know? Yeah. I never saw that show. I know. I never saw it. It's available. Where is it? Out there. Really? I thought they erased it all. Yeah, they did. So that's it. It's done. Didn't he go become a lumberjack at the end? No, he did not. Okay. Oh, that's Dexter. Oh, man. I know. We talked about the ending of that show. Crazy. I actually never saw the end of that one. You just told me about it. Yeah. I think you saw it to yourself just to watch the finale. Okay, so this dude, Kevin how would you pronounce that? Bachhubr. B-A-C-H which is fine. That's clearly Bach and HUBR. You just don't often see two H's side by side. No. So, anyway, Kevin Bachuba nice. Is a dude that is kind of championing not kind of very much championing this movement. In 2007, he went to Thailand and tasted crickets, deep fried crickets. And he's from California, and he's like, hey, this is really good. He's far out. They've been doing this in Thailand since the late ninety s. The King established a big growing program for crickets and cricket farms, education and schools. Like, this is a good way to get protein in your diet. And he said, I think this is the direction America should go, and I'm going to get in on the money side of it. Yeah, like the farming of it. Apparently. It's a $20 million industry already. Not bad. No, it isn't. And we should say that Bach Huber is one of several people who are into the idea of cricket farming, commercial cricket farming. And he's definitely one of the OG's, for sure. His business was the first to get approval to sell crickets as food in the United States. He got FDA approval because the cricket industry actually is kind of old. Well, it's not too old, but I saw anywhere between 50 and 70 years old in the US. And they were raised to, say, feed fish for commercial fish farming or to grind up as a protein supplement for livestock feed. So people have been raising crickets for a while or to feed to, like, reptiles, to sell them to pet stores. So there was an established infrastructure of cricket farming but making the transition from selling it to feed to cows or fish or snakes to selling it to people to eat directly, that was a big step. And Bach Huber was the first one to take it in the US. I should just say the reason I point out he's just one of many is because this House Stuff Works article is basically like, here's my report on Kevin Bachuber's. Ted Talk, sort of. Yeah. I think he definitely deserves credit because he's leading the charge, but so are other people as well. Yeah, he's woven throughout this thing, though. Yeah. And if you listen to the Entomophagy episode episode? No, it's episode we pointed out then, and it bears repeating, that America is new to this, but I think it was like Canada, United States and Western Europe are literally the only places on Earth that don't consume insects as a regular part of their diet these days. So this article kind of says the standard 80% of the world regularly consumes insects as part of their diet. I saw that there's a Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN organization report said something. It was more like about a third of the populations rather than 80%, maybe like 30% to 35%, which is still significant. Yeah, that's a big difference, though. It is. And in the west specifically, the idea of eating bugs is not commonplace. Right. And I actually saw a pretty good explanation for why. Like, 13 of the 14 large livestock animals that are domesticated are found in Eurasia and made their way over to the Americas. Right. And those animals provide not just meat, but also things like milk, clothing, everything, basically. So since what you would call Western countries had access to these domesticated animals, they never needed bugs as a food source. And then secondly, since they were raising domesticated animals, by definition they had a sedentary agricultural lifestyle, which meant that their exposure to bugs was bugs as pests. Right. So not only were bugs not edible, they were something that were just undesirable on their face. Oh, sure. So that led to the it closed the door on bugs being eaten by Westerners, and so that came to be filled by a sense of disgust, which is a basic human emotion, but it's the only one that's culturally bound, which means you learn what is disgusting from your cultural group. Yeah, for sure. But that also means you can unlearn it, too. Well, if Big Cricket has anything to do with it, why don't we take a quick break and we're going to come back and talk about a UN report that kind of changed a lot of things about four years ago. Okay, friends. So imagine you're in an accident and your injuries are extensive enough that not only do you have to spend time in the hospital, but you're going to need rehab, too. Well, you have insurance, so no problem, right? Well, not entirely. You get back from the hospital and notice there's a gap and that your insurance is only covering part of your bill. And it's a big bill. Yeah. And until you get back on your feet, you can't get to work. And now you have this financial burden hanging over your head like some dark rain cloud. So what do you do, Chuck? Well, if you have Aflac, you can worry less knowing they can help with the expenses health insurance doesn't cover. Aflac pays cash, which can be put toward expenses, which may be impacted by a covered medical event. Things like your medical bill, copays, or even routine things like rent, groceries, childcare, and more. Yeah, that's Aflac in a nutshell. They care about what health insurance doesn't cover so those they insure can care about everything else. And care has always been part of Aflac's DNA. It's the foundation that the company was built on more than 65 years ago, and it's at the core of who they are still today. That's right. They believe the cost of health care shouldn't come at the expense of peace of mind, which is why they are on a mission to help close health and wealth gaps for Americans everywhere. So when the unexpected threatens your peace of mind, let Aflac stand in the gap to help you. To learn how Afflac can help with expenses health insurance doesn't cover, visit Aflac.com. That's Aflac.com. What if you were a global bank who wanted to supercharge your audit system so you tap IBM to UNSILO your data, and with the help of AI, start crunching a year's worth of transactions against thousands of compliance controls. Now you're making smarter decisions, faster operating costs are lower, and everyone from your auditors to your bankers feels like a million bucks. Let's create smarter ways of putting your data to work. IBM let's create. Learn more@ibm.com. All right, so I promised you a UN Report 2013. There was a big kind of sea change. I don't know about sea change. It was the beginning, beginning of a sea change. They issued a report called Edible Insects Colon future Prospects for Food and Feed security. And it was basically just championing entomophagy and all the benefits that surround it, like how nutrient dense crickets and other insects are. The fact that it's socially sustainable, economically viable, and friendly. Environmentally friendly. And it kind of paints it as like, hey, this is the future, or it could be part of the future, at least of getting protein into Americans. Right. And the report itself didn't focus exclusively on crickets, but crickets feature prominently in the report. It was about bugs in general and eating bugs in general, and it made a pretty big splash. I remember when it came out, it really hit the news cycle pretty hard. But it also caught the attention of that Box Huber guy who said, all right, I think I'm going to get into this, because he'd already been exposed to eating crickets. In Thailand. And then when that UN report came out, he, I think, began his startup here in the States of his commercial cricket farm start up. Yeah. It's funny, they had in this article that it was the most popular document in the history of the UN. Yes. I didn't see that anywhere. I think that was he said that at his Ted report. Yeah. But it definitely made a splash, I'll give him that for sure. Yeah. He spoke at a TEDx Youngstown, Ohio, because that's where he's based. It's where his company is. Right. And I guess he just made up his own TEDx, probably. All right, so let's talk about crickets. Well, all insects in particular are very rich in protein, like we've talked about. They have a lot of healthy fats, a lot of zinc, a lot of iron, a lot of calcium. And there's something called, I guess, efficient animals. Yes. This is when vegetarians and vegans are like these kind of terms make their skin crawl, I'm sure. But the kind of efficiency you get out of raising and killing and eating an animal is on a spectrum. And from cows, like you talked about, is probably the worst. I wouldn't guess. Don't you think? Right. The animal itself is efficient at converting food that you feed it into stuff that you can get from it. Yeah. So, like you said, not a lot of the cow is used to eat. No, it's like 40% of a cow is edible and digestible. And I think the chicken is about the most efficient animal protein right now. Right. Nothing like crickets. So there's two different things here. Right. So you've got efficiency and nutrient conversion, which is, say, like, if you eat an apple, you can convert X amount of the energy available in the apple into energy for yourself, metabolism. Right. And poop. Right. Yeah. But poop is waste, so that stuff wouldn't count toward efficiency. It would actually subtract from your efficiency and lower your efficiency. If you ate an apple and used every bit of it and it produced zero poop, you would have 100% efficiently converted that apple into useful energy. Right. And that'd be a weird apple. It would be. It'd be a magic apple. And you wouldn't need a poop shoot. But instead you do, because there is no such thing as 100% efficiency in any animal. Right, right. But some are better than others, like you were saying. And with the cricket, it's something like they're like twelve times more efficient at converting food into usable energy, or stored, in this case, stored protein. Right. Yeah. So for every kilogram of live cricket weight, which is a pretty substantial amount of crickets, but kilogram to kilogram or pound to pound, it just takes 1.7 feed to produce 1 crickets. Not bad for a cow. It takes 10 feed to produce 1 beef. Very inefficient by comparison. So if you take the fact that it doesn't take much feed to produce a biomass of crickets, and that crickets are 80% edible and digestible compared to the cows 40% edible and digestible. Then you really have if you're just going pound a pound or kilogram to kilogram and much more nutrient dense, much more efficient, and then therefore much less wasteful animal that you could eat. Yeah, a lot of that has to do with the fact that crickets are cold blooded, so they are very much more efficient at converting that feed into protein. And crickets aren't even the most efficient insect. No, I'm not sure which one is, actually. I think mealworms are pretty efficient. You just said that because you're eating a mealworm. Right? Well, I have a mealworm farm I was going to ask you to buy in on. Oh, really? All right. In my pocket. Is that a mealworm farm in your pocket? It is my pocket. Mulch so, like we mentioned, Mr. Bach Ruba is if he's not German, he should be kevin Bach Ruber. I think he's spelled he's Irish German, maybe. It's spelled KVN, though. So we're just inserting vowels for it. Right? Like DNCE. What's that? It's this band. Okay. Probably a young person's band. I believe so. No wonder. I don't know. But he is one. I think they're about and this has probably changed even since this is written about 25 or so cricket startup farms here in the United States. Yeah. I couldn't find the current number. Yeah, let's just say at least 25. Okay. Although I'll bet they go under pretty quick. You think so? I could see losing your shirt on cricket farming right now. It's just so early, and the market is still not there, and the stuff they're producing is so expensive. Well, and their output right now is still really small in the early years here. But the dream for him and all these cricket farmers is that one day I don't think they have designs that will ever be, like, in some parts of the world where it's on every menu in every restaurant. But they would certainly like to see cricket snacks in grocery stores and menu offerings and some of the more wacky hipster restaurants. Right. At least, yeah. Do you watch Shark Tank? Oh, you know I do. Okay. So did you see the one with Rose wang and Laura Desario? I've seen them all. Okay, so you sell the one with Chirps. They're cricket based snack product. Chirps. I want to try it. I do, too. I'm not an adventurous eater, as you know, but I would totally try fried crickets and things. That doesn't gross me out for some reason. No, I would try it as well. I don't know if you remember or not, but when we did that locust thing for Science Channel, the second time it's come up this month, weirdly enough, they made fried locusts, and I refused to eat them. Right. And it wasn't because I was grossed out. It was because I was sure that I was going to have some sort of weird allergic reaction to them. Oh, right. Yeah. And I would have had to have been, like, life flighted somewhere to a hospital and would have missed my flight home. That is the only reason I didn't eat them. It had nothing to do with disgust, but in that UN report, they address allergies, and they said that it's actually exceedingly rare that somebody has an allergic reaction to an arthropod or to an insect, I should say. But the reason why I thought so is because I had, like, a shrimp blow up once. Right. And I just was not about to roll the dice on that, not for what Science Channel was paying us. Well, I think it's very funny that I remember your shrimp years and that you had an allergic reaction to shrimp, but you wanted to eat shrimp so bad, you started to eat shrimp a little bit just to see if you could eat shrimp. Yeah. Shrimp chips. Yeah. Which use real shrimp powder. It's like I think Japanese or Korean or Chinese delicacy. But now you can eat shrimp. Right? Yeah, I did immunotherapy, and now I'm fine. I can eat shrimp all day long. I love that you were so dedicated to eating. Yeah, I love shrimp, man. Good shrimp. Like season with old bay. Just simple stuff. Oh, man, so good. This is a great time to bring up one of my big pet peeves. Okay. I know that cooking with shrimp heads and tails on increases the flavor quite a bit. Does it? Yeah. Okay. Which is why they do it. But it's one thing if you get an appetizer with, like, a prawn with a head left on or something. But if you like, I get pasta dishes sometimes oh, yeah. That have, like, heads and tails on them. If there's a fork involved, you don't want to have to put your fork down and take the head and tail off. No. Like, you literally have to dig them out of the pasta, take the head and tail off, and then put them back in your food. Right. Which is just I don't get why restaurants do that. Like, maybe cook it in there and then take it off for us. So I ran across a reason probably why all right, let's hear it. There's something called chitin, which makes up the exoskeleton of bugs, but it also makes up the shells of crustaceans as well. And chitin, supposedly, if you don't have an allergic reaction to it, is apparently good for it's said to be good for weight loss. Yeah. Digestion AIDS in digestion, allegedly. And I think it has something to do with your blood pressure, too. And in other countries, non Western countries, I think they prescribed chitin quite a bit as, like, a dietary supplement. And I saw one study that said, yeah, it had a little bit of an effect, a little more than placebo, but not clinically significant. But it was just one study, so I'm curious if Kit actually does have an effect, but it's possible. They're saying you should eat the whole thing, but that's what I was going to call the shell. What? I don't know. They could also just be a fat, lazy chef, you know? Well, I mean, I'll eat a soft shell crab till the cows come home, but I'm not eating a shrimp tail. Yeah, it sounds gross. Well, it's just not like they don't soften up enough. But if you think about it, though, if you're eating a fried cricket or something, you're eating the whole thing, shell and all. Antenna. Well, yeah, but I saw that in the soft shell crab zone. So you eat the shell of the soft shell crab? Yeah. That's what you're supposed to do. That's what it is. I don't know that I've ever had soft shell crab. Oh, my friend. Is that like a blue crab? No, I think it's a special kind of crab that has parents must love it very much. I might be wrong. I think it's a special kind of crab, and then you prepare it with the shell. But I think the shell is soft to begin with, though. I don't think it's just from cooking, but spider roll is one of my favorite sushi rolls. That's softshell crab. Okay. Yeah. I thought that was crab, like, spelled with a K, like fake crab. No, the little legs are coming out of the end and everything. That's why they call it a spider roll, because it looks like little spider legs. I'll try that, and then, like, a soft shell crab sandwich is when you open the bun and there's just, like, this crab staring at you. Yeah. How's it going? You're going to eat me in a second, aren't you? I'm getting hungry now. You want to take a break real quick? Well, quickly, before we just should mention that they did get a deal on Shark Tank with Mark Cuban for church. Right? We're contractually obligated to munch on Mark Cuban. That's right. We get our kickback coming. I would try chirps for sure. If the church people are out there listening and you want to send us some chirps, I will try them up. All right. So let's take that break. Okay. Okay, friends. So imagine you're in an accident and your injuries are extensive enough that not only do you have to spend time in the hospital, but you're going to need rehab, too. Well, you have insurance, so no problem, right? Well, not entirely. You get back from the hospital and notice there's a gap and that your insurance is only covering part of your bill, and it's a big bill. Yeah. And until you get back on your feet, you can't get to work. And now you have this financial burden hanging over your head like some dark rain cloud. So what do you. Do, Chuck? Well, if you have Aflac, you can worry less knowing they can help with the expenses health insurance doesn't cover. Afflac pays cash, which can be put toward expenses, which may be impacted by a covered medical event. Things like your medical bill, copays, or even routine things like rent, groceries, childcare and more. Yeah, that's Aflac in a nutshell. They care about what health insurance doesn't cover so those they insure can care about everything else. And care has always been part of 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. 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. So, Chuck, I think I said that one of the things that's holding this industry back right now is that it's so expensive, the products they're making. There's something called cricket flour, which is ground up cricket meal, basically a protein powder made from crickets. Right. And it's anywhere from like it's very expensive, a lot of money. But it's really ironic because crickets require so much less space and food and water and electricity. It's apparently the labor force that is the most expensive thing of any commercial cricket farm, because it's just hard to find people who can do that. Even though it's not exactly hard, there's a lot of trial and error going on. So from what I saw, it's the labor force that's eating up most of the revenue or profits from cricket farming. Well, finding all those tiny people, those three inch people, right. It's not easy. But there are startups also that are trying to sell, like, home cricket kits, too. Yeah, because that's part of the whole idea where if you're going to get people to supplement their diet, we'll just let them grow them at home, too. So should we talk a little bit about the farming? Yeah. So crickets live about seven weeks. I mean, that right there shows you a big difference between that and, like, the beef industry. Sure. So during that seven week life cycle, they have three different environments that they reside in and they basically live and hang out on what they call cricket high rises, which are little egg cartons. Yeah, I saw that. They have tried all sorts of different material and they keep going back to egg cartons. For some reason. Crickets just love hanging out on egg carton. Well, who doesn't? And what they eat is because I was kind of wondering that they eat grain based feed, organic grain based feed, fruits and vegetables, and some of them will reach that breeding stage, some won't. And if they do, they're going to lay a lot of eggs, like several thousand eggs a mommy cricket will lay in her lifetime. Yeah. So many eggs, in fact, that they typically just throw most of them out. Like they'll keep some to grow a new generation from, but there's just so many that are just tossed out because they don't have the capacity yet to grow them. I think Bachelor put it like he could be drowning in eggs if he's not careful drowning in cricket eggs, he probably wakes up every night sweating recurring dreams. He probably really does wake up every night from the cricket chirping. Oh, I never thought about that. That must be nice, actually. Yeah, it can be. So they like hot, humid environments, or at least warm, depending on your definition of hot. It's hot to me, 85 to 95 deg with about a 40% humidity level. And the whole process, from soup to nuts or from eggs to chirps is about 56 days. Yeah, roughly, yeah. And if you can do this yourself at home, you just need basically two terrariums. You need to put them near heat, because that is substantial. 85 to 95 degrees is way hotter than you're going to keep your house. So you do need, like, a heat lamp of some sort. And you need water, a source of water, too. Those are the two most important things with raising crickets. And the reason you have two terrariums is because in the one where you have, like, the 30 initial cricket say you're going to put a dish of soil and that's where they're going to lay their eggs. You want to check the soil every day for eggs. And when you find eggs, you take that little soil dish out and put it in the other terrarium, and then that's where the eggs are going to grow and hatch. And when the crickets hatch, they're fully formed. There's no larval stage. Right. They don't go from like a maggot into a cricket. They're fully formed. They're just much smaller. Right, yeah. And according to Aristotle, it's about around here, or maybe within the next week or so, that they're the most delicious. Aristotle? Yeah. Aristotle wrote in his Historia animalia, actually, he was writing about cicadas. They're better before their last molt. So I guess it wouldn't apply to crickets. No, it would, because they molt. Do they? They do mold. He also said that females taste best after copulation, because they are full of eggs. After Aristotle has copulated, right? Or after instead of a cigarette, you just need a pregnant female cicada. Try this baby, right? It will knock your socks off. I bet Aristotle pillow talk was something else, or it'd just be like, man, he just keeps going on and on about cicadas. So harvesting, I mean, there's no way around it. At some point, like, any live thing that you're raising, you're going to have to kill it. And instead of like what we see on factory farms with cows and pigs, what you do on a cricket farm is you cool them down and then freeze them. And so what happens is they get cold, they start to get a little chilly, their temperature drops and they go into what's called the diapause, sort of a hibernation like state. And then pretty much after that, they go, it is sure it's chilly in here. And then they're gone and frozen. Yeah. Apparently they eventually freeze solid, so they spend about 24 hours in the freezer and then they're ready to be sold either ground into, say, like a powder or baked into a fried snack or sold to somebody else. I was like, do they wake up then if you heat them up in a pan? But apparently after 24 hours in their frozen salad, they're dead. Yeah, but to them, it's just like going to sleep forever. Yeah. I kind of wonder, when I was reading this, I was like, how do vegans and vegetarians feel about eating insects? Supposedly, it does not count as vegetarian. Well, it depends on who you ask. I didn't get any. Like, there is no official rule book. There's not? I don't think. So I'm surprised. But basically, I just went to a bunch of vegan vegetarian websites and looked to see what people said, and it kind of ranged from, well, sure, allied insects and this is a much better way to get protein in your body than animals, to where other people said, no, it's a living thing, not going to eat it. I get all the protein I need from plants. If you're eating something alive animal, then you're not a vegan or vegetarian. Yeah, I saw crickets referred to as mini livestock. All one word. I mean, they are a living animal for sure. I guess it's a personal choice, it sounds like. Yeah, just like vegetarians eat fish sometimes, too. Well, that'd be a pescetarian, right? I guess, but I've met plenty of vegetarians. They're like, I'm vegetarian and I eat fish, leave me alone. And that's nico. Technically, you're a pescetarian and then you get punched in the face. All right, so eating crickets, some people say it's sort of nutty, some people say it's a little sweet, like sweet corn. I would like to know for myself. I wish we could have gotten our hands on some chirps beforehand, but maybe we can follow up in the future. We need a big bowl of chirps right here. Yeah. Like we did with the soil. Yeah, with the soil. We'll do a follow up. Soylent. So there's this lady, Daniela Martin, and she has a travel show. It's an insect cooking and travel show called Girl Meets Bug. Very cute. We should say the church ladies called Crickets the Gateway Bug. And funny. And Daniella says that she started eating crickets and kind of became fascinated with insects in general when she was in Mexico and Yucatan and kind of became, I don't think obsessed, but just super interested in this as her protein of choice. And said, you know, I started cooking them up with a little butter, onion, little salt, and like with anything, if you put it in a pan with some butter and onion and salt, maybe a little garlic, it's probably going to taste pretty darn good. Yeah, you could cook almost anything with butter, salt and onions, and you're fine. Yeah. Even when you hear stories of these creepy cannibal people oh, yeah. They usually cook it in butter with a little salt and onion and garlic. Yeah. I think that one guy who advertised on, like, Craigslist he did. He sauteed with yeah. Onion, you're right. Penis? I think it was. Who say what? He ate penis like that? He did. And that was a very disturbing case. Sure. So she says crisping them in the oven is another besides grinding them into powder, cooking them up, like boiling them in the oven. Don't overcook it. Olive oil, garlic, salt. Throw them in about 250 for about 15 minutes, and a little sea salt on top, maybe. And you're going to have a crunchy, delicious, nutrient rich snack. Yeah. And you want to clean them off, too. If you're cooking them from raw they're bugs, it's something you want to do. What do you do, just like, wash them in a calendar? I guess so. Yeah. But I think if they're already prepared, you're probably okay. Because one of the big things that, like, Bachelor did by getting FDA approval now you can't just raise crickets on just anything. Like, they have to be fed food that is okay for humans to eat, which is something that the cricket farming industry is running up against. Because one of the big things proponents are saying is like, man, you could raise crickets if you have large scale cricket farms, you could raise crickets on food waste. And if you do that, not only are you, like, raising your crickets, you're also getting rid of food waste. You're composting, basically, right? Yeah, composting. That's the way you say it. But apparently now you can't feed things, food waste, your nut job, you're going to eat it eventually. So there's big rules against it. But I think they're trying to chip away at that as well. Yeah. I remember being alarmed when I briefly worked in the chicken industry when I found out that a lot of chicken feed is made from chickens. Yeah, not okay. Yeah, that's not right. So I saw in, I think, Popular Science, they had a little nutrition facts thing for crickets. It's so cute. They said for 100 grams of crickets, you're looking at about 121 calories. Okay. You've got about five and a half grams of carbs, 12.9 grams of protein. That is substantial. Yeah. 75.8 milligrams of calcium, and nine and a half milligrams of iron. That's also pretty substantial. Just from 100 grams. I think they estimate that's about 20 to 22 crickets. Like a handful and a half. Yeah. Nice. That is pretty good. The idea that if you are just raising crickets yourself, you can feed them your own kitchen waste and then eat the crickets yourself. There's also very low barriers to entry into cricket farming. So if you're not a wealthy person and you need to make some extra money, you could conceivably raise crickets yourself and then sell them at market, too. It's like podcasting. Exactly. I think that's it. I got nothing else. All right, well, that's cricket farming, everybody. Go make it happen. And in the meantime, you can look at this article on howsup works.com. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Kevin Spacey's accent explained. Oh, and before I read this, there is a house of cards. Spoiler. Spoiler alert to that. Hey, guys, just listen to the episode on accents. I'm happy you brought up Kevin Spacey's accent from House of Cards, because I have a theory. Spacey plays a character, Frank Underwood, grew up poor in Gapney, South Carolina, but then went on to the Citadel in Charleston and created a persona that eventually lands him president. His accent does not sound like a bad attempt at the Rless old money Charleston accent, but I think it fits the character. Instead of a Twangy R flow accent that he'd have from Gaffney, spacey's playing Frank Underwood, who was playing someone with noble Southern roots, and that's why it sounds fake. Am I giving Kevin Spacey too much credit? Possibly. But being from Greenville, South Carolina, enjoyed dissecting his Carolina accent. Actually, I don't have much of an accent myself, except with words like lawyer and oil. Cherry just left because my brother, who's ten years older, trained it out of me when I was very young. He said he didn't want people to underestimate my intelligence because of our accent. He would correct me every time I would say things like turn the lights on instead of turning the lights on, or naked instead of naked. If you're saying naked mechan with a link to drive bamboo. And say again, I sort of wish I sounded more like the rest of my family, but what a considerate thing for my big brother, who had done when he was a teenager. Seriously. And that is from Mary Jean Murphy. That's pretty great. Mary Jean, your brother is a little social engineer, isn't he? I like that. And thank you also for the spoiler about Kevin Spacey becoming president on House of Cards. If you want to get in touch with us like she did, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. I'm also at Josh Clark. You can hang out with us on Facebook. Comstepysheno. Can hang out with Chuck@facebookcom Charlesw. Chuck Bryant? You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@houseepworks.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. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that, we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural science based nutrition Gary, 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 Stonehenge Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-stonehenge-works | Even as far back as the Roman invaders, people have had absolutely no idea just what the massive monument complex in England known as Stonehenge was built for. Join Josh and Chuck as they try to get to the bottom of this Neolithic mystery. | Even as far back as the Roman invaders, people have had absolutely no idea just what the massive monument complex in England known as Stonehenge was built for. Join Josh and Chuck as they try to get to the bottom of this Neolithic mystery. | Thu, 05 Mar 2015 16:57:15 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=5, tm_hour=16, tm_min=57, tm_sec=15, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=64, tm_isdst=0) | 40294680 | audio/mpeg | "Are you looking for an escape? An immersive getaway experience? Well, there's a place for all your wildest dreams. Perhaps you enjoy wrapping along the paperboy or you believe that blessed be the fruit. Or you dream of one day smashing a glass while stealing who's. Ah. Whether you're sworn to Team Kim or you just want a good old fashioned mysterious murder, there's a place that has it all. From Atlanta to only murders in the building, it's all on Hulu. So check into your obsessions. Hulu subscription is required. Terms apply. Visit hulu.com for plan details. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry. It's a brand new day. It is a Wednesday. Yeah. Welcome back, buddy. From vacation? Yes. You mean I went to New Zealand and then to Okinawa. It was pretty awesome. Do you want to say anything about it? New Zealand. Zealand is wonderful, and I always love Japan. I've heard New Zealand is like America in the 1950s. I've heard it described that way as very pure, still, and like, oh, yes. Friendly and just sort of uncorrupted. So apparently New Zealand ranks fourth on the Global Peace Index, which it takes into account. Yeah. You don't get the impression that there's this naivety or innocence necessarily. It's more just like they are a thoroughly content, peaceful people. That's nice. And it's not like, you know, it's not like that manufactured, like, labored kind of like friendly contentedness that you kind of run into sometimes. This is the real deal, and it rubs off on you while you're there. Like, New Zealanders are AOK in my book. Everyone we met, everyone was friendly except for one truck driver who I had an incident with. But in retrospect, I look back and I'm wondering if he thought he was trying to protect me by not letting me go around him. Interesting. But everybody else was just, like, totally friendly, neat, cool people. And we were everywhere. Like, we were in the little spot town of Rhode Aurora. We were in Auckland, we were in Wellington. We were in little Napier, which is like, the Art Deco capital of the world. They had an earthquake in 1931, and it just leveled the town, while the fire afterward leveled the town. So they're like, we need to rebuild. What kind of architectural movement is hip right now? Art Deco. So they rebuilt the town and Art Deco. It's really pretty. I love Artecko. That'd be great. You would love Napier. Cool. Yeah. So New Zealand awesome. Great stuff. Lots of sheep. Like, no joke. Yeah, there are probably more sheep than people. Yeah, and it's a wonderful place. Awesome. And then, of course, Okinawa. Once we got there, we're like, okay, let's start eating. Yeah. You're, like a Japan expert at this point, right? Except I can't speak Japanese, but yeah, everything I'm an expert. I'm learning. We hung out with Yumi's family. Nice. And her little, I guess, second cousin or first cousin once removed. Little kid. Awesome. Little precocious dude at one point was trying to talk to me and he just put his face in his hands and said, in Japanese. discommunication in Japanese is not going very well. That's adorable. Yeah, it was very different. And you ate like a king. Yes, I bet. Feasted, man. That sounds great. Thanks, man. Thanks for welcoming me back. Still a little jet lag. So I've noticed. In case I get a little weird. That's why. Well, maybe one day we can hit up New Zealand on a tour. I would love that. And Australia, too. I know they love us over there. Well, we can't go to one without the other. I just did well for stuff you should know. Shell oh, I see what you mean. Sure. That would be rude. Yeah. Wood awesome. Well, welcome back. Thanks. And now Stonehenge. Have you ever been? No, I've been to London and that's it as far as the UK goes. Yeah, same here. I would love to go to Stonehenge. Me, too. It sounds like a very cool place and I wanted to go before I researched this, but now that I have, I'm, like, definitely want to go because it's not just Stonehenge. You think it's just Stonehenge, and you go and there's like the rock formation and you get in your car and go home. You could do that, but you'd be missing out on, like, a whole huge, rich tapestry of weirdo earthen works that are totally mysterious to us still to this day in that whole area. Yeah. I had no idea. I didn't either. It's a hotbed of hinges. Yeah. Which is technically a hinge, by the way, we should say is an earthworks. I didn't know that until I studied this. I didn't either. So it's an earthwork that consists of a bank and a ditch. And in most cases, the high bank encloses a ditch within it. Right. But Stonehenge, which gives the name hinge to other hinges sure. It's the opposite. It's a reverse hinge. It has the ditch on the outside of the bank. Yes. And it sort of looks, when you look at these images of hinges from above, sort of like a crop circle with nothing in the middle. Right. Yeah. And remember that's where the home of crop circle started was in that area, the Salisbury Plain and outer space. Right. All righty, Stonehenge. So like we said, Truckers, the whole reason for any of this stuff, for building these things, still defies understanding. Yeah. But exploration has gone back many centuries. You don't just walk past Stonehenge and say, oh, that's natural. It's clearly man made. But the idea behind it has been lost. But study of the whole thing has kind of has yielded some pretty good stuff. Like, for example, we have a pretty good idea of when Stonehenge was constructed and apparently it was constructed over a period of less than 200 years. Yeah. We also have a pretty good idea about where it is because is it where it is, which is 8 miles north of Salisbury, Wiltshire, England. Right. Home of crop circles. Home of crop circles. And where the Banshees live. And they do live well. The Banshees. Yeah. You're not a Spinal Tap fan. No, I've been having that song Stonehenge in my head all day on a loop. They talk about the banshees. That's one of the lines where the Banshees live. And they do live well. I thought they were from Ireland. The Banshees. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, they're talking about Druids in the song as well. Yeah. Final Tap, which is a common misconception that the Druids built Stonehenge. Right. Yeah. They have dated it. And they were not there at the same time. Correct. Yeah. So back in the 19th century, some antiquarians, which is what they used to call historians and archaeologists and stuff, before there were such things, figured that Stonehenge was some sort of Druidic temple, which made a lot of sense because the Druids were a weird mystery cult that were big on human sacrifice and all sorts of really interesting stuff. They were the priestly class of the Celts. Right, right. The problem is the Druids were around from about 300 BCE until the first century Ce, when the Romans suppressed them. And Stonehenge is way older than that. At least the whole Earthworks thing goes back at least 5000 years. Yeah. And that's the Earthworks, the actual large stones that it's most famous for, they date that between 26 20 and 24 80 BCE, which is about the same time as the Great Pyramids in Egypt. So if you're wondering how they managed to get these large stones, it's still a mystery. But they were not as advanced as the Middle East at the time. Right. So in the Middle East. No, they were well into, I guess. The Bronze Age. Well, at that time, Europe western Europe at least, was still in the Neolithic, the New Stone Age. So yeah, the idea that there was this massive public works is a huge mystery. Like why that happened, how it happened, how they got the stones there. There's another long held theory that was recently discarded, that the stones were moved there through glacial activity thousands, hundreds of thousands of years before. And they've checked it out and they said, no, the stones actually did come from Cory's, at a minimum, I think, of 40 miles away. Yeah. They said that even if there was glacial evidence, then it would not have been able to carry it that far. There's just no way. Yeah. So humans did, again, no idea how, because this is before the wheel was around in Western Europe. Which makes the whole thing that much more impressive. Yes. They've got some theories, like, basically things that sort of acted as wheels before they were technical wheels, like small rocks or stone ball bearings or the old log roller trick. Which makes sense, because the largest of these things can weigh up to \u00a350,000. Yeah. And the smallest ones are about \u00a35000.02 to five tons. Yes. The smallest one get the strongest men to lift these things. You got 100 strong men because they're only so big. You can't crowd that many dudes around and lift this thing anyway. Exactly. There's just no way. It's a mystery. It's a mystery. So let's talk about the stones themselves. I mean, this is what people think of when they talk about stonehenge, but there's more to it, and we'll get into it. But the stones, the upright stones are called Sarsons, right? That's right. And sarson is a kind of sandstone that's peculiar to the region. Yeah. And the closest they found this is the Marlborough Downs, about 20 miles away. So basically, if you haven't picked up on it by now, what we're saying is these stones weren't just laying around and they decided to prop them up. Right. At the very least, they were brought from 20 miles away and likely much further. Oh, I thought it was 40 miles away. 20 miles away. Well, they said the closest source of this sandstone is 20 miles away. Got you. Okay. But there's all different kinds of rocks, which we'll see. Yeah. So the Sarsons, it's a type of stone. But when you're talking about stonehenge, if somebody points to a stone and says, that sarson there, they're talking about the upright column. That's right. The Sarsons are topped in the outer circle and in the inner circle of stones by what are called lintals. That's right. Which are also sarsen stone, I believe. But because they're horizontal, on top of the upright ones, they're called lentils. And the upright ones are called sarson's. Right. Yeah. Pretty cool. And again, these are really heavy stones. And again, we have no idea how they got them there, how they erected them, and how they got the heavy ones on top of the upright ones. Yeah. That's crazy. That is pretty cool, because, again, we're talking about many ton stones. Right. Each, but as if just to show off for the people that followed, the people who erected stonehenge, carved the Sarsons with a knobs on top and carved the lentils with grooves so that they fitted and they were replicating a type of woodworking. Yeah. Mortise and Tenon and all put together. These are called a trilotheron. In the inner circle, the big ones. Yeah. When you have the Sarsons and the lentils, it's called the trilogy. And yeah. They don't know why they carved those, because apparently when I heard that, I was like, well, probably to make them fit together better. But they said that it really has nothing to do with it. Well, they said it's totally unnecessary. Yeah. So they think it may be symbolic, which we'll get to later. Sure. So you've got inside the inner circle, and I found this kind of thing. It's like describing a yoyo motion or something like that. Like a yoyo trick. It's just easier to go see it yourself. There's 1000 a million and 1000 great pictures of Stonehenge. Yes. 1,001,000 pixels. Just go look at one of them. So, yeah, it'll help if you're checking this out while we're describing it. But there's the inner circle of Stonehenge, and those are made of trilothons, which are two upright Sarsons and a lintel. Right? Yeah, there's five of those. And those are the big boys. Those things are like 30ft tall, I think is the tallest one. Yeah. I didn't realize it was that big. That's like 10 meters. Yeah. I would say you probably have to go there and say, oh, this is bigger than I thought. Right. Unless you thought it was bigger. Then you might say it was smaller than you thought. Yeah. Unless the opposite is true. And then in the outer circle, apparently, it was intended, or it was at one point, to be a complete circle. And this is made of lentils and Sarsons, but they're not trilogy because it's just basically if you took a bunch of sarsens, a bunch of upright columns and put them in circle and then topped it with as few lentils as would make a complete circle, that's what you have. So it made a ring. Yeah. And I think my impression is that it was not ever completed because there would probably be some evidence of the falling down Sarsons or something. Right. Well, unless they were taken away. That is the theory. That when the Romans came along, or then later on, when the church came to power after the fall of the Roman Empire, that locals were like, well, that's some pagan weirdness. Sure. We don't want to encourage paganism. Let's just take it and build a church that'll show them. So it's possible that some of those rocks are found in medieval churches in the area. Interesting. Isn't that crazy? That is crazy. That's cray. And there are four more of the sarsen stones that actually have names. The Slaughterstone, the Heelstone, which is huge, and then two station stones. And they're out of the outer sarson circle right inside the circle, and then also outside the circle, or what are called blue stones. These are the smaller stones that are between two and five tons still. Yeah. Little guys. But that's what they're called. There's a bunch of those guys, too. Yeah. And they're called blue stones because when they're cut or when they're wet, they look blue. Yeah. Pretty neat. So that's the stones, but that's just the blue stones. They're all different kinds of rock, which proves that they came from different sources. Right. It is the key. It also might get to the bottom of why Stonehenge was built. But we just touched the tip of the iceberg here by just talking about the rocks. We're going to talk about the larger hinge part and what was originally there right after this. All right, Tuckers. We're back. Yeah. I mentioned quickly before we broke about the blue stones coming from different places. One of the places they think that eleven of these bad boys came from was in western Wales, 140 miles away. Nuts. So that's probably the maximum some of these sons traveled, which it kind of gives a little bit of credence weirdly to one of the old legends of where stonehenge came from, which was Merlin. Merlin and some of his boys stole it from Ireland and the stones proved too heavy for, I guess, Merlin's men to lift, even 15,000 of them. So he just uses magic to load them onto the boat, which he should have done to begin with. Yeah. They were like, why didn't you try this before Jimmy broke his back. Right. Jimmy the Knight. Yeah, sir Jimmy. That was from the Historia. Regumme Britannia. That sounds like magic. Yeah. The history of the Kings of Britain from Jeffrey of Monmouth. How's that guy's name? And that was the one of the original Jeffrey of Monmouth. Yeah. With a gauffrey joffrey. That was one of the original theories was that giants built this and that to commemorate the death in the battle against the Saxons, was when Merlin was like, let's steal this stuff. The giants dance. Steal it. The giants built it in Ireland, and Merlin was like, let's go steal that because 400 Britons died. Brittons. All right, so that was one of the theories. We'll get to a few more of those in a bit. Okay, all right. But jumping back to the Salisbury Plain, what they do think is true is that they not giants. Not giants, not Merlin. This was a good place for hunting. It was a good hunting ground. Oh, yeah. Because there's a causeway from glacial heaving and thawing, it formed what they call like an avenue, which is made of chalk, apparently. Oh, really? So this avenue coincides with the rising of the summer solstice and then the setting eventually with the winter solstice. And for many years they thought this was like, this meant something, but now we think that it's just coincidence. Right. But I mean, if you're hunting woolly mammoths and eating psychedelic mushrooms, and that's your existence. You see the sun come up and then go down and it's crazy. Like on the longest and the shortest day of the year, and there's like a white chalk line connecting the two. Sure. You got to put a little significance on this. Yeah, of course. So they did. That's why they think that they chose the site for stonehenge. Like it was sacred and divinely inspired. Exactly, yeah. Again, you were on a ton of mushrooms at the time, so it made sense then. Okay. That's right. Don't judge. So we mentioned the hinge earlier. These hinges, I don't think we pointed out. They're not natural formations. No, they are designed and built by people. And so something like 3000 years BC. So about 5000 years ago, on the nose almost, some Neolithic Western Europeans in the area of what is now the Salisbury Plain grabbed some deer antlers, turn them into pickaxes, and started digging the circles that ended up becoming the ditches, that ended up becoming Stonehenged. They built the earthworks, they dug the ditch, they made the bank. And then you had this raised ground long before the stones ever showed up. Yeah, about 330ft across. And like you said earlier, at the beginning, it is a reverse hinge because the high bank is on the inside and not the outside. Right. Usually the ditch is inside the bank. That's right. Rather than outside. I don't know why Stonehenge is different. Who knows? Maybe they started to make and we're like, oh, man, we made it backwards. Yeah, but we've already done, like, 100ft. I'm not digging another one. So they left a wider entrance on one side on the northeast end, which is kind of that avenue that's like, where the avenue runs into Stonehenge. Yeah, the main entrance almost like a road to a roundabout or cul de sac. Yeah, maybe that's what it was. It was Sun Temple cul de sac. And then there's a narrow entrance on the south side. And that's not all that's there they found all these holes, the Aubrey holes. 56 of them, basically, where they think that there were wooden posts, that there were either totems or some kind of a structure there previously. Yeah, that's very significant. Something like 10,000 years ago, I think about 8000 BCE, somebody put up three pine posts. They think it was probably pine. Yeah. Those are not the Aubrey holes. Those are different. Right. They discovered that they were going to make a parking lot for Stonehenge in the while they were excavating. Yeah, I guess I should qualify that. Well, there would be a parking lot in the 1860s. You don't know. Who knows? Well, actually, I guess we do know now there wouldn't be one. Yeah. So in the 1960s, they were going to put a parking lot and they discovered these three postholes, and they were like, these probably held totems of some sort. This is huge because there's no other site like it. There's no evidence of any other kind of monument building this far back, 10,000 years ago in Europe. Yeah. That's crazy. So at least as far back as that, this site was considered somehow significant, if not sacred, by the locals 10,000 years ago. Yes. All right. But then again, we're fast forwarding to 5000 years ago, 3000 BCE. And that's when the Earthworks have been constructed. The hench is built. Now we're under the Aubrey holes because I think they were deposited at the same time. Right? Yeah. 56 of them. And like I said, they could have held blue stones. Maybe that was a structure. Maybe it was some sort of astronomical design or layout or something. They didn't leave a book behind saying what they were doing. So I don't know. It's all the speculation. All we know is there is a circle of holes that probably held something at some point, we don't know what. But that was the original hench, the original Stone hench. Yeah. And then that was the first stage, right? Yeah. Basically between 26 20 and 24 80 is when these Sarson horseshoe came about. Yeah, about 300 or so years. Like what we know is after the first construction of the Earthworks, the stones come in. That's right. Yeah. So they bring the stones in again, like you said, from as far away as Wales. The nearest is 20 miles away. There is definitely a Corey. Some stones came from like 40 miles away. So they're coming from all these different places and they're being brought in and erected and then that's the second phase. So the Stonehenge, as we know and love it today, was built about 26 20 BCE. Then about 2300 BCE. The last phase of construction, as far as anybody can tell, is undertaken and it's basically like sprucing up the place. That's right. That's when they dug their ditches and banks. That's when the avenue was cleared out, which is 1.7 miles long, by the way. Yeah, that's significant. Using deer antler, axe picks, they made ditches on either side of this avenue to clarify it, I guess, for 2 miles, basically. It's pretty amazing. And it followed a route to the River Avon. And then over the next few hundred years, basically, they would reposition some of these stones, these blue stones. I don't know why. To fit their whims, maybe? Or should they have reasons? That's another mystery, too. Some of the stuff would be moved around from one place to another. Yeah. You said that it goes to the River Avon. Sure. And I think about 2000 there was a big archaeological survey undertaken that uncovered another hinge called Bluestone hinge. That was where the avenue hits the River Avon. So at the far end of Stonehenge, they think that's where the blue stones came from. So apparently originally they may have had another type of hinge closer to the river and decided, let's move it into Stonehenge proper. Yeah. No idea why. I used to go camping at a place called Sunfish Pond at the Delaware Water Gap when I lived in New Jersey. And there was at Sunfish Pond there's this one big rock bank, basically, which is tons of these huge, awesome rocks, and people would build just things out of them. Yeah, those little totems or little structures. And I think everyone that went there, it was part of the ritual of camping there was to spend a day moving these rocks around and doing stuff that's cool. And I think this could very well be what happened here. People would show up hundreds of years later and be like, I kind of like the look of that, but maybe this would look better over there. Maybe there wasn't some grand reason other than artistic. I get that. My question is this. If you're talking about the smallest stone weighing two tons, that's not like, well, that's true. Some hippie just going to move this stone. You got to get a bunch of hippies together to move one of those. Yeah. So it's a community effort. Every stage of Stonehenge is a communal effort, which is that's important. They probably had more significance than just artistic. But what is that urge that drove people out in the woods where sunfish gap. Sunfish pond. Sunfish Pond. That drove them to move the rocks around? What made you do it? Seeing other people doing it and thinking, I want to build my own. Yeah, well, like, rock stacking is a thing, too, right? Yeah. I mean, that's basically what we were doing. Okay. Stacking rocks, huh? Yeah. So it's an ancient primeval urge. I guess. So we'll talk a little more about some of the surrounding landscape in Stonehenge right after this. So, Chuck, Stonehenge isn't the only place, the only Neolithic weirdness in the area. No, man. There's a lot of Wicker Man stuff going on. Yeah, there was. There's something like a thousand barrows, which are like mound tombs. There's some other hinges that don't have stones, necessarily. There's one called Wood Hinge, but probably the most important other site around there is called Durrington Walls. Yes. It is also a hinge, and it's on the other side of the River Avon. And one of the very significant things about Durrington Walls is that it has an avenue as well that's aligned with the sun on certain days, and they just happened to be the opposite days of the Stonehenge Avenue or the same day, but the opposite position. That's right. It had a couple of timber circles. It's about the same size as Stonehenge, roughly. And they think that this could have been like a staging area for what Stonehenge would become, which doesn't make sense to me. Like, they're saying this is possibly the builders camp for Stonehenge 2 miles away. That's not a convenient camp. No, that's a good point. Plus, also so you've got Stonehenge, right? Right. And then you have the River Avon, and then a little further up, the River Avon, but across the other side, you have Durrington Walls. And on the summer solstice, stonehenge hosts the summer sunrise. Right? Yeah. But on that same day, Durrington Walls, that avenue, features the summer sunset, so they're aligned. Clearly, they have something to do with one another, at least in the Neolithic mind. That's right. So it's not just stonehenge. This whole site is lousy with it. But why? Yeah, I guess we should look at some of the older theories first that have sort of been debunked. We already talked about the giants dance in Merlin, the wizard which we don't believe anymore because we're modern thinking guys. Sure. King James I, in the 17th century, did an excavation of the site, and they found a bunch of animal bones and burnt coals, which I was just learning about him. He was a scholar king. Oh, really? Yeah, he was pretty interesting. Well, he had, like, the King James Bible. Sure. He had that translated. But he also was like an early essayist oh, yeah. Which was a new thing at the time. He was just a smart dude. Nice. As far as kings went. He wasn't just like the fat, drunk turkey, like eating time. You know what I'm saying? Like, he actually was a thinking person. Well, if he commissioned an excavation, that means he probably had a little bit of interest in things like this. This is before archaeology even. Yeah. He could have just had people beheaded and ate his turkey. Sure. It's good for him. We're down with King James. Is that what you're saying? Yes. All right. So I don't think we mentioned either yet that there have been a lot of body well, not body parts, but bones found. Human cremains. Wait, we're not animals. We're calling that, if I remember correctly. Oh, really? Cremated remains, I think. Why was that defensive? Yes. Remember, funeral directors don't like to call them cremeins. They said that that's just too shorthand. Right. It sounds like a McDonald's. I got cremes in my burger and my McJob. But there have been a lot of they think one possibility was that it was a burial ground for maybe royalty. It's mostly been men. So maybe important people. Yes. Which is another reason why what was it called? Mortise and tenant. That would be working in yeah. And we didn't mention that. With the outer circle where everything fits together, they used a woodworking technique called dovetailing, so that the lentils fit together to form, like a well tony groove. Yes, exactly. So there's all this kind of woodworking simulation that's totally unnecessary. So they're thinking maybe that they were replicating a monument to a human dwelling, which could suggest basically a mausoleum of sorts. Yeah. And that ties in with the theory that if Durrington Walls was a place of the living, stonehenge was a place of the dead. And that's how they are connected. Yeah. In Durrington Walls, they call it a place of living because there's evidence of settlement, like human habitation, lots of animal bones, like from food waste. Yeah. So, yeah, it's clear that people lived. Not as many dead bodies. Exactly. There's another theory that it's possible Stonehenge was a place of healing. There's something called the Amesbury archer who was discovered and he was contemporaneous to Stonehenge. He had a knee injury, and they thought, well, maybe he was on his way to Stonehenge or something. Right. They did a survey of the injuries and evidence of illness of the remains at Stonehenge and found that it was about. The same as other contemporary sites. So they don't think that it was a place of healing, not like a spa. Right. Probably a place of the dead. Probably so. And a lot of this new way of thinking has come about since the with a guy named Mike Parker Pearson led the stonehenge riverside project. And they've kind of brought, like, debunked a lot of these older theories that it was maybe a monument for astronomy or some of the other things we talked about. Yeah, apparently, like, if you're a stonehenge expert, you say, yes, stonehenge was clearly constructed in some way related to the summer solstice and the winter solstice, the sun. But they kind of draw the line at they used it to predict solar eclipses and stuff like that. They're saying there's no evidence of that. No. Although it could be true, but they just don't know. They just haven't figured it out yet. Another theory that I like, that's one of the more modern theories is that it was a monument to unification, just kind of neat. Which makes sense that the Britons at the time were from all sorts of tribes and that they blended together there. And that's why they might have brought stones from all over the place as a symbol of our unification. Yeah. Like, here's some stones from Wales. Here's some from here, here's some from there. And here's a big monument to us all coming together to one day rule the world. Well, significantly, the stonehenge site is at the area where three different chieftains territories came together. So it is possible that if not a monument to a monument from cooperation from these groups. Remember we talked about the upper paleolithic warlessness? Supposedly these chieftains where they peacefully coexisted, which also could explain why stonehenge came about. One of the things you do to keep your populations occupied and busy is creating massive public structures, projects like pyramids or something like that. And stonehenge could have been the result of that, of clever chief saying, I need to do something to keep everybody busy. Let's make stonehenge. Yeah. There's so many people buried there in and around stonehenge. They say, like, maybe thousands of people have been buried there. So I think it was probably just some sort of final resting place that looked nice and they dressed it up. Yeah. And it's probable that the people there were part of the elite ruling class there's. Like, they found incense burner, polished mace head, some other evidence that the people there had some sort of political, religious power. Sure. That kind of stuff. And like we said, they're mostly men, which at the time, of course, there would have been the people in power. Yeah, at the time. That's right. Not like these days, women can do anything they want. We need to do an episode on the equal rights amendment, man. It's just mind blowing to me. Yeah, let's do it. Okay. What inspired that? Patricia sharkette the facetiousness about men being in power. Oh, sure. Yeah. Or not being in power. Yeah, let's do that one. Okay. Patricia arquette inspired me. I'm like meryl streep here. Yeah, man, that was awesome. She's digging it. Yeah. You got anything else? I'm sure we could go on about this for a while, but why? There was one theory that they erected stonehenge to create this piper's illusion. Did you hear about that? Yeah. Like, two pipers in the field are playing in certain places. They will cancel each other out. Yeah, which is weird. It's a weird acoustic phenomenon. And apparently in stonehenge, this phenomenon is replicated. And there is also an old legend that stonehenge was the result of pipers leading maidens into a field and then turning them to stone. Well, there's this acoustic archaeologist. Who believes that, like, a lot more archaeological sites than we realize, we're dedicated to sound interesting. And he has this theory about stonehenge may or may not be right. I get the impression that he was also postulating it to get attention to his theory. Yeah, well, there's definitely some weird acoustic features at stonehenge, so you can't discount that. Yeah. Was it a byproduct or was it intentional? Who knows? We don't even know why they built it in the first place. Well, we're going to have to visit it if we ever go to england for a live show. For sure. Maybe we'll do a live show at stonehenge. Pink floyd, they did something at the they did pompeii. Yeah. Which I've been there, and it's amazing. Not just because it's pompeii, but because pink floyd played there. Sure. We'll do our live thing at stonehenge. I think, if I'm not mistaken, pink floyd live at pompeii was a concert in front of nobody. Yeah. Well, on the echoes video, they're not playing in front of anything. That was the deal. I've got one more thing. There was a horrible police brutality incident at stonehenge. Oh, really? Yeah. There was this hippie movement called the new age. Travelers from the into the. Then in 1985, they were going to celebrate the summer solstice at stonehenge. They had the year before, but 100,000 people showed up and just trashed the place, like, dug into the ground to build bread ovens and toilets and just totally laid ways to the place. Yeah. And so the locals were like, you can't go to stonehenge again. So the cops tried to barricade it. The hippies tried to break through the cops club. The hippies, including pregnant women and women holding children. Wow. There were eyewitnesses. It was a horrible scene. And it was later called the battle of the beanfield. And after that, for the next 15 years, you weren't allowed to go celebrate the summer solstice, which is a big thing for neo druids and stuff. Sure. At stonehenge. And then finally, in 2000, the english heritage group I can't remember what the full name is. English heritage? Yeah. They're in charge of stonehenge. They opened it back up. So now I think the most recent summer solstice had like 30,000 or so people peacefully celebrating it. I think if you dig there, though, you're in big trouble still. Yeah. Appropriate. I imagine it's a secure location. Yes. You can't just back into it like Clark Griswald. Okay. Now I really don't have anything else. Okay. If you want to learn more about stonehenge, you can type that word into the search bar@housetofworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listing or mail. I'm going to call this ice cream email. And speaking of ice cream, we should thank a local ice creamery here, high Road Creamery. Yeah. High Road here in Atlanta. Well, just outside of Atlanta, they got in touch with us, two people did, and one person said, hey, I don't know if you've heard of us, but you should try our ice cream. And another person emailed from High Road, and I was like, yeah, you should. They said, we'll send you ice cream. I was like, I like, you better. Yeah. So they sent us some ice cream, and it's delicious, and we just want to say thanks. And nutritious. I don't know about that because it rhymes and you know it rhymes, but this is about ice cream from Nathan. Hey, guys. And Jerry just listened to you how ice cream works episode and thought your tuna gelato story reminded me of my own terrible gelato story when I refresh people about tuna gelato. Yeah. If you go to Plaza Fiesta, the Latin American mall in Atlanta on Beaufort Highway, there's a gelato place there that at least a year or two ago sold raw tuna flavored gelato. It's dead on the taste. So we lived in Naples, Italy, for two years ago and fell in love with real Italian gelato. And it's safe to say my wife and daughter would get it at least three times a week all year round. We took our summer holiday one year to a city called Tropea in the Calabria region. The city is famous for red onions, so much so that red onions in Italy are all called chipola ditropea. As we were walking through the city, we saw a place that had onion gelato, though. Decided to try it. I don't know. I know. Luckily, my wife was smart and suggested I tried it before I ordered the whole cone of the stuff. Let me tell you, it was awful. It tasted like a spoonful of onion powder, and it had the consistency of snot and was cold. It was all I could do to choke it down without throwing up. Even after eating tasty strawberry and lemon gelato, the taste still lingered. To make it worse, every time I burnt the rest of the night, I got to relive the taste. So that's my story, guy. I will steer clear of the tuna gelato if you stay away from the onion gelato, I will stay away from the onion gelato, but I think you should try the tuna gelato. That's the deal. Nathan. Yeah. Chow, he says. Chow bella and all that. I would taste any of those with small spoonful. Yes, I use the very tip of my tongue and onion. It was weird. It wasn't bad. It was really surprising that you could get that taste. It's probably just ground up tuna froze with some yogurt. It's not hard, dummy. If you want to get in touch with us for any reason whatsoever, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffychano. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at how stuffworks.com. And as always, you can hang out with us at our luxurious, nutritious, delicious home on the web stuffyhood.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. 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, you can access new episodes early. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-08-12-sysk-mccarthyism.mp3 | SYSK Selects: How McCarthyism Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-mccarthyism-works | In this week's SYSK Select episode, if you're accusing someone of disloyalty or subversion without decent evidence, then you may be guilty of McCarthyism. In this episode, Josh and Chuck explore the origin of the term, starting with the infamous Communist | In this week's SYSK Select episode, if you're accusing someone of disloyalty or subversion without decent evidence, then you may be guilty of McCarthyism. In this episode, Josh and Chuck explore the origin of the term, starting with the infamous Communist | Sat, 12 Aug 2017 15:43:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=15, tm_min=43, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=224, tm_isdst=0) | 40618614 | audio/mpeg | "Hi, there. It's Josh. And for the SYSK selects this week I've chosen how McCarthyism works unfortunately, it seems like it's always a pertinent time to cover McCarthyism. There's always some jerk who's persecuting other people people, and I hope it opened some eyes, might not otherwise have been open to our friends in the gay community. Our apologies for using the word homosexual without making air quotes. This was five or so years ago, and I like to think we've evolved somewhat since then. But still, sorry about that. And just as a final note, you should probably disregard the rules to the contest that's now defunct, that's come up at the end of the episode. Contest has come and gone, and it was fun, so enjoy the Stuff You Should Know. Select welcome to stuff you should know from Housetopworkscom. The Dream Police. They get me out of my bed. That's all in my head. In my head. Right? Dream Police live inside of my head. Okay, well, come to me in my bed. Okay, thank you. I'm so glad you're here, Mr. 40 Year Old Guy. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and that is Chuck Bryant. Is that how we're starting? Yeah. All right. And since we started off with Dream Police, you know that this is Stuff You Should know. And you actually now know more about the Dream Police than you did before, I'll wager. Yeah. That's one of my Halloween costume goals one day, is to dress up as a Dream Policeman. How would you do that? Just mimic what they did on the cover. They were like these white police uniforms, and it was all white. Cool. Okay. I saw a tour T shirt, an original tour T shirt. Who is that? Cheap Trick. Oh, is it? Yes. I didn't know that. That was my very first concert. Nice. Was it the Dream Police tour? No, I'm not that old. Okay. The one on one tour. So I'm Josh. That's Chuck. Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this is the weirdest intro we've ever done. Yeah. Hands down. But we're here. We've started houseworks can only afford so much tape, so we can't go back and record over that. No. So we're just going to plug ahead. All right. Are you ready? I'm ready. Chuck. Josh, we talked about Cheap Trick, but have you ever heard of another band called the Dixie Chicks? Indeed you have. Sure. So you may remember that back in 2003 and I believe March of 2003, apparently, like ten days before the US. Invaded Iraq, but when everybody knew that the US. Was about to invade a rock, the Dixie Chicks had a concert in London. And on stage, the lead singer, whose name escapes me at the moment, natalie, I believe. Okay. Natalie. She basically came out and said that they opposed the war and that they opposed the violence. And here was the kicker, that they're ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas. Dixie Chicks are also from Texas. Right. But they were saying they're ashamed of the President. Right, I remember that. This is in London, and they still did not have an easy time of it. Immediately, the international press jumped on it, made its way back to the United States and it was war on the Dixie Chicks and their lack of patriotism and their disloyalty. People held demonstrations where they burn their CDs and T shirts and stuff. And ultimately there is a radio group called Clearwater, I believe that refused to give them any radio play. And it was pretty rough going for them. They couldn't get any work or anything like that for several years. And I was looking for something to intro this episode on McCarthyism with. There you go. That is new. McCarthyism yeah, they were blacklisted. Yeah, they couldn't get work because they expressed an unpopular, unpatriotic sentiment and basically everybody turned on them. McCarthy ism almost hysterically. One could say they were turned on. Yeah, very good. But they're back, baby. The Dixie Chicks are backing better than ever. Are they? I don't know. Didn't they do, like, a whole lot of USO touring and stuff to kind of shake it off? I don't know. I think they did. Hooked up with Toby Keith. Yeah, that'll do it. This jingle ism rubs off on you. Like, Stank, get near that guy and you just start to turn red, white and blue. McCarthyism is that where we are? Yes, I think I got us there. So where do we start with this man communism. Well, let's define McCarthyism I mean, that's a pretty good modern touchstone, but there's an actual definition of it. What does Webster say? Well, what is the American Heritage Dictionary? Hey, man, Webster was British. You turned to the American Heritage Dictionary to look up McCarthyism that's right. The political practice of publicizing accusations of disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence. So that's kind of the key there. Yeah, it's basically saying, like, I publicly accuse you of being disloyal to this country and not caring about mom and apple pie and baseball, and I'm going to tell everybody about it, and I do. Even though I don't really have any real evidence. It's just suspicion. It's railroading. And this is all because of Jenny McCarthy, right, yeah. Cormac McCarthy. Sure. Okay. No, of course. Joseph McCarthy. Yeah, that was his name. And he was a senator. Should we give a little background on this guy? Yeah. Born in 19. Eight, if I'm not mistaken. That is right. He's a Scanny. He went to Marquette. Golden Eagles. Golden Eagles, really? Yeah. You know them from basketball? No, I looked it up. Okay. It's pretty impressive. I do know them from basketball, though. He became an attorney in 1935 during the Great Depression and became the youngest circuit court judge in Wisconsin history in 1939 at the age of 31. Very young. Yeah. That is young. For a judge even then, even on old timing times. That's right. Joined the Marines in World War II, but because of a hazing incident or accident, had a broken foot. So he was, I guess, discharged. Yeah. After years. But impressively, he made it to captain in those two years. So he's a Marine captain, and he wrote that for all it was worth as far as using it to get elected to Senate. Right. In 19 before he ran for Senate in Wisconsin and lost. But that's where he cultivated his image of Tail Gunner Joe. That was his name. And he just kind of, like you said, rode that military service for all it was worth. Yes. But he did win a couple of years later in 1946 and became a junior senator and was sort of floundering as a senator as far as making a name for himself until he latched on to the idea of let's get some attention here and start calling out people in power as secret Communists. Yeah. So he had this two prong attack chucky. It wasn't just like calling out these secret Communists. It was simultaneously calling out the soft liberal establishment that was apparently fine with letting Communists gain position of powers within the US. Government. Which was not true. Or was it? Yes. It's not. Well, in 50 in West Virginia, he gave a speech on Lincoln's birthday, and he had this list of, like, 208 names of people who worked for the State Department that he said were, like, Communists, drug addicts, sexual deviants, which was aka for being gay, and said that these people need to be rooted out. And the list was accurate. It had been published a few years before by the State Department. But he was using it as an example of not only is this real, are these people really in government power? Right. But the State Department itself published this list, and these people still work there. So what's going on? Let's go get the Communist out of government. Okay. And almost immediately, this fervor, this anticommunist fervor that had just been kind of slumbering and was there and taking shape. Right. There was plenty there. People didn't like the Communists in the US. Before McCarthy. That's right. But McCarthy came and added a level of jingoism to it that just completely created this anti Communist hysteria in America. Yeah. There's a little bit of I don't know about controversy, but back and forth about how many people are on this list. Initially, he said 205, but then when he submitted the speech formerly to Truman the next day, I think two days later, it was 57 names. Right. And so it's kind of gone back and forth over the years on whether it's 205 or 57. So I think the original list that he got his hands on and was unedited was 205. But possibly there's just 57 Communists on the list, and the rest were drug addicts or alcoholics. Or whatever. The irony is, Chuck, that had he been screened by that State Department test, he probably would have been on the list himself because he was a pronounced alcoholic. Joe McCarthy was. And did you know this? He was apparently gay? I heard that. But there's been no proof of that. No, it is conjecture. But there's conjecture that not only was he gay and there's rumor back in the fifties, but not only is there conjecture that he was gay, but that his top aide, Roy Cohn and Roy Cohn's top aide, David Shine, were gay as well. Well, I think cone was. Was he definitely gay? Yeah. Okay. I mean, he died of AIDS in the 80s. Not that means you're gay, but I think he was known to be gay. Okay. That one was lost on me, of course. What's his name, too? Jay Edgar. Oh, yeah. So it was a weird time. Yeah. There's a lot of homosexuals persecuting other homosexuals. Yeah. Public office for that. Allegedly. Well, I'm curious then. Is McCarthy just gay by association? Because Roy Cohn was I don't know, I think it was just never proven. Like, he dated two of the Kennedy girls and was married later on. Well, yeah, he got married in 1952, right after the first public accusation that he was gay was published in a column. So he turned around and married a secretary and then they adopted a five week old. That's kind of the formula, isn't it? I guess so. Like, oh, no, I'm in love with my secretary. Right. Look. Watch this. So whether he was or whether he wasn't is kind of irrelevant. But it's fun to talk about. Yeah. Or is it irrelevant? Well, no, it's not. Of course not. Okay. All 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? 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 fourweek trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. Well, let's get back to it. So he starts waving this list. The list is out there. He's got proof that the government is turning its back on known Communists who work in its own ranks, and America starts just going crazy. Well, yeah, and it's important to know what's going on here at the time. This is the second red scare. The first one was during World War I and after, and it was pretty brutal, like jailing people, deporting people with not much evidence. This was the second one. And at the time, a couple of things had happened that preceded a speech. China had just been taken over a couple of months earlier by Communist Chairman Mao. Very big deal. The Soviet had just exploded their first atomic bomb, thanks to the Rosenberg. Very well get to that, too. Leaders of the Communist Party of the United States, which I think they maxed out at about 75,000 members at a certain point, which a lot of people, they had been convicted of conspiring to overthrow the government. So people were ready for this speech. It was like just the icing on the cake for this fervor. Right. And I think something that's often overlooked because all of the blame for this hysteria, if you can call it that, even these days, is laid at the feet of Joe McCarthy. But he was definitely building upon, like, you say, something that was already there. Like there was the Sedition Act, the Espionage Act, the Alien Registration Act. All these were acts that were passed by the US. Government in response to fear of Communists. And he figured out how to use them to his advantage, to root Communists out of the country, basically, and to make a name for himself. Well, that was part of politics. Well, sure. That might have been a big part of it. His big problem was, though, was that it's not illegal to be a Communist in the United States. Sure it is. It's not, though. It is illegal, thanks to the Alien Registration Act, to even a bet to basically sit by and let somebody try to overthrow the government. And that's what they use to arrest the leaders of the Communist Party of the United States. Subversion. Yeah, that's what he was trying to get everybody on. So basically, he would bring you in front of his congressional committee and just give you the business, basically say, Admit it. Yeah. And the other thing, too, though, is like, he was immediately almost attacked by both political parties for the speech. It wasn't like people the President was rallying around McCarthy. He didn't get along with Truman or Eisenhower. No, Truman was one of his great detractors. Yeah, Eisenhower was a supporter at first, but, as we'll see, changed sides. I know, but yeah, he found Truman to be a little too soft on Communist, even though Truman was the one who made sure the Alien Registration Act got passed. It's a weird time. Yeah, it really was. So should we talk about the Rosenberg, since you've lobbed that out there. I have julius and Ethel Rosenberg very famously were executed. Only Americans ever to be executed for espionage in the Cold War period, right. No, I think civil war had plenty of people excluded from they hung people left and right, and they were, in fact, Communists. They were known Communists. And pledge to Fifth, which a lot of people did, which ended up biting them all on their collective, took us because that was tan amount to a lot of people as a guilty plea. Right. And of course, the Fifth Amendment gives you the right to not testify on your own behalf, to incriminate yourself. Yeah, to protect against self incrimination. Right. The problem is, I think even today, a lot of people say, well, what do you have to incriminate yourself about? If you don't want to say anything, doesn't that mean you have something to hide? You're guilty. And that was huge during the McCarthy trials. That if you pled the Fifth, you're basically saying, like, I'm not admitting to being guilty, and everybody says guilty. That's true. But however, the Rosenberg, it has been found through the vanilla transcripts, and those were secret Russian taped recordings that were decoded in the 40s but held onto until what the is when they were released and made public. So now that the venona transcripts are out, we know that Ethel Rosenberg was at the most, an accessory to this and not a blatant seller of American secrets. But was her husband guilty? Her husband was guilty of well, here's what this says. It says they did not give the Soviets the secret of the bomb because they never possessed the secret of the bomb. Okay. And that there was evidence that Julius was passing on information to the KGB, but it was a military industrial rather than atomic well selling out Boeing. So it's not like they were like, yeah, that's great. They were just working with the KGB on other things. But the fact that they were executed is largely looked on now that this has come out as a miscarriage and justice. Well, plus, also, if they're blamed, like in this very article, they're blamed for passing along the information that gave the Russians the bomb. Not so, which led to, like, one of the tensest periods in world history, I imagine. Just their reputation, aside from the fact that they were executed, just their reputation being tarnished in that way. That's kind of a big deal. It was. But you mentioned the van owner cables they were intercepted and decoded in. The problem was, McCarthy apparently didn't have clearance enough to get his hands on these things, so this is all the evidence he ever needed, but he could never produce it. So what he did instead was use really awful bully tactics to intimidate people into admitting they were Communists. And every single interview, every single session was started with the same question, as far as I understand. Right, yeah. Are you now or have you ever been I don't even have it in front of me. What was it? It is are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States? Right. That's how I thought. You're going to open the show, by the way. No. I was going to talk about the Dream police. How did you not see that coming? He did all this it should be known from the seat as the chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, which increase his level of power. But I think initially he was given that position to sort of say, here, just go play in that sandbox. I don't think they realize what power it gave him at the time. He was very smart. He knew what he was doing. But this was not HUAC. No. And let's talk about whoack. The House and American Activities Committee. Yes. First established in 1937, and it was established to investigate things like espionage, subversion, that kind of thing, including stuff by communists. But it also originally investigated subversion by the right and the left, and it was a House, and he was a senator. Oh, yeah. So that's why a lot of people, I think, still think that he was the chairman of Whoac, but that's not the case. Well, how did he use it then? I think they worked in concert. Okay. That's the best I could figure out. And I was looking at that, I was like, well, why is it always talking about who at? Because they were involved in the blacklist of Hollywood. Right. But he was heading up that thing, so I guess maybe it was just kind of hand in hand, like you say, working in concert, because the blacklist of Hollywood happened three years before he even gave his speech in West Virginia. Is that when it started? Yeah. Who act? The House on American Activities Committee was started in 1937. Like I said, they investigated the right and the left, but they never investigated the clan because apparently the three guys who were in power of the Huek were all clan sympathizers, if not members. Wow. So the clan never got investigated, but everybody else did, including the Communists, and there was already sniffed out as just a really insincere political tool. That's how it was being used. And there was a guy who was the head of the Progressive, and he basically said, you guys are using this committee as a way to wrap the flag over your grease stained togas. You never have to explain your vote, because all you can do, you can oppose anything. You can oppose labor unions, you can oppose the farmer, you can oppose anything you want and never have to answer for it because you just say that you're fighting the Communists. Yeah, well, the labor unions was a big part of the first Red Scare, the rise of the labor unions and all these strikes going on, and people are like, the labor parties, they're Communist. Right, exactly. But that's how it happens, basically. They say the Labor Party, communism. Same thing. The American public doesn't put too much thought into it, buys it, and now still to this day, people compare the two. Yeah. Sad. It's less than indelible, Mark. You could say it has. And like you said, he was an intimidator, threatened prison. No evidence, or very little evidence. And he would attack people, release names publicly, and ruin people's lives without any recourse. Except that in 1957, the Supreme Court ruled that Constitutional rights of witnesses were guaranteed during a congressional investigation. Even though it's not court. Right. So they got a law on the books, thankfully, thanks to him. Yeah. Apparently McCarthy's big problem was he had good information, just no evidence. He got all of his information from the FBI, from Hoover's FBI, but it was basically just hear saying conjecture. That was right. There was just no evidence to back it up. So, yeah, he just used to try to beat people over the head and intimidate them into agreeing. And it worked a lot of times. It had worked before, too, when Hollywood was blacklisted. Do you want to talk about Hollywood? Yeah, let's do it. This is the most interesting part to me as a movie guy. So we were talking about how there was this blacklist that was created. There's an official version, as I understand, right, an official blacklist. Is there? Or was it all unofficial? No, I mean, like 320 people were on it, but there's some like, Orson Welles was supposedly on it and Charlie Chaplin, but I don't think that was proven, or maybe I'm wrong. I couldn't find I really found a list of people, but I don't know if there was an official list passed around. There probably was. So basically, there was a pamphlet called Red Channels, and it was put together by some FBI guys and a producer in Hollywood, a rightleaning producer. And it was a blacklist. It was basically the blacklist, and it was distributed to everybody in the entertainment industry. And basically, if your name was on there, to get work, you had to go up here before the House on American Activities Committee or McCarthy and clear your name, and then you could get work again. Or name names. Name names. And a lot of people did. Like Lee J. Cobb, great actor, and Twelve Angry Men. He named names. He apparently put up a heck of a fight for a while and then finally said, My family is starving. And I thought about it. I'm not willing to die for this. So here's some names. And then he named some names, and some of those people would name some more names. And people were naming names. Other people were going to Europe like CHEP Baker. He was on the list because he was gay, as far as I understand. So he went to Europe and never came back to the US. I believe. Yeah. Chaplin went overseas to get work, too. Elia elia Kazan very famously named names director, legendary director, on the waterfront, named eight names of people that were already known to be communist. So that was his reasoning, was, I got to save my career. I'm not willing to go down for this. They already know these people, so I'm just going to name those eight. Did you watch the Oscars in 2002 when he got his honorary award? It was divisive, to say the least. They brought him out there. I think Scorsese and De Niro brought them out, and they showed reaction shots of the crowd, some people standing and cheering, and then like Ed Harris and Amy Madagan sitting there scowling and like Nick Nulty sitting on his hands. Yeah, you don't want to tick off Amy Mad again. I bet she's mean. That was really divisive before the blacklist, though. Or I don't know if it was before the blacklist, but the Hollywood Ten were very famous because they were ten screenwriters. I think nine of the ten were screenwriters. One was a director, but they always pick on the writers. But they were questioned by McCarthy and said, we're not cooperating. We're going to claim our First Amendment right to free speech. And eight were sentenced to a year in prison. Two received six month sentences and out of the blacklist. And that was the Waldorf statement, very famously was issued. The head of the MPAA, met with basically the member of every major Hollywood studio behind closed doors, developed their blacklist, released the Waldorf statement because it was at the Waldorf historia, and said, these people aren't going to work again. And here are their names. Well, and I think at the end, out of the 300 and something, only about 10% ever worked again. So sad. Burgess Meredith, he was on the list. He worked again. He was great in Batman. In the Rocky movies. Yeah. Oh, and Batman. Yeah. Remember the point? Euromastell, he was on there. He was great in The Producers. Pete Zebra, he was folk singer. 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 there were, like real repercussions of this. Not just basically a single senator deciding that he was going to interpret the Constitution anyway. He liked not just whipping up this fear among the average American person, but there were people whose careers were ruined, whose lives were ruined, who just lost their livelihoods because they went to a Communist meeting or something ten years before, or maybe even were Communists. Probably the big problem with this is McCarthy took a really in Randesque approach to this where he kind of interpreted allowing Hollywood to espouse any kind of Communist ideas as a moral crime. Just like recently, Congress tried to go after NPR for having liberal bias. They were going to cut off its funding. It's very randy where it's a moral crime to support something that's trying to destroy you. And McCarthy definitely had that viewpoint, and I think that's why he was going after Hollywood himself. Sure. Or at least supporting it well, because they were supposedly making movies that subversively supported Communism. The problem is that's going after the intellectuals, he's not going after the spies any longer. He's going after Communist thinkers, like people who aren't trying to overthrow the government, they just think Communism is a better idea. Yeah. And going after spies, I don't think anybody really has a problem with that. But he went well beyond that. So that combined with his tactics have basically smeared his name through the mud for the rest of history. It's true. If you're interested in some good movies on the Blacklist era, guilty by Suspicion is one de niro. Really good movie. And goodnight. Good luck, of course. Which was awesome. Or just read The Crucible? That is great. Arthur Miller, famously, in 1953, wrote a play that was a very thinly veiled attack on McCarthyism. By way of the portal was the witch hunts. The Salem Witch Trials. Yeah. It's basically like, here's what's going on now. Goody. McCarthy surprised he didn't just outright say it. Also, he went after books, too. He apparently had people scan the libraries for books that contain anti American sentiments. They identified 300 titles and purge libraries of these books. What a jerk. You said it. So, Chuck, this guy, at one point in 1954, at his peak, there was a poll taken that found it was a Gallup Poll. So, you know it's quality. Yeah. 50% of the American people had a favorable opinion of McCarthy. Like, I don't think Ronald Reagan even ever had 50%. Yeah. And everybody loved Uncle Ronnie. Well, that was in January. That same poll taken in June saw that number fall to 34% for very good reason. What happened? What happened. Was he didn't make the mistake. President Eisenhower, for the very first time in broadcast history, said, let's broadcast these hearings. And this time it wasn't the Hollywood Blacklist hearings. It was his war on the army. Yeah, which is a bad move to do when your president is a decorated general from the last war, like five years before. Yeah. It was called the Army McCarthy hearings, broadcast in 1954 on live television. And after somewhat of a mundane start to the hearings, he started accusing very heavily decorated and respected army officers of not being fit to wear the uniform. He told Brigadier General Ralph Zwicker he compared him mentally to a five year old, said he was a disgrace to the uniform. And then everyone watching this on TV, it's like, Wait a minute, wait, this is what he's been doing. This guy is a total jerk. Yeah, because before there were transcripts and there were minutes, but they were classified. Well, no, they weren't out. The media was also very sympathetic, so they're portraying everything in a real light. So basically, Eisenhower was like, I'm going to give you a little rope, and I think you'll go hang yourself with it. And he did, and the American public turned on him like crazy. Truman. I'm sorry, not Truman. But Eisenhower also instructed his vice president, Richard Nixon, to go speak vaguely but publicly against McCarthy, which he did, which gave the media tacit approval to go after McCarthy. He gave who the media? No, but who did he get to talk to? Nixon. Nixon was Eisenhower's VP, and Nixon out there was like, oh, okay, I love the money. After that, the floodgates open, and all of a sudden, everybody was all against McCarthy because basically Nixon had been like, the government's against McCarthy, too, and the army started feeding the media. Army intelligence had dirt on McCarthy. He used his office, or tried to unsuccessfully, to influence the army to keep from drafting David Shine, roy Cohn's lover or aide. And it didn't work. And then once he was drafted, he tried to use his influence again to get the army to take it easy on the guy so he wouldn't go into battle. So they released that to the media. So this guy who's, like smearing decorated army generals on TV, right. Has tried to use his power to keep somebody else from having to serve. That didn't play very well either. So basically they censor him, right? Yeah. They said. You know what? We don't like you anymore. I think that's the official statement, we don't like you anymore. Cruel and reckless. And he was centered by a vote of 65 to 22. Originally in 1054, there were 46 charges of abuse of legislative power, but they reduced that to two. Or they only centered them on two because they didn't want to appear like they were big softies on communism. They were trying to strike the right balance of getting him out of there without looking like their commies. Right. Themselves. Yeah. In office, at least for a little while longer. But at age 48 in 1957, he died of acute hepatitis from alcohol abuse. If you're 48 and you die from alcohol abuse, then you've been drinking since you were one and a half. Yeah, he read some biography a bit that said that when he was on the wagon, that meant he just drank beer. Crazy. And didn't drink whiskey. Well, so when he quit drinking, that meant he only drank beer. He was like Dennis Hopper and Hoosiers. Except in the Senate. Very powerful. Wait, so he was like Ted Kennedy? Well, he was actually a friend of the Kennedys, which is weird because Kennedys were very liberal, obviously, but he was Catholic. He identified with the Kennedys because they were Catholic. Joseph Kennedy was big anti Communist, and he thought, hey, if I can help this guy get into office, then that will be a good road paved for other Catholics. Like my son's, like my Johnny, like my Johnny, my Teddy, my Bobby. And like I said earlier, he dated two of the daughters, supposedly, and, well, not supposedly. He did. I just don't know what went on on those dates. John Kennedy was very quiet about this whole thing. He never came out and attacked him because McCarthy had a lot of sway in campaigning against Democrats in elections, and he never did that to John F. Kennedy. So Kennedy kind of laid off when it came time to attack McCartney. Got you. And I think Bobby Kennedy actually worked with him. Well, that was another abuse. Like, basically he used this whole hysteria and the power given to him by targeting New Deal Democrats and basically helping further Republican policies rather than going after the Communist. Yeah. He was quoted one time saying that Democrats had been operating on, quote, 20 years of treason. He accused them of being treasonous Democrats. And Truman once referred to him as the best asset the Kremlin has. Instead, he was out to sabotage the foreign policy of the United States. So crazy, man. He did not get along with anyone so chuck outside of his group, of course. Here's the kicker. As shamed and publicly humiliated and just kicked to the curb, joseph McCarthy, the big jerk was he was right in a lot of instances. He was, in a way. I have a historian on my speed dial named John Earl Haines. Oh, yeah, John. He went over the Venona transcripts and his conclusion was that out of 159 people identified by McCarthy, nine of them were aiding Soviet espionage efforts. And he said a majority of those could legitimately have been considered risks, but a substantial minority could not. So he has nine people, which included a captain in the Navy. Davey, he was still in the Navy. And imagine he would be for life. Two atomic spies, someone who held meetings with Churchill and Roosevelt yeah. Who is that? I don't know. I couldn't find out. I'm very curious. And somebody who held the top office in today's equivalent of the CIA. Oh, yeah. It also says ten senior level officials were also later shown to have had communist ties, even though they weren't necessarily a security risk. Right. You can also make the case that if you cast a wide enough net, you're going to catch some tuna along with the sea spiders, as the old saying goes. Yeah, it's still divided, like some people. Angculture loves the guy now and said history has shown that he was right about it all. Is she still around? Yeah, she's alive. Okay. What do you think happened to her? I just thought she fell off the radar. Oh, I don't know. Okay. She's not on my radar, but sure. She's on somebody's radar. She's on Bill Mars radar. She's on oh, man. Ted Nugent's radar. Really? Yeah, man. He would guest host for Neil Borts years back, and I heard her on his show once, and he's like, Look, I'm just a guitar player. And she stopped him. She's like, I love it when you say that. It was like, really? Wow. Like, I was like, if I were a Ted Nugent's wife, I'd be mad right now. That's a little creepy. Yeah. So, you got anything else? No. So, in this episode, if you come across stuff you should know. Quiz that mentions the McCarthyism episode, the four bands that made an appearance were cheap Trick, the Dixie Chicks, Billy Joel and Ted Nugent. Wow. Who knew? I don't know. The Billy Joel. That was a cheap one. It was good. I'll take it, though. It was good, man. So that's about it for McCarthyism. It's still alive today. Instead of Communists, we now target Muslims, what a lot of people say, and the Dixie Chicks. Muslims and the Dixie Chicks. Basically, anybody who opposes America invading other countries. That's the new McCarthyism. All right. I could throw an REM reference in there. I already said it. We're not going to exhume him. What exhuming McCarthy? Sorry. I'm sorry. Oh, is it? How did you wait this long to throw that in? I don't know. I just figured it'd be a little cherry on top. All right, so the five bands are Cheap Trick, billy Joel, Dixie Chicks, Ted Nugent and R-E-M. But Ted Nugent was NRM. Oh, man. Anyway. Just go type in McCarthyism. 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And you have to be at least a semi computer literate to get to this Facebook page and like it. Yes. But other than that, it's wide open. It's your big chance, probably once in a lifetime chance to know what Jerry smells like. Here's a spoiler. She smells very pleasantly. She does. So if you want to do that, go do that. And if you want to get in touch with us via Tweeter, we want them to call you on Tweeter via Twitter. Yes. Weird. You can look us up. Our handle is at syskpodcast. You can visit our Facebook page, too. While you're on Facebook, go to facebook. Comstuffyshenknow. And you can also send us a good old fashioned email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Host by autopsy technician Elena Erkart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this charttopping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
http://netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1215462384378sysk-lame-duck.mp3 | How Lame Ducks Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-lame-ducks-work | In U.S. politics, a lame duck is a president who will not be re-elected because he or she has been passed over for election, or already served the maximum two terms. Learn more about the origin of lame duck presidents in this HowStuffWorks podcast. | In U.S. politics, a lame duck is a president who will not be re-elected because he or she has been passed over for election, or already served the maximum two terms. Learn more about the origin of lame duck presidents in this HowStuffWorks podcast. | Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:17:06 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=18, tm_min=17, tm_sec=6, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=108, tm_isdst=0) | 5357205 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from howstopworkscom you're getting smarter. Hey there and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke, work as staff writer. Here@houseworks.com with me, as always, as my trusty editor Chris Paulette. Chris, today I want to talk about lame duck presidents. Agreed? Absolutely. Okay, let me give a little background first on what a lame duck president is. Lame duck president is basically any president that has already either not been passed over for election or has served both of their terms. And basically they're just sitting around in office waiting to finish out the rest of their tenure before the next president takes over, correct? That is correct. And where did this come from? Lame duck? Do you want me to explain that part? Why don't you do that? Let me. Okay. Basically, lame duck originally was a financial term for somebody who couldn't pay their debt. Our current use of that term has nothing to do with debt anymore. As I said, it's a president who's finished out the term and it can also refer to Congress. But there's an amendment in the constitution called the lame duck amendment. And it is the 20th amendment. Absolutely. The 20th amendment is the lame duck amendment. And it was instituted in, I believe, 1933 during the Hoover administration. Basically what was going on was members of Congress had 13 months in between the time they found out that they were not reelected and the time they actually left office. 13 months is a really long time to do a lot of damage, basically robbing their constituency blind. Right. Well, they have the opportunity to use the powers of office for all sorts of projects, and once they don't feel like they owe the voters anything anymore, they can vote any way they want to. Exactly. They could also pick the president under certain circumstances, those being a tie in the electoral college, which frankly, I don't even want to get into. But, Chris, it seems like there's somebody out there right now who is a lame duck. Their name is slipping my mind. Can you refresh my memory? I think you're thinking of President George W. Bush. Exactly. That's who it was. Tell us a little bit about his lame duck status, will you? Well, you know, he's actually been fairly busy during his lame duck period. I saw that people have been talking about his presidency being entering the lame duck phase as early as the first part of 2007. So if that's true, obviously this is a subjective thing, but he would have been a lame duck for almost half of his second term in office. I heard that the Associated Press actually tagged him with lame duck in 2004. Wow. Well, see, as soon as you get elected for your second term, I guess technically your lame duckness sure starts, but he's been actually pretty active as of late with the economic stimulus package and recently to pushing for a permanent extension of the surveillance package, pushing Congress to extend that permanently instead of a temporary extension. He's been very vocal about doing that. So he's not just sitting on his hands and waiting for his term to end. Now also one of those little balls with the raccoon tail that is battery powered and cats like to play with that's also very active. Too but I think that that has just about as much of a chance of pushing legislation through as George Bush does at this point. From what I understand and doing some research for this podcast, I found that it's pretty much open season on Bush. It seems like he spent all of his political currency, and suddenly the wolves are at his door, as it were. I quote David From, who's a former speechwriter, there's no possibility at all of the President advancing anything that is acceptable to both the Democrats and the Republicans talking about what he'll be able to do in his last term. It looks like nothing. Chris, what do you think? Well, he's only so powerful anyway as President, because the members of Congress are the ones who have to push the bills across his desk for him to sign. So he can talk all he wants, but if they don't give him a bill to sign into law, he can't do anything, whether he's a lame duck or not. Exactly. Too and I think a further sign of the President's lame duck status. I was really surprised to find this out, but Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives, in July 2007, flew to Syria to hold talks with the President of Syria, who Bush was ignoring at the time, going completely behind the President's back. Now, if that's not a sign that you're lame duck, I don't know what is. How about you? I do think you have a point there. Okay, well, please read how lame is a lamepresident@houseworkscom? It'll change your life. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.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?" | |
4373bea4-53a3-11e8-bdec-7be7fdae6378 | How Herd Immunity Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-herd-immunity-works | Herd immunity is an epidemiological concept that if enough people are inoculated against a disease the rest of us won’t get it. It’s been useful in holding back diseases like polio and measles, but we have vaccines for them. We don’t have one for Covid-19. | Herd immunity is an epidemiological concept that if enough people are inoculated against a disease the rest of us won’t get it. It’s been useful in holding back diseases like polio and measles, but we have vaccines for them. We don’t have one for Covid-19. | Tue, 12 May 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=133, tm_isdst=0) | 60294030 | audio/mpeg | "Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles w chuck Bryan over there. And it's just the two of us again, but I'm getting used to it. How about you? I am. I am sweating in our studio by myself. Like, you're nervous? No, I'm hot because the studio is hot and I know we've been buzz marking enough, but the Internet is only working in our studio for some reason. Oh, my. And I ate some of that spicy beef ramen in this hot room. Yeah, that's a dangerous combo. Didn't think to open the door, so I'm just like sitting here pouring sweat out everywhere. Well, here's the thing. You could go totally dong out like Spartacus if you wanted to because you're the only one there. People have been talking about dong out lately in the Movie Crash page. Yeah, well, it's a pretty hilarious term, but just please put down like, some newspaper or something on the chair before you sit on a bare bottom. Okay. By the way, speaking of Movie Crush, I think this is going to come out the day after your Movie Crush Mini Crush appearance next week. Yes. I'm excited about it and I'm a little nervous now. It's going to be great. People are going to love it. So if you don't listen to the show, maybe listen to this one episode and then forget about the show again if you want. Or stick around, maybe boost the numbers it had. But it was a lot of fun and I think people would want to hear your appearance as well. I really appreciate you having me on. It was a lot of fun. You're consummate professional at hosting. Hey, turns out we know what we're doing here, don't we? Don't jinx us. Speaking of which, I think we should front load this episode with a little bit of a COA. If you are a pretty hard line anti vaxxer or if you believe in things like pandemic or that Bill Gates created the Coronavirus for population control. Sure, you may not want to listen to this because we're going to bring you hard and lean facts. Lean and mean depending on your point of view. I think that's a good COA. I think that maybe you got rid of 2% of the hate mail we're going to get. So thank you for that. Yeah, we'll see. I think it just bears saying, why rile yourself all up? Just listen to your echo chamber podcast that validate what you think, maybe. Or I think, calm down and just hear us out and see what you think. Well, that's always an option. So we're not even talking necessarily just about vaccines or anti vaccines. It's almost like a side thing to this whole thing, but it's definitely still very much intertwined with it. We're talking about her immune or you can't not talk about vaccines if you're going to talk about herd immunity right now. Because with herd immunity, especially in the 21st century, there's basically two ways of getting there, and one of them is a robust vaccination program. That's right. And if you don't know what herd immunity is, then you're probably just fine. You've been living under a rock and you're not near any other humans or the Internet. You're still protected, though. That's right. Herd immunity, though, is the principal sort of in its simplest form of safety in numbers. And if you have a lot of people, or enough people, because there's actual math involved to figuring that out, it's not just a guess. If you have enough people that are immune to a virus, and it can be, like you said, through vaccination or through having lived through the disease and then having antibodies, right. Then the population is protected from that disease even if they aren't immune. That's the idea that so many a certain threshold of people are immune that even people that choose not to vaccinate can hop on that wagon. Right. And it's not even like you hop on the wagon like you are on the wagon just by virtue of being alive in the society or culture. Right, that's a good point. There's a really easy way of understanding it that Molly Edmunds used in the House of Work episode on herd immunity, that if you pretend you're at a bowling alley and each person has their own lane and this is basically that bowling alley lane is like their bubble, that they live in their work, their home and everything and they don't encounter anybody else. Just that. It's kind of like Wally but with bowling. Right. If the first person on lane one comes down with, say, the flu, he can very easily pass it on to the woman in lane two. If she's not immune to the flu, she will contract it and pass it on to the person in lane three, and so on and so forth. And it will just keep going. And eventually people will develop antibodies. Some of those people will die, most will survive, and the flu will have a hard time getting through that population the second time around. But if the woman in lane two is already immunized to that flu strain, say through like a vaccine or something, then it's not going to transmit from the first guy in lane one to her or it's certainly not going to transmit beyond her. So she's protected everybody in lanes three to ten just by virtue of having been immune to that flu virus. It stopped with her and that's the point of her immunity. That's the basis of the whole thing. Yeah. And if we want to stick with bowling parlance, then that means that that lady is bowling strikes. She's throwing strikes. Strikes not even 710 splits, which she could if she wanted to. That's how immune she is. Yeah. The perfect game, right. I remember that dumb joke when I was little about you learn the stupidest jokes when you're a kid. Sure. Because they have to be so dumb a kid can understand them, I think. I think so, maybe. But about the guy who bowled a 301 and you're like, you can't bowl a 301. Well, you can't bowl a 300 and lose, man. I know. That's how bad it was and that's how much it stuck with me. Did you get that from Highlights? I don't know where I got that. It was pretty bad. Sounds like a playground joke. Yeah, I think so. But I think you get beat up in the playground even with that one. Yeah. So let's talk about herd immunity some more. We talked about the two ways, natural exposure and vaccinations and if we're going back prevaccination and talking about human history, there was herd immunity. And I guess the way to describe it is herd immunity the hard way, people being exposed to the virus or the bacteria developing that immune response and enough they reach that tipping point where enough people have it to where everyone's immune, but they lost a lot of people along the way. Yeah, that's part of the problem. If you look at it on an individual level, if you are exposed to a virus or a bacterium and it runs rampant and infects you and you come down with an illness from it, there's basically two outcomes. You can put up an immune response and win, or you can lose and die. But if you survive and win, you've become immunized. And that's just the natural course of viruses or bacteria when they encounter humans, at least contagious ones, infectious ones. Right. And we didn't have any recourse other than that. So it's actually kind of good that we do have this natural immune response to I mean, we just wouldn't be around anymore if we didn't have it's. Part and parcel with human survival or any biological survival, is to be able to mount an immune response, build antibodies, so that if you do encounter this thing again, you don't have to go through the illness all over again for the most part. But we didn't have any other tools besides that until the 1940s when we were able to mass manufacture vaccines. And now all of a sudden we could say, create herd immunity without anybody ever having to get sick or almost anybody, just through vaccination programs. Yeah, and here's the deal, too. In pre vaccination, they could build up an immunity, lose a lot of people on the way, and it wasn't like, all right, now we're fully set forever. Right. Sometimes there would be, like, another swell of exposure, whether or not it's like a bunch of people moving into the country or a bunch of people being born, but basically non immune people kind of flooding the system. And then that percentage point that we're going to talk about dips below that number, and then you don't have to restart the whole process, but that hamster wheel gets going again until that herd immunity is then reached again. Yeah, I think that's what's called an endemic disease, where it's still there just hanging in the background, but for the most part, people are immune to it. And then when you have an influx of birth or an influx of immigrants, it can flare up again, but then those people get kind of taken into the immunized herd and become part of the immunized herd as well. And the deal is that natural herd immunity is all we had until we developed kind of the ability to make massive quantities of vaccines. Right. I think starting in the 1940s. Yeah. I mean, there were a few researchers along the way who really brought this along. There was a couple of people named a couple of dudes named WWC. Topley and G. S. Wilson, who actually coined the term herd immunity. But in 1933, there was an epidemiologist named AW Heidrich who studied measles between 1919 31, and he's the one that actually kind of quantified this and said, I've done the math. If 68% of kids 15 or younger were immune to measles, then we're not going to have a big outbreak. And he wrote a very famous paper about it, and that's where the term really took off. Yeah. And so herd immunity is basically an epidemiological concept. Sometimes, I think, in the popular press especially, it gets kind of leaned on as if it's like a natural universal law or something like that. It's basically an observation, but one that seems to be consistently held up by the success of vaccination programs that we've created to generate artificial herd immunity. And that's the point. That's the point of vaccine programs is to say, okay, for basically all of human history, all we had was that natural herd immunity, whether we liked it or not. But now that we have vaccines, we can create vaccine programs where if we vaccinate enough people, we can force this herd immunity without almost anybody getting sick. Like, you might have a slight reaction to the vaccine for a small number of people, usually somewhere around, like, say, three to 10%, the vaccine is not going to protect you, but if enough people out there get this vaccine, they're going to be vaccinated immunized against the disease without ever having gotten it. And if enough people are vaccinated, we will have this herd immunity without having to undergo some disastrous epidemic that kills off some ungodly number of people and makes an even larger number of people sick. That's the basis of vaccines in the vaccination program. And countless tens of millions of lives have been saved just from the fact that they have existed since the 1940s. Yeah. That's when they came into mass production in 1796, is when we first started as humans to kind of understand this concept. There was a man named Edward Jenner who inoculated a little kid, a little boy against smallpox, and this is kind of gross sounding, but he infected him with the puss from a blister of cowpox, which is less deadly, and he was like, hey, I think I'm onto something here. And in 140 something years, we're really going to be on the ball with this stuff. Right. And there are other vaccines along the way. And I think they were all just kind of small batch like artisan vaccine that were created. But it was like the 40s where on this mass industrial scale that they were produced. Only under those circumstances can you actually get to herd immunity for a large population, like a state or a nation or a world, basically. Yeah. And I think we've said this, we'll kind of keep beating the drum and repeating this, but the whole concept is to protect people who haven't even been vaccinated, because sometimes you're too young to get vaccinated. Sometimes you have a condition as a child where you literally can't be vaccinated. Or maybe you're elderly and you had been vaccinated, but they always talk about, especially with COVID-19 and the flu, the elderly population is at risk because they are way more likely to develop complications. Like, pneumonia is a big one for what's going around now, but as far as even something like chickenpox encephalitis or hepatitis and we don't really know the deal with children and adults in their immune system and exactly how they work and what the differences are. But it looks like kids are either more robust and against something like chicken pox. Like when you have it as a kid, it's usually not such a big deal. When you have it as an adult, it is a big deal. Right. Because it may be your adult system just going into overdrive, saying you should have had this when you were six. Right. What is wrong with you? Didn't you have any friends? You had chicken pox probably, didn't you? I did. Same here. Yeah. My sister always had she had a pox scar, like on her temple that I always admired. So I made sure to pick one on my temple. I don't think Emily got it. For some reason that is in my brain. Oh, my. Does she have the vaccine against it? I think so. Okay. Because since the mid 90s, they came out with a vaccine against varicella, which is the virus that causes chicken pox. And now it's like you don't have to get it as a kid anymore. I'm pretty sure somebody I know didn't get it and did get the vaccine, and I'm pretty sure it's my wife. Right. Pretty well with chickenpox. That's a good example of how if you have it when you're a kid, it's still life threatening. You can get all those same things like encephalitis or pneumonia, but you're just way likelier to get it as an adult. Same thing with the flu. Like the flu can be very deadly depending on how old you are. Right. I think something like it says 90% of flu related deaths and 50% to 70% of hospitalizations for the flu are for people over age 65 for the same exact strain of a bug that has a kid at home watching prices right. For one day, maybe two lands an older person over age 65 in the hospital on the brink of death. It's just different. And so, because there is that difference, it makes sense to immunize the young inoculate the young to protect the elderly. And let's not forget, even if you couldn't care less about the elderly, you hate the elderly because some old man yelled at you once when you threw a football in his yard and you've hated all old people ever since then. Do you hate babies? Because there are people do. There are babies who are too young to be inoculated. And then there's also those people, like you said, who don't have healthy enough immune systems to get a vaccine, and so they rely on everybody else, the herd, to be vaccinated to provide this immunity for them. So there are really good reasons to be vaccinated in addition to you yourself being immunized against these things. Yeah. And these things work better in a homogenous population. And every time I see that word, I want to say homogeneous for some reason. That's the British way of saying, do they say it that way? They probably do. Probably just to be contrarian. They're contrary. They work better in homogeneous populations, which there are not a lot of those still these days, thanks to people integrating with one another. So when they do these calculations that we're about to talk about, they take all of that into account. Races, ethnicities mixed races, stuff like that. And so we've been talking about the modeling and the math involved. It can get complicated, but it's really kind of simple in its base form, don't you think? Yes. Especially if you're a mathematical genius in a statistical way, which I am not. Okay. But in the broad strokes yeah. You can make a pretty good case that it's understandable for sure. It's all based on the reproduction number in relation to the size of the population, basically, yeah. And that reproduction number in the biz, it's pronounced R, not R. With. I guess that's a zero. Yeah, I'd rather say R zero any day. R zero. R not, though, for an infection, is the number of people expected to contract that illness after coming into contact with an infected person under the right conditions that they can contract it. So a less confusing way of saying that is the are not number is the expected number of people that a contagious person is going to infect. Right. So if you understand this about a disease, if you know, for example, with the mumps, it's extremely contagious, which means that it has a high R not, because the average person walking around infected with the mumps and contagious with the mumps is going to get something between ten and twelve other people infected with the mumps and then they themselves will be contagious. So that means that the mumps has a relatively high are not or reproduction number. So if you understand that about the mumps, you can calculate how many people in a population have to be immunized against the mumps to prevent it from transmitting within that population. And like we said, there's a lot more math to it than that. But ultimately for the mumps in today's modern heterogeneous populations, is that the right way of saying it? I don't know. Nobody says heterogeneous, do they? That sounds way too close to erotic. It sounds like something I would say in today's modern society, we'll just put it like that. Yes. You need to have about 95% of any given population immunized against mumps to reach what's called the herd immunity threshold. That herd immunity threshold is basically what I just said. It's the percentage of the population that has to be immunized for herd immunity to kick in to cover everybody else. Yeah. And I know that everyone's going, what about Cobad? What about Cobb? What about Cobb? Just wait. Do you want to not even say yet? Do you want to wait? Okay, that's fine. Well, how about this? Let's take a break. Oh, my God, this is just I can't and then right after the break we'll dive into this stuff later, but right after the break, we'll give you sort of what they're thinking as of today when we record right after this. All right, so that was an unfair cliffhanger. And keep in mind, we kind of learned and we knew this was going to happen with our Kobe 19 podcast. It was out of date, like days later. And this will be out of date because there's just so much we don't know yet and we're learning so much every day and every week. But I've seen the range from 60% to 80% is what they think the immunity threshold needs to be to have a pretty successful herd immunity. Right. That's the current thinking that I saw as well, that they think the reproduction number is somewhere between two and three. I think I saw 2.8 is like the most widely touted for COVID-19, for corona. Yeah, thankfully. Can you imagine if it was like mumps level? Right, yeah. Especially with the fact that there's such a thing asymptomatic carriers who can walk around and fix people. If it was that much more contagious, it would be pretty rotten. As bad as it is, it could conceivably be worse, epidemiologically speaking. Yeah. And here's where we should also point out that just like we're talking about her immunity, but if we reach her to immunity, that doesn't mean everything is solved. If we come up with a vaccine, which we will. Vaccines aren't 100% effective against every single human, so things can still happen. And then sometimes you get an immunization that's effective for a short time, for a few years, maybe. Yeah. There's an outbreak of diphtheria in Russia in 1994. I mean, like, tens of thousands of people fell ill with diphtheria and they were almost all adults. And they went back and figured out the reason why this happened was because those adults hadn't been given a booster shot for their diphtheria inoculation. And so their immune response, their antibodies that they'd built up when they were children, having been given the Stipheria vaccine, had waned. And it waned enough that diphtheria was able to kind of take over and cause this outbreak. And so when you look at it like that, that's almost a really good analogy to herd immunity. It's like over time, that threshold can decline so that the virus or the bacteria can get in. Same thing on the individual level, if you don't get a booster shot, if you need it for some vaccines, you don't need it. I think measles, mumps and rubella are all considered to confer lifetime immunity if it does work on you. And I think those are 97% effective. So for 97 out of 100 people, when you get an MMR vaccine as a kid, you don't need any kind of booster and you're going to be immune to it for life. Right. Which is great. It is. That's the point of vaccine. Yes. And this is where we need to dip our toe into something that's called vaccine hesitancy. That's what the official name for it is. And this is a situation we have I'm not sure about other countries because I didn't do a lot of research into that, but here in the United States, especially certain parts of the United States, there are vaccine exemptions in place, granted for philosophical purposes, religious purposes, personal reasons. It is important to point out here that personal reasons get all the press. Like when you see articles about antivaxxers, it's people that choose not to get their child vaccinated for certain reasons. But the largest percentage of people who don't get vaccinated, very sadly, it has to do with finances and poverty. Right. If you want to vaccinate your kids, but you can't because you don't have the money or they're not available to you, I think kids in rural areas have a much lower vaccine rates than kids in urban areas. That is really sad. And I think that's something that because it's such a public health success, it should be something that's much more widely available to anybody who wants it. Yeah, here's some numbers on that. There was a study by the CDC in 2017 that noted that the percentage of children without any vaccines had risen to about 1.3%. And these are kids that were born in the year 2015. And then they compared that with the 2001 survey. They found it was just zero 3% of children between the ages of 19 to 35 months. So basically they looked at the numbers and they found that the children who are uninsured or who live in rural areas like you said, or maybe had Medicaid insurance, 17.2% of the unvaccinated kids were uninsured compared to 2.8% of overall kids. Right. That's a big dip. It is a huge diff, for sure. And then there are, like you said, there's parents who forego vaccinations for personal reasons or religious reasons or philosophical reasons, although I don't understand what the difference is between philosophical and personal. Yeah, I agree, and I'd be interested to find that out. But people who don't vaccinate their kids for whatever reason, who make a conscious decision not to tend to be viewed as freeloaders. And that's not just us like throwing shade. That's like the term that is used is freeloaders. They're freeloading on the larger herd to prevent from being exposed to this disease or these diseases or viruses or bacteria because they're depending on other people to immunize their kids through vaccinations instead. That's right. And there's another weird phenomenon that's happened here in the US. Where a vaccine program is so successful that generations will go by without any of this disease. So you're not even familiar with it. So it's sort of absurd in this way that it's been flipped. But one of the reasons sometimes you will hear to not vaccinate is like, well, that old disease, we haven't seen that in 200 years. Right. And I'm going to put that vaccine in my kid. And it's like, well, yeah, because the vaccine worked. Right. It's a victim of its own success, the vast vaccination program. And I think, from what I can tell, that's how public health officials typically explain anti vaccine or declines in vaccine rates among people who consciously choose not to. That basically they just haven't seen how bad a disease is. Like, you haven't seen what polio can do to somebody because you were born into a world where for all intents and purposes, polio just didn't exist. Right, right. And so you lose that incentive that somebody who is aware of what polio can do, the incentive that that person has to vaccinate their kid. And then when you couple that with questions about a vaccine or fears that there are some negative side effects from a vaccine that disincentive, or that lack of incentive becomes a disincentive to get that. And so there's this ironic circle that develops where those vaccination rates go down. We dip below the herd immunity level, there's an outbreak of that disease, and then the very people who led to that decline in vaccination levels point to that outbreak as evidence that vaccines weren't working or herd immunity doesn't work. It's hard to wrap your head around. It is very hard to wrap your head around, especially if you are fully on board the vaccine. And herd immunity through vaccine trains, it can be fairly galling, I believe. Yeah. And there's a couple of things, a couple of big challenges to herd immunity and whether or not it can work today. And one of them is that we can get on an airplane with our family, and we can fly great distances and get places really fast and then come home again really fast. And this happened in 2008 with the outbreak in San Diego. There was a family that went to Switzerland. This little boy picked up the virus of the measles while he was in Switzerland. He's such a bad little boy. He was so naughty. He was unvaccinated. He got sick when he got home, he infected eleven other people, including one who was an infant that was too young to be vaccinated. Yeah. Just if you were ambivalent about this right through that little detailing. Yeah. And at first they were like, what is going on here with this weird outbreak? Because we have a minimum threshold here in San Diego and 95% against the measles for her immunity. And in 2000, it was declared eliminated basically all over the country. And so they started to kind of poke around this case and they said, all right, San Diego is doing great, but this kid actually goes to a school and his localized social group is about 17% of them at this school don't vaccinate. So while the city was doing fine, his little localized community had a pretty high percentage of unvaccinated kids. And so that allowed it to spread. Right? It allowed it to spread. Those kids became immunized. They became ill, but then they became immunized to the measles naturally from being exposed to it and having fallen ill. But the big problem is, in addition to the fact that it just kind of ravaged this hyper local social group, there are other pockets within the herd that probably bear a striking resemblance to that social group. And those social groups come in contact with the other social group that's been infected. You can have an epidemic within the larger immunized herd, which you don't want. You want those people to be protected. But the decline in vaccine rates and the fact that we can travel, like you were saying so easily, not only does it mean that, like, a virus or a bacteria can travel just as fast on board a human who's on a. Plane. It also means that there's constant fluctuations to the percentage that heard immunity threshold because of the influx and outflows of people who are vaccinated or not vaccinated. Right. And this is why those vaccination rates being high is really important because it's protecting everybody. Yes, you want a large public buy into the concept of vaccinations and when there is not a large public buy in, then your herd immunity is under threat and everybody who is bought in is at risk because again, you might say, well, who cares if you've inoculated your kids if they're immunized against measles? What do you care if somebody else's kid isn't? Because they have personal reasons against it. Your kid is fine, they're inoculated. Don't forget that. With the measles vaccine, I think it's like 97% effective. And that means that if there's 100 kids in a room and one of them has full on contagious measles. Which again is very contagious. Like the mumps in its contagiousness. Three of those kids who have been vaccinated are possibly going to get the measles from that kid. Even though they were vaccinated. Because their body just didn't form the right immune response or enough of an immune response that they'd be protected if they were exposed to that kid. So it is a problem for even people who have been vaccinated against diseases to have a decline in herd immunity. And then also don't forget the people who don't have an immune system that can allow for them to be inoculated or vaccinated, and the elderly who are just by virtue of being older, more susceptible to a really hard bout with whatever disease it is they're being exposed to. Yeah, I've been running up against that frustrating sort of circular, non logic about Cobin 19. I'm a member of a Facebook page of a boy, an area in more rural Georgia. That's all I'll say. You could have just stopped at a Facebook page. And there's been a lot of that same sort of circular logic of well, all these models are turning out to be wrong. They weigh overstated everything because look at the numbers falling. It's like that's because social distance and because we did all this stuff right, it worked and it worked. That's how modeling works. Like the initial numbers were really high because that was just sort of the starting point. That was the input data. Right. Here we are at the beginning and this can happen this way. And Americans got together, by and large, at first at least, and did the right thing and so those numbers went way down and it worked. And then they are using that as proof of like well, see, the modeling is just off, they're just guessing. Yeah, I saw that coming a mile away. Of course everything's political. Yeah, I've tried to avoid it, but I have also commented at times like modeling is not guessing. There's real research and math that goes into it and that math changes based on the input data. Like, in a month, there will probably be different numbers, and it's not because they're just guessing and they're wrong. Right? Yeah. I think it's that distrust and expertise that has really kind of wrecked things quite a bit. Yeah. All right, let's talk about what's going on right now and how this applies to our situation today with the 2020 novel Coronavirus Cobid 19. Call it whatever you want. Well, wait a minute. I think we should institute a tradition in this episode where every time we're about to talk about covet, we make it a cliffhanger and take a break. Okay. All right. We'll take a break and we'll talk about all that right after this. All right, Chuck, thanks for playing along with me. We're going to have, like, 50 Ad breaks in here because we're going to stop every time right before we talk about covet. Yeah. So what we're dealing with now, in the most recent days, in a couple of weeks, is a new sort of divide has emerged. Everyone got together. At first it seemed like there was a lot of unity for five minutes, and then a dividing line has now formed in the United States and kind of in the world, depending on what your view is on how to best handle this. And the two sort of routes are and we'll talk about specific examples of different countries and what they're doing. But there's elimination and then there's herd immunity and vaccinations and not pooping. You don't mean pooping by elimination? No, I mean getting rid of it, of the virus. But not by pooping. No, not by pooping. But we're talking about a few countries in particular. Everyone's talking about Sweden right now because Sweden, compared to the rest of the Nordic countries, the rest of Europe and most of the rest of the world, was one country that was like, you know what we are going to say. If you feel sick, stay at home. If you're at risk, maybe stay at home. Try and keep a safe distance from people. But bars are open, restaurants are open, no big concerts or anything like that. And let's try and get that herd immunity going instead of shutting everything down. Right. So they're pursuing a mixture of social distancing guidelines, but nothing that's being super enforced, aside from those gatherings, like you said. But ultimately they're pursuing basically a strategy of herd immunity while trying their best to keep the curve flattened. Right. And I think we're pushing this one out sooner. So this will just be out, like, four or five days from now and all of these numbers are going to be changing. But the jury is kind of still out on whether or not that's working. In Sweden, as of a couple of days ago, they have a far higher infection rate than their Nordic neighbors. Right. It's a little lower than some other countries to the south. So we just don't really know yet because the jury is still out. We don't know what our percentage needs to be right now. Like I said, it could be as high as 80%. Right. So we just don't know. As these numbers come in over the next month or two, it's going to be really telling, I think, kind of. Either way you slice it, it's not right to say, all right, we'll look at Sweden and if it works there, that means it's going to work everywhere. Because that's just not the case. No, Sweden has consistently beat this drum. They're like, look, we're not even sure this is going to work for us, but we're willing to try it. But we're far likelier to be successful at something like this because our population maybe is a little more collectivist than some other populations. They're healthier than Americans. They are healthier. They have a big deal, a much stronger and more responsive healthcare system. They have a more homogeneous population, don't forget, which may mean that they could reach herd immunity more quickly than some other countries that have less homogenous populations. Sweden is more homogeneous. They don't have like huge mega grocery stores where there's 1000 or 1500 people milling around all at the same time. They have smaller shops and markets that serve like a particular corner in a neighborhood and they have them like every few corners. So there's not tons of people in the market at any given moment. There's just a lot of differences between Swedish culture and, say, American culture that is giving the Swedes the confidence to try this. But even still, there are people in Sweden that are like, this is indefensibly reckless, we can't do this, we can't try this. This is stupid. And like you said, there are some early signs that it is not going so well. Because compared to Norway, Denmark and Finland, their death rate adjusted for population size is between three and six times the death rate of those nations. And those nations tried elimination. Yeah, and I saw that I think it might have been the head of whatever their CDC is said that they were surprised by the death toll. Yeah, yeah. And not in a way like they seem like really good people. So it's not like, oh, we never thought of this. But I think they were surprised that it is as high as it's been. Right. Sweden is not the only one trying this. India is trying it as well. And they're doing something very similar to Sweden. They have a lot of social distancing guidelines, but are also kind of hoping for natural herd immunity to kick in. And they don't have much of a choice. They have like zero point 55 hospital beds, so a little over half of the hospital bed per 1000 people in the country and 44,000 ventilators. But both Sweden and India are taking a strategy of saying if you're older, if you're elderly. If you are in this high risk group for suffering complications from covered 19, you stay home too. And we'll let the younger population go out and get sick because they can handle it better and maybe less of a strain on the healthcare system. And they'll be the immunized herd for the rest of the population. I don't know if the strategies are going to work or not, but that's kind of like the mentality behind them. Yeah. And there are other countries, I think, in England, they originally were going to kind of follow that model and then everyone said, no way, bollocks to that. And so they have got some stricter measures going. Belarus is the one place that's really the president there, who's been in office, I think, since 1994, has called the stricter responses around the world mass psychosis. And he's basically like, I mean, they're having a full on military parade this weekend. Oh, my. And saying, screw all this. And Belarus has one of Europe's highest per capita infection rates. Yeah, it's like, have any of you even seen the coronavirus yourself? I haven't. Yeah. Jeez. There was a guy on one of that same Facebook page that said, I don't even know a single person who's had it lol. And I was like, well, you're lucky, sir. You should be thankful for that. And he's like, it's not luck. Could be something else. It's just like, I'm stepping out of this immediately, man. I don't know if I say hats off to you for being on a Facebook group or just deeply pity you for being on that Facebook group. Well, I sort of have to be because I have to keep up with some things. This is another part of Georgia where I own a little tract of land. Oh, got you. So you need to nobody's squatting on it. Yeah, I'm the only squatter. So this whole herd immunity thing, herd immunity itself has been controversial since before the COVID-19 pandemic. Right. Those same people who question vaccines also question the concept of reaching herd immunity through vaccinations. There's a suspicion that you're artificially suppressing the vaccine and you're actually weakening the immune system and that it's going to set us up for this horrible problem down the road. None of that bears scrutiny under logic. But today, her community has kind of reached this controversial inflection point for a totally different reason. And that the people who are saying, well, we're going to opt to try for her immunity now rather than later so that we can get our economy going again. What they're talking about is her immunity without a vaccine. Right. Big difference. Huge difference. Because what they're talking about is basically reverting back to the prevaccine thing where it was just like, okay, I hope we get to herd immunity sooner than later, and a lot of people are going to die along the way. And that's one of the big flaws of this argument. Of going for herd immunity right now, which is there's going to be a lot of people who die as a result. Before we get to herd immunity, because we don't have a vaccine, we're going to have to reach her immunity through just exposure to this virus, just like in the old timey days. Yeah, I was about to say, as if we were living in ancient times and just sort of crossing our fingers. Right. Not good. Lots of death is a big flaw against it. If the reproduction number for SARS Cove two is three, that's confusing. But if covid 19 has a reproduction number of three, let's say, and that means the herd immunity threshold is about 70%, that's about the high end that anybody's saying is 70% should stop the virus from spreading anymore. Right. So if that's the case, then that means 70% of a population would be sick. And I think a half to 1% of a fatality rate would mean that of the larger population, 00:35 to zero, 7% of the population will die. So if you know that, then you can take just the populations of some of these countries that are trying this and say, well, before you reach her immunity, sweden, out of your population of ten point 25 million people, about 36,000 to 72,000 are going to die along the way. Statistically speaking, that's the number that you can bet on. Yeah. Between 1.25 and about two and a half million in the US. And if you're going to look at the world population, we're talking numbers higher than the Spanish flu, 27 to about 54 million people dead. And we're not saying like, that's going to happen. We're saying that's if the whole world took the approach of just, all right, let's just see how we do. Right, we're a virgin population. Humanity, not just the US, not just Canada, not just the UK, not just Sweden. The world is a virgin population to this virus because it's a novel coronavirus. No one on earth has ever been exposed to this particular virus before, so there isn't any pre built in immunity like there would be if it makes another round a year from now. Right, so it just burns. Viruses and bacteria burn their way through populations like that, so you can imagine it would spread pretty effectively. And if the fatality rate really is a half to 1%, those numbers could be pretty real, depending on what measures we take to mitigate those, like you were saying. So death, that's a big problem. And also along the way, we would be doing the opposite of flattening the curve by just letting people go out and getting sick to get things over with. Yeah, I mean, we worked so hard to flatten the curve, and it worked in most of the United States, except these weird outbreaks in smaller towns that didn't have enough beds and ventilators. And that's all been really, really sad to see happen. But by and large, we did the right thing for a while and it flattened the curve pretty well. But this would fatten that curve right back up and we'd be in that same, like, in a worse situation than we were going in. Right. So that's another big one. And then also, Chuck, reinfection is another huge flaw in this. We don't know if SARS cove two, which causes covid 19, how fast it's mutating. If it's like other coronaviruses or other flu viruses, it probably has a lot of what's called antigenic drift where it mutates really rapidly and creates new strains. That the antibodies that have built up this immune defense against one variety are useless to fight this new variety. Right, yeah. Some diseases don't do that, like polio. The reason our polio vaccine has been so successful is because it doesn't mutate very much. It doesn't create new strains. But with coronaviruses, they tend to do that a lot. So there's a real chance for reinfection. So this herd immunity will just be like this ongoing thing until we can come up with a viable vaccine that can protect us from basically any mutated variety of this coronavirus. That's right. An antigenic drift. Do I need to say it? No, you don't. Oh, yeah. Chuck, I think you trip up band for sure. That muted trumpet thing that they got going on, what's that thing called on the trumpet that they make that sound with? Oh, yeah, the plunger head, the muffler, the thing. I don't know. Yeah, you're on the trolley. So the other thing that we need to consider, and that is the other sort of way that you can go about this is elimination. Elimination that we were talking about. Not pooping and not pooping. And that is the opposite tactic. And that's what most of the world has done, including the US. Which is self quarantining isolating, trying to contain the virus, closing borders, masks, gloves, all that stuff. We have flattened the curve for the most part. Other countries have come close to elimination. New Zealand is getting a lot of press because they got a lot of again, you can't say like, well, the same thing could happen here in the US. Because New Zealand is a very isolated place and it's a smaller population and they have super smart elected officials and smart people who listen to those elected officials. Oh, man, we just get to get so much mail for that one. No, man, someone come at me. New Zealand's prime minister is amazing. She's like one of the best. Yeah. I remember when we were there. We got a cab ride. You. Me and I did. To the airport and this guy. I think it was an immigrant from Sri Lanka and he just could not stop boasting about how great the New Zealand government was. About how taken care of their population was. How much of a sense of community the whole country had and it was just really refreshing to experience. Yeah, it is. Maybe we should move there. Anyway. So the thing about New Zealand yeah, I'm sure there's some people listening like, yeah, why don't you move there if you love it so much, get out. And there's also kiwis that are going, come on over, we'd love to have you. Sure. And then there's also probably some there like, please don't. We've had enough of you too. Why I worked there, though, was because, like I said, you have to have everyone on board. And it seemed like most everyone on board or got on board in New Zealand. And that's just not happened here. It really has worked for New Zealand, but they've taken serious restrictions. Like you can't fly if you want to, domestically, they shut down their ports. If you want to fly to New Zealand, TS for you, you're not going to get anywhere near the country. But in addition, if you're a New Zealand citizen, you can't fly from one place to another if you want to, just for the heck of it. Right. So they've really instituted some draconian measures, but it seems to have worked. Like, there was a report that came out two days ago on May 4, that says that the models originally used to project how many cases New Zealand was going to have said that they're going to get something like 1000 cases a day if they did nothing. Like no blackout measures. All they've had since March is 1487 cases, not 1000 a day, 1487 cases total. And they've only had 20 deaths. So it seems like elimination can work. And for that reason, a lot of countries have said, this is what we're going to try. And elimination just amounts to hiding out from the virus until a vaccine can be developed. The problem is there are serious flaws to that too, depending on what kind of government and culture that you have. But even without that, depending on that, it requires that everybody act basically perfectly and avoid everybody else and give up your job, give up your economy, and wait until somebody comes up with a vaccine. And that can be a really pricey, costly measure. Yeah. Which is why a lot of people are like, we got to find some other way. Yeah. And there are ways you can look at the countries and decide whether or not people are going to comply or not. There was some cultural data. There was a company called Hofstede Insights, and they look at things like individualism of a population, basically, like whether or not people are going to all go along, or people are like, Heck no, man, I want my freedoms. I'm an individual, I'm an American, and you can't tell me what to do. Right. And you might not be surprised to learn that in Sweden, they have a rank of 71 out of 100 on individualism. The US score is 91 out of 100. So basically 91 out of 100 would be difficult to maintain these kind of restrictions for too long. I mean, if you look at it like that, it's remarkable in heartening how much people have given up individual liberties for the greater good in this pandemic in the United States then I hadn't looked at it that way. I just kind of saw like 91 and thought, okay, that's a high score. There's a lot of individualism in the United States. We got an individual streak like nobody's business. Right? Yeah. But if you look at it almost like it's a percentage of the population that will listen in situations like this, then it really does kind of go to show you how much of a sacrifice people have made and not just Americans, I don't want to just say it like that. Like if you're in a collectivist society, you're still sacrificing for the greater good. It's just possibly a little more culturally ingrained in you that this is the thing to do. But either way, the idea of people sacrificing for others is heartening. The problem is people can only sacrifice for so long until you have just massive economic drawbacks. That's the thing. So if you follow the forced herd immunity, natural herd immunity strategy toward COVID-19, it will result in a lot of deaths. If you follow the elimination strategy, it results in a tremendous amount of economic hardship. And it's easy to say, Chuck like, well, live's lost top economic hardship any day of the week and ultimately, yes, it does. But you really should not understate the toll in human misery of economic hardships and how bad this has gotten for some people and how quickly. Yeah, and the other thing I'll say too is one of the arguments I've heard is that there are going to be so many deaths from people who are depressed because they can't go out and people dying by suicide and stuff like that, which I don't want to minimize that because that for sure has an impact on people. But I saw a tweet from a guy that was talking about can we just stop pretending that our former world of working 50 hours a week and commuting in a stressful environment and hectic crowds and mass consumerism and pollution and everything else was like a mental health utopia. Right? Yeah. So you got to kind of look at the big picture and not just pick and choose what you're going to highlight because it fits your narrative. Yeah. I think one of the few good outcomes so far of this has been like a huge downshift in that manic productivity that drives most Americans. Yeah. And here's the thing. Everything is so new. We're not going to sit here and pretend like there is only one right way. There's so much that we don't know about this is we don't know the exact right path forward yet the population and the medical community doesn't know the exact right path forward. We're all trying to figure this out in real time and build the road as we're driving on it or whatever. That expression is close. And I have my money on staying at home, slowing this thing down, and elimination. Other people might feel a different way, but it seems like that way is working better. Yeah, it is. But again, it's still early and the data is still coming in. There was a report this week of 100 New York hospitals. They found that 66% of new cases were among people who had stayed at home and mostly followed the elimination strategy. So this one guy. This doctor who wrote an article that I read. Dr. Stephen Phillips. He said. Look. Man. In addition to all the stuff that we need to be doing to handle this pandemic. Let's also create like a really robust data sharing arrangement so that we can look back a year or a few years from now and study this and say. Oh. Actually. These countries followed elimination mixed with these social distancing guidelines. Or they followed herd immunity pursuit, and they actually came out on top so that we will know the next time which one actually does work, taking everything into account, the cost in lives, the economic costs, the cost in personal liberty, and find the best way forward. And it probably won't be a panacea where everything works. Like, one thing works for every country, but we'll have a pretty good model, hopefully that can be adjusted to suit the individual country that's adopting it. Hopefully that's if we can get past all of the arguing over whether this is even real or not. Yeah. And I know it's hard right now, but I think that the most dangerous thing right now is to have the mindset of, well, you know what? I'm pretty cagey and the weather is nice and I don't know anyone personally who's gotten it. So I'm just sort of going to ease back into normality here. Right. I think that's when the second wave comes and things get worse and it's tough and everyone is antsy and cagey, myself included, you know, I find myself wanting to do things and it's tough on kids especially, but I think it's more important now than ever to keep up what we're doing. Yeah. We haven't just magically wished the pandemic away. It didn't work. No. And lovely weather, take your walks, get outside, do it safely. But it is not a reason to be like, well, that's old news now we can just go back to normal. Right. I saw a post to button it up. I'm sorry we keep going back and forth on this, but I saw a post that said easing of lockdown doesn't mean that the pandemic has gone away. It means that they have a hospital bed for you now. Right, exactly. You got anything else? I got nothing else, man. All right, well, that's it for her community. Hopefully you guys learned something I definitely did from researching all this and we hope everyone out there is staying safe, insane and hanging in there. That's right. Since I said hanging in there, it's time, Chuck, for listener mail, I'm going to call this thanks from England and a little shout out. Hey, guys, I wanted to say thank you. Thank you for your ongoing efforts with stuff you should know. It's been a welcome distraction at work. I, along with so many, feel like we know you guys so well with Stuff You Should Know and Chuck's Movie Crush and Josh's Into the World podcast, hope your families remain safe. And from my son Dexter and I, we wish you all the best for yourselves in the future of the podcast. Sorry to ramble on, which, by the way, Ben, that was not rambling on. No, that was concise and beautiful. But you're from England, so you're very kind. Sorry to ramble on, but I was wondering if you would be kind enough to shout out all the UK NHS staff that are helping us over here. I have friends and family that work for the NHS services and this is the only way I know how to say thank you. So for sure, Ben, thank you to not only them, but to medical providers all over the world who are working hard, risking their own lives, often with equipment that's being reused when it shouldn't be and not going to wait into those waters. But you don't have all that you need to do your job right now and that's terrible and we should not be in this position, but we are. So thank you. He also says, PS. Torquay. We heard from a bunch of people on this you mentioned the other week, and I think the Agatha Christie segment, we would pronounce it Tour as in Tour bus in Torquay. It's always fun to hear how everyone pronounces these bloody silly towns over here. Kind regards. That is from Ben Cleaver. Ben, that was such a good email that we are now friends. That's right. Thank you for that. That was much needed, man. Thanks a lot for that. And we will very happily shout out the entire NHS and especially all of the people who are out there on the front lines working to save people's lives against Kobe 19 or anything that happens to it before and then. That's right. Thanks again, Ben. And if you want to be like Ben and get in touch with us, whether you want to tell us to stop being so political or you want to tell us that you think we're great, it doesn't matter. We want to hear from you either way. You can email us by sending one to Stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts, My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1227558121703hsw-sysk-ocd.mp3 | How OCD Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-ocd-works | Obsessive-compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder characterized by obsessive thoughts and compulsive actions. Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more about the effects of and treatments for OCD. | Obsessive-compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder characterized by obsessive thoughts and compulsive actions. Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more about the effects of and treatments for OCD. | Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=337, tm_isdst=0) | 13722918 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from houseworkscom. Hey, and welcome to this podcast. I'm Josh. It's chuck coming to you from studio one a yes. He's within the bowels of how stuff works. Corporate headquarters. My spokesman voice. Yeah, that's pretty good. Chuck. Chuck do your best. Monk. Like a Franciscan monk. Chant. I don't care. No, I know what you're talking about. You're talking about? Monk, the TV show. Yes. One of my favorites. Is it? Yeah, I love it. You watch it. You don't. Yes, I do now. It's good. I watch Monk because let me go ahead and set this up in a very offhand way. No, Monk. Let's hear it, Chuck. I don't know him. No? I've met him a few times. Tony Shalom, the actor? The great actor Tony Shalom. And I'm not just saying that because I've met him. I really is a big fan of his work with the Coen brothers, especially. Yeah, he's pretty good in their film. So you know how to direct that guy? Yeah, I met Tony through a friend of mine who was a director and who had worked with Tony. And Tony's, really good guy, took a shine at my friend Jim and went to his wedding, even, which I went to, and Tony's read one of my screenplays was kind enough to do that. You went to Monk's wedding. No, I went to Monday. But when I was there, I thought it was kind of funny that I knew he was going to be there, but there was a lot of periphery family there, and I just wondered if people just kind of flew in from out of town and sat down. They're like, hey, what's Monk doing here? He's over there. I just see him. He's right there. Yeah, he's an online registered minister. I sort of have met Tony a few times. He's a very nice guy. We got way sidetracked here. Oh, we did. And actually, if we had OCD, that would not stand right. Man, that was good. Thanks. Like Monk OCD. That's what we're talking about. Yeah, that's where Monk came from. So, basically, let's discuss OCD. Today, which stands for obsessive compulsive disorder. I think most people probably realize that. Yeah, which seems kind of foreign to me. Not me. I can kind of identify with it. But I mean, the thought of actually being clinically diagnosed with OCD and living the way that people who have OCD live, I can't imagine it being bearable. I guess that's probably what I should have said, right? You can identify well, I often say I have OCD to my wife as a joke, but I do have a lot of really weird, quirky compulsive habits. But after reading the article and doing a little more research, I realized unless it's an actual compulsion that you have to do it over and over, then it's not actually OCD. It's just weird, quirky habits. Like what? Oh, boy. Really? Yeah. Wow. I never really told people a lot of these. I don't step on stairs to have something on them. Okay. I will try to avoid cracks on the sidewalk. But not only that, but if I step on a crack with my left foot, then I have to step on the next one with my right foot. Wow. I know. I might have OCD. Actually. That's entirely possible. It sounds like though, it doesn't run your life. Well, that's the difference. I think OCD would be if I stepped on the crack with my left foot and then miss the next one, my right foot, I have to go back and then do it all over again and it doesn't come down. Or just chop both feet off and get it over. Right. And I don't always notice it either. Sometimes I'll do it, and sometimes I'll notice it, and sometimes I don't. I got you. It makes me wonder what the conditions are when you notice it. Like, what is going on in your life? What's your brain going through? That's interesting. So let's give a little background on OCD. Like Chuck said, it stands for obsessive compulsive disorder. And while the obsessive part is talking about the mental state right. People with OCD obsess over very slight things that seem gigantic to them. Right. For example, you think that your hands are dirty. That's a big one. That's an obsessive thought. And you can't get it out of your head. The only way to get rid of it is through compulsive behavior. Say, hand washing, right? Exactly. Here's the problem for most of us. If we look at our hands and go, oh, my hands dirty, I need to wash it, you wash your hand and that's that, right. You may not wash your hand again for several days. If you have OCD, you wash your hand over and over. And that obsessive thought that your hands still dirty is still there. Right. And from what I understand, it may vary with some people with OCD, but it's not necessarily that you get to the point where you actually think your hands are clean. A lot of times it will be a specific number in your head. Like, I have to wash my hands ten times. The magical number. Right? Yeah, the magic number. And then I can move on with my life. And you'll see that more often with people maybe locking and unlocking doors three times or ten times every time. Or opening and shutting or touching a doorknob or something like that. Right. David suddenly, the comedian and author David Sudara. Not comedian, but funny man David Sudera. Humorous. Humorous. Some of his books, he touches on some of his OCD when he was a kid. It was really funny. Licking light switches and licking mailboxes, things like that. That's really good. I didn't know that licking there was a licking compulsion. Well, touching, I guess licking is just touching with your tongue to get down to it. I have to try that line sometime. Okay. So that's the background on OCD. The obsession, though. Right. They can generally be categorized into four categories, appropriately enough. You got germs, which would account for the hand washing. Right. Right. There's symmetry, which is keeping things in place. Right. That's where mine figures in a little bit. Yeah. When I'm cleaning the house and things, I can't just put the remote control on the TV. I have to put it in a certain spot. Right. Yeah. Okay. Now there's doubt. Doubt is the one I think I can most identify with. Apparently, if you have OCD, this doubt is overwhelming and you will keep going back home, back home, back home. Just to check on the espresso maker or whatever. I read an article in the New York Times about OCD in restaurants. Apparently, it doesn't matter how your OCD manifests, a restaurant is a nightmarish, hellish place. There's just so many problems. If you're paying attention, you're going to really flip out. Well, you got someone handling your food. First of all, that's a big one. And you're eating with utensils that are shared. I mean, they're washed in theory, but shared utensils. The Jack Nicholson movie. As good as it gets. The restaurant scene in there, I think it's pretty indicative of what the hell you could suffer through. Yeah. Well, the author of the New York Times article that I read, he was never certain that he had actually signed the check when he's credit card. Interesting. So he'd look again, see that he'd signed it, and within seconds opened again to install that he signed it and open it again. He would drive himself crazy, like and also he had what I think is one of the more interesting, I guess, manifestations of OCD is reporting compulsion. I love this thing. It's pretty cool. Basically, let's say you're seated at a table at a restaurant. This is the example the New York Times guy uses. If you're seated at a table in a restaurant and it's maybe a little loose, you're suddenly overcome by thoughts of either yourself or somebody else down the line who will be seated at that table, being crushed by the weight of it when it falls over. Right. And you are overcome with the compulsion to tell somebody, the restaurant manager, a waiter or something. And the problem is they never really appropriately react. Right. I think if you feel that something is enough of a danger that it must be reported, action should be taken immediately. So the fact that the waiter doesn't immediately take the chair and the rest yeah. Or evacuate you from the table or something like that. Yeah. It's kind of got to be a downer. And the other problem with restaurants is that it's a very public forum. And so if you have to touch something several times before you sit down or you change tables several times because they're not entirely stable. Right. People notice that kind of thing and all of a sudden you're fairly embarrassing disorders put on display. Right. So I think for that reason, a lot of times people find themselves trapped in their homes and give a little bit of agoraphobia going out. Yeah. Apparently OCD can very easily lead to agoraphobia. Right. And baldness. Yes. This is awful. From what, Chuck? From pulling your hair? I mean, come on, what kind of an affliction is this? Right. This is awful. And it's all in your head. That's the worst part. And I think people with OCD realize even before they are ever really treated, that this is all in their head. Right. And that just has to make it all the worse. Right. I know there was a basketball player in the I guess it was the his name was Chris Jackson. I don't know if you remember him. I remember him, yeah. He played well. He played for LSU in college. And I can't remember we played pro, but he had OCD and I think would tie his shoes tie his basketball shoes up over and over and over and be late for practice and leaving the house. He had problems leaving the house. And I'll have to look into this. It just hit me, actually. But I believe it actually had something to do with the early end of his basketball career. I may be wrong there. Well, I'll look into that. Yes. Hopefully Jackson is still playing because that sucks. Well, he's definitely not still playing now just because he'd be old. Oh, got you. Yeah. Like Dr. J old. No, not Dr. J. Old. Magic Johnson old. Little younger than maybe he still could be playing, actually. Latrel Spriell old. Yeah. Okay. Well, old. I've stumbled upon it. See, that was the magical number three. Yeah, we worked it out. There's one more category that obsessions can be lumped into, and this is kind of the darkest of them all. Disturbing thoughts. Yeah. And these are thoughts that you can't get out of your head. Right. And that if they led to compulsive behavior, it's probably going to be violent. Like violent sexual thoughts. Other acts of violence may be self inflicted or on other people. And actually, I found a study, a case report, actually. Did you know that Nymphomania is often linked to OCD? Really? Yeah. That makes sense. Compulsive behavior. Yeah. There's this woman whose case was in extremist, though. It's a 2002 case study. And there was a woman who was 23 and she was a daycare worker, but she became unemployed because her sexual activity she was so prolific that she couldn't hold a job down. Right. She had sex too much and she's in the wrong line of work. Well, yeah. Okay, let's just settle down and check. All right. So this woman actually this is self reported. She commonly had sexual intercourse 30 times in a 24 hours period several times a week. You sent me this in an email. I didn't realize. I thought it was just here's an interesting fact, but she had OCD. Yeah. Should I be amazed at the 30 times? Can you imagine having sex 30 times in 24 hours, doing it several times a week? No, I can't. So this woman also had other compulsions as well, but that was a pretty interesting compulsive behavior. She was doing it to her own detriment. She derived no sexual pleasure from having sex, and she reported that she was afraid of being abandoned by these people. Interesting. Well, that took over her life, for sure. It did. And happily enough, she went under a cognitive behavioral therapy right. And is working it out, which is one of the treatments along with, I believe antidepressants is one of the things they can prescribe sometimes. Yeah. There is treatment. Take hope all you who have OCD and are just finding this out. There is treatment for this disorder. And cognitive behavioral therapy is the chief method of curing. You want to tell them about the CBT? Well, yeah, I know one of the methods they use in CBT is called exposure and response prevention. And basically, from what I can gather, that's showing someone or putting someone in front of their fear or in this case, their obsession and just saying, you can't do it. Yeah. Imagine tying somebody to a chair, right? Yeah. And then putting, like, a dirty towel on their hand right. And not letting them wash it. Yeah. And basically, you reinforce. Look, you're not dying, your hands not falling off, you're not getting sick. It doesn't just happen. One takes a series. It's like breaking a wild horse. Right. Again, through therapy, and often in conjunction with antidepressants, this disorder can be licked. What's up? So not like David sudera's lick. Yeah. Not licking being a form of touching. Lick. Right. Boy. Full circle. Yeah. Nice one. That was by accident. All right, well, thanks for joining us this time on Stuff You Should Know. And you can learn a lot more about obsessive compulsive disorder by typing in those three words or even OCD in our search bar on howstepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworz.com. 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?" | |
How Witchcraft Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-witchcraft-works | Witches are perhaps one of the most reviled and misunderstood groups in history -- but why? Join Josh and Chuck as they break down the Stuff You Should Know about witchcraft in this episode. | Witches are perhaps one of the most reviled and misunderstood groups in history -- but why? Join Josh and Chuck as they break down the Stuff You Should Know about witchcraft in this episode. | Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:59:03 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=21, tm_min=59, tm_sec=3, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=40, tm_isdst=0) | 41592178 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, Chuck, Joshua, you were about to be in Guatemala, buddy. Correct. Action, dude. We are in Guatemala. As this is playing. Wow. Pretty cool. Yeah, it's the magic of technology. So tell them what we're plugging here. Well, we're going to be down in Guatemala finding out whether education can actually alleviate poverty or not, right? Yes. And while we're down there, we're going to be blogging the whole time. Hopefully, as we speak, there will be blog posts, and if we don't have Internet access, it'll be up next week. Yeah. The Internet in Guatemala may or may not be spotty. We haven't figured it out yet, but if not, they'll be up the following week, right? Indeed. Okay, well, you can check those out at the blog. Athousedupworkscom Chuck and I share a blog called Stuff You Should Know. Appropriately enough, Right? Yes, that's that right. On with the show. On with the podcast. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And Chuck. Yes. Josh, I'm going to paint a theme for you. Literally, it might take a while now with my work. What's that canvas and easel doing in here then? This is just to help me fix. Okay. Got you. Okay, let's hear. I'm just going to drop the big figures right here, so don't expect me. Imagine, right, that you are tied to a pole. Okay. You are so good. You're bound with your hands behind your back. That's good. And your ankles are also bound to said pole, which is looking upright, direct. Sure. And you notice that there's an awful lot of really dry firewood scattered around you around this pole. That's not good. It's really not good. Even less good is you figuring out that there's some guy, probably some sort of priest or official, maybe an executioner coming towards you with a torch. Are there people there? There are tons of people. All of your neighbors, people in your very small community who you've known your whole life. My neighbors would be saying, who's that guy? Well, this is in a different time. Okay. So let's say that you know all of your neighbors and work with them and trade with them and maybe helped raise their children, all right? Healed them when they were sick, using herbs and maybe incantations. There were better times in the past. Right now, everyone in your town is pointing at you and laughing at you and yelling and calling you horrible names and accusing you of doing horrible things like stealing babies and sucking their blood and wow. Yeah. Just doing all sorts of terrible stuff, right? Sure. In front of you are your daughters. You have a couple of daughters. Okay. And they're being forced to watch this man who is approaching you with the torch. But not only that, they're being whipped in front of you. Wow. So you're about to die in one of the most horrible ways a human being can die. Right. While you're watching your daughter's being whipped and the entire town pointing at you, calling you horrible names and just basically lacking any level of humanity whatsoever. Wow. That's pretty rosy. Oh, I'm not done yet. Really? The guy finally makes it over. He took his sweet ass time, didn't they? Sure. He finally makes it over with the torch and lights, the kindling, and all of a sudden, you got the hot foot. Yeah. Right? The flames start to climb and climb. You're having trouble breathing. You're extremely hot. Your clothes are catching on fire. Sure. Your skin is blistering. The pain is about as intense as it can possibly be. Of course, from what I understand, burning to death in this manner can take a matter of hours. Wow. Yeah. Until I die. Yes. Or until, I guess, you're completely burned up, Josh. That's awful. It is pretty awful. I can't imagine a worse way to die. No, I can't either, Chuck. But do you want to know something? What's? That? This actually happened to hundreds of thousands of people during the Middle Ages in Europe and later on in the United States. We are talking about witches. We are talking about witches. Perhaps witchcraft, one of the most misunderstood or reviled groups of all time in history. Yeah. Never think about that. No, you probably would have said gypsies. Yeah. But no. Okay. That's my two cent. Yeah, I would agree with that. Especially after reading this article and hearing that story, which has got the bad end of the stick. Yeah, I would agree with that. So where do we go from here, Josh? To the beginning? Sure. We don't actually know the very beginning. Right. Because witchcraft has been around since they were pre humans. Right, sure. Yeah. I mean, you could make the case that all pre Christian religions, with the exception of Judaism, witchcraft, basically. Yeah, because the article pointed out here that witchcraft, like, when times were rosy, everything was great, but then when plague hit and famine and disease, then that's when people said, oh, maybe we should get this shaman to cook up a little potion or say a spell to the gods, and maybe things will turn in our favor. And if they didn't turn in their favor, then the shaman or the witch or the folk dealer, whatever, usually found the entire town against him or her. Right. And perhaps even burned at the stake. But this was before a certain period. Witchcraft is basically just like, whatever. It was normal, commonplace, everyday stuff, and there wasn't necessarily anything like evil associated with it like we do today. It was magic. Right. With a K. Explain. Yes. M-A-G-I-C-K is to differentiate that is a common, accepted spelling by modern witches. To differentiate between, let's say, real witchcraft. David copperfield. Right. That kind of magic. Or duck an illusion. An illusionist, yes. Or John C. Reilly as the illusionist at the end of Boogie Nights. Remember, he became a magician at the end. No, I totally forgot that. Yes. That's what he became after his porn career. I forgot about that. Anyway, that kind of magician. Or the other kind of magic, which is there's both black and white magic, and they're not necessarily mutually exclusive, as the good and evil. Right. As we learned. Now, at some point, though, the tide very much turned, and there's actually, I should say it turned at one point, but there are several things that led up to the turning of the tide against witches. And you say Augustine had something to do with this. Well, actually is it Augustine? Yeah. Okay. I know we always say Augustine. And you doubt his existence at times. We've gotten some email on that. Yeah. Round about Ad 420, augustine argued that only God could suspend the normal laws of the universe. Therefore there couldn't possibly be any such thing as what witches claimed to be able to do. Right. So basically, they may as well have just been engaged in tooth fairy studies or something like that. They were totally harmless, possibly wacko. But to the Christian Church, they had nothing to do with anything. Sure. Right. Okay. And that view was held for a good 800 years. So it's popular. Yes. Which is where they went along their merry way, did their own thing. Christianity went along its merry way, did its own thing, and no real problems. Right. Right. Until Ad 1208 and a pope named Innocent III went to war with the Cathars. You heard of these guys? No, but I've heard of the innocents. Have you? Yeah. And the third had nothing on Junior. Just let me say that. Who the Second? Yeah. No, we don't need to get into that. Okay, go ahead, though. Anyway. Innocent the third not junior. Right. Innocent the Third. Did they use Junior to denote folks? No. Okay. Innocent the Third declared war in the Catheters. Catherine were this kind of Christian sect who lived in France, I think northern France in Long Dock, and they were very much convinced that on Earth and throughout the universe, there is a very real war going on between God and the Devil, good and evil. Right. Light and dark, night and day. Yes. Right. And there was very clear division, and there was a power struggle going on. Okay. The Catholics also clearly believe that the Roman Catholic Church was actually the church of Satan. Okay. They really believe that? Oh, wow. Yeah. And they were very much opposed to the Roman Church. Okay. The Roman church had more power, led by Innocent III. Said, you know what, Catherine? We decided that you guys worship the Devil. And not only that, we're going to create propaganda that shows that are wood carving, showing your people kissing the anus of the devil in person because you guys are devil worshippers. Take that. Wow. That was not a good day. The Catholics were persecuted, and to this day, they're called the cather heretics. I'm sure they could have gotten by with, like, kissing the hand of the devil or something. I saw a woodcarved little overboard. It's like the devil with the cloven huston. He's bend over like, kiss my devil butt. Exactly. Can I go on? Yeah. Okay. Does it get better? It does. Well, it doesn't get better for witches. Okay. So now we have people who oppose the Church, worship Satan. Yes. That division has just been created. Got you. Okay. And the whole reason the Pope went after the Catherine, the idea that there was a war between good and evil going on right. Was actually, like, 80 years later, adopted by St. Thomas Aquinas. Okay. For him. And he's like, okay, there is such a thing as demons, and they're here on Earth, and not only are they involved in pleasuring themselves, they really like to lead human beings astray from God. So this is going on. There is real evil. It's really tangible, and it's all around us all the time. And we have to protect ourselves. As Christians, we have to be suspicious of other people who aren't Christians because they're probably being led astray by these demons. Okay. Now we start to have everyday people who can possibly be in league with the Devil because it's all around us. Right. All right. And this is when this was first taking root. Right. This was the real start of it. But everything's been leading up to this day. Okay. Right. And then finally chuck in, we have the real seed of how we view witches and the witch scare, which led to the witch executions and persecution. Sure. Fortunately for a pair of German friars, took two years to write the Malius. Malificarum. Okay. Right. It's basically a witch finding handbook. This is how to seek them out, how to seek them out, how to try them, how to execute them. Basically, these two German friars remember the vow of abstinence? We're not very happy with women. And they basically made all this stuff up. Most witches were women. To tell a witch, anyone who suspected of it, any woman who is suspected of it should be stripped down and search for moles. Right. And then also which is like to steal penises from men, collect them, keep them in a box where they would move by themselves and eat oats and corn. Pretty awful idea. Right. And also witches, when you're trying a witch, you have to lead her in backwards so she doesn't have a chance to cast spells on everybody when she's showing in the room. Makes sense. Just stupid. Stupid like that. Right. It's probably going to get bleeped out. I think so. Okay. And that led to the witch scare, the witch persecution, and the witch executions that we know and love today. Hundreds of thousands of people chuck wow. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed because these two German friars wrote this book and just made it up. I feel like we could stop there. I have more. I'll try to interject it later. So, Josh yes. Should we talk about one of the most famous of those persecutions? Yes. Not single persecution, a set of persecutions in 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts. Of course, if you've read the Crucible, we're talking about Salem witch trials. Yeah. Should we go over that real quick? I think we should. This all started because a couple of precocious teenage girls may or may not have had clinical hysteria or been bored or been bored. Maybe epilepsy. You never know. Point is, they were having convulsions and screaming, like, as if they were possessed, saying they were being pinched and poked. Is that what it was? Yeah. By an unseen force. Bitten and pinched, not poked by an unseen force. They were poked by the witch examiners, I'm sure. Okay. And the doctor actually, the witch examiner said they are clearly bewitched. Right. And how? Because that stupid book probably the stupid book. Yes. He probably had that in his little doctor's physician. He wasn't even a witch examiner. The guy was the village physician. And he was like, I can't come up with any explanation, so they're clearly bewitched right. And so this led to the one by one, these ladies in Salem, Massachusetts. And this was clearly before their big liberal influx of liberals in Massachusetts. Those days are over. Well, yeah, true, recently. And these women became persecuted and accused of being witches. A couple of men, too, but yeah, mostly women. Women who lived on their own, of course, which was a crime, supposedly, in Salem. You know who didn't help? The servant. Tituba. Was that her name? Yeah. Yeah. This is a West Indian servant of one of the girls. And she really cemented the whole deal when she said that she admitted in court to dealing with the devil and flying on sticks and said, quote, unquote, they made her hurt those girls. Yeah. She didn't help things. Yeah. So that really sending into high gear and what, like, 20 people were killed, right. Put to death. Yeah. One guy, Giles I can't remember his last name he was pressed to death with a heavy stone. He was like an old man, an elderly man, and they laid him on a big stone and put an even bigger stone on top of his chest, and the life was pressed out of him. Wow. I've never heard of that. I believe he was tortured to death like that because he would not confess to being a witch. I wonder what they called that. Was that called presence or something? It was, yeah. Goodness me. That's creative. And that went on for a little while under the rule of the general court, and then that court was usurped by the court of the judiciary. Nice. And they basically reversed stance, and not very many witches after that took place were persecuted. Right. They basically said, okay, the witch hunt is over. Let's just pretend this never happened. That's literally what happened. And that was it. No more witchery. Yeah. I said only three more people after that were found guilty of witchcraft, and they were even pardoned yeah. Later on. And they still don't know what was up with these two girls. Like, they said, they could have been precocious little girls looking for attention, or they could have had some mass or not mass hysteria, but clinical hysteria. I wrote an article for the site about this study this woman conducted, I think in the she proposed that they were actually all poisoned by ergot. Really? Which is a hallucinogen agenda, and that everybody got it from eating rotten grain and was basically tripping. Well, that was one of the theories of the Enlightenment at one point. A lot of the Enlightenment was because of bad bread. Basically, people were hallucinating and coming up with all these amazing inventions. That's awesome. Yeah. I don't know if that's true, though. So where are we, Josh? Well, we could start to talk about the modern era. Okay. Well, pagan religion. Well, do you want to talk about the different kinds of witchery around the world? Yeah, I've got a couple I'd like to highlight. I want to hear it, Chuck. OK. Josh you know, I was going to pick this one appalachian Folk Magic. So cool. Can't you see Nell Ne Typo Neil putting, like, a hex on somebody? That was the worst movie ever. Appalachian Folk Magic, Josh, is clearly around this area of the Southeast, and they have a very much Christian based idea of a Christian God and the Devil as the good and evil, like you were talking about. And they can use their magic with a K for good or evil. And they look to nature for omens and like, to portray the future. Yes. And they're local men. Yeah, I know. We could probably go up in North Georgia and round up a couple of these. That would be pretty boss, actually. Yeah, I'd like to go do that. What's yours? Give me something. One of my favorites is the coolest name pennsylvania Dutch Hexcraft, aka Powell, and it is from the Well, Pennsylvania Dutch area of Pennsylvania. German and Dutch settlers, including the Amish, but also including people who are Reformist, like Lutherans. Right. Protestants believe in this stuff where you can create good will, blessings, things like that, usually for the home, by creating symbols hexes, which apparently when they first arrived and they were talking to the English, they were saying sexes, but the English heard Hex, and that's why it's called hexcraft. It's not the least bit dark. I think of a hex is a bad thing. Right. You know that pineapple welcome flag? That people, like, hang outside of their house. Sure. That's a Pennsylvania Dutch. Hex really? Yeah. Bless this home. That's a Pennsylvania Dutch. Hex the two partridges with a heart. Pennsylvania Dutch hex. What about the pretty nice stuff? It's really pleasant. Witchcraft. What about don't tread on me, it's a rattlesnake. It's a little different. That's not the same thing. No. Okay. And of course we got to talk about Wicca. That's probably where we're going to spend most of our time here, because WICA is the most widely even though it's the youngest. Well, no, but youngest, but only, what, like 60 years old? Yeah, about. But it's still probably the most widely accepted form of modern witchcraft. Right. And it's a form of paganism. Right. Let's talk about paganism. Okay. Because that gets a bad rap. It does. A pagan is also often interchangeably called a heathen. Basically, pagan can mean either, like, someone who doesn't subscribe to the big Three, christianity, Judaism or Islam. Sure. So any other religion, including major established religions, like Buddhism, Hinduism, that kind of thing, they're technically pagan. Or it can denote a religion that existed prior to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, that kind of thing. Got you. And actually the other characteristic of it is that it's usually polytheistic. Right. More than one god. Exactly. That is the characteristic. Right, yeah. Sort of like the rectangle square thing. Well, if you have multiple deities, you're definitely pagan, but if not, doesn't mean you necessarily aren't a pagan. Does that make sense? I just blew your mind, didn't it? Yeah, you did. Wow. So pagan actually means country person, though, and Latin sort of the easiest way to put it. Sort of like just redneck kind of home and hearth. I think hearth dweller is the Latin translation. Yes. But they weren't city people and they were looked down upon, but they weren't necessarily bad or anything. Right. They're just kind of like you said, rednecks pumpkins, appalachian. And it was later on is when they became associated with Satan. Right. And we've seen why, or we've seen how I'll get to why later on, because that will blow your mind, too, dude. Okay. Okay. But yeah, right now, as far as we know, there's pretty much only one form of witchcraft practiced in the world. Seriously? Practiced in the world, yeah. And that is Wika. And like you said, Chuck, it's only about 60 years old, and it was created by a guy named Gordon Gardner. Right. Gerald Gardner. Gerald Gardner. His brother Gordon actually was working on a different religion, and it didn't pan out. It didn't peter it out. So Gordon fell by the wayside and Gerald took over. Right. None of that is true, by the way, because people are wicked, are going to write and say, I've never heard of Gordon. What was his religion? We should make up a pamphlet and curse you. Actually, no, Chuck, I know. I'm glad you did that, though, because that's a great Segue, there's some real misunderstandings of Wicca. Yeah, big time. And Wickends, first and foremost, is that they are devil worshippers. Not true. No, it's not true. As a matter of fact, the Wicked don't even believe that there is a devil. They don't believe in the Christian concepts of the devil or hell. Yeah, exactly. So how could you worship the devil if you don't even believe in exactly. Josh that's a big one right there. What's, another misconception? Chuck well, Gardner actually founded it as a life affirming religion that does include psychic abilities and magic. But the Wicked takes an oath or is it a Wicked, I guess, yeah. Takes an oath to not do harm. It's only for self improvement. It's almost like it's not like self help, but it's only meant to be performed on yourself. Is that right? Yes. And technically, there is an implied understanding that you could harm other people with the power that you come to harness through the Wicked rituals. But like you said, they take a note not to harm other people. And there's also a Wicked belief that if you do harm other people what is it the rule of three? If you harm other people, another person, the damage you've inflicted will come back on you three fold. So there's kind of that prohibition should we talk about? I think this is really cool, the life force cosmic energy bit. It is cool. And this is pretty much the crux of the whole thing. Yeah, the crux of the whole thing is that Wickens believe well, the scientific concept we all believe is that all matter vibrates with its own energy. Wickens believe you don't believe that? I don't believe that. Wickens believe that a witch's body has that same vibration, both physical and spiritual rate of vibration. And during these rituals they perform, they vibrate such that they can create a pathway for energy to flow through them and call on energy from the gods and deities. Right. I think all of us, in their opinion, have a physical molecular vibration and a spiritual molecular vibration, but that they learn how to meld the two together and become suddenly exceedingly powerful and to channel it for more powerful beings in themselves. Right. And with the key. Right? Yes. Because you have to invoke a deity to carry out one of their rituals. Do you want to talk about the Great Wright? Chuck that's the best one. I think so, too. And there's a sentence in the description of the Great Wright that I just thought was so cute. Yes. Josh the Great Wright is one of the main central ceremonies, and there's tons and tons of them. They're all different, and there's all different kinds of ways that you can do them. But we're going to go over just basically a generic great right. Ceremony. Right. That's our disclaimer. And we should say that there are three levels to WICA, and each level is learned in a year and a day starts out as, I think, student, teacher and high no, student, practitioner and teacher. So you've got which priestess and then high priestess or priest. Yes. And once you've completed all those phases, Josh, you are official and you have the power to perform these rituals. So the great Wright ritual is actually carried out by the Covenant. And we should also say Wicker can perform by themselves. They can do rituals on their own. Sure. But they also have covens. Right. Coven. If you're a fan of American Movie, matt our guest producer, clearly he's laughing. Remember American Movie? Did you see that documentary about oh, really? It's good. You should definitely see American movie. Okay. He makes a short film, this crazy filmmaker guy in Wisconsin, and he calls it coven instead of coven. Okay. But he thinks he's right. Funny thing. You're going to see this thing? Oh, it's great. Okay. Till I continue. Yes. So they can be in a covenant, or they can be but let's say they're in a covenant, a solitary sure. Right. For our purposes, we're going to describe a coven ritual. Coven ritual. Now you have me scream. I like coven more. So you have the High Priest and the High Priestess of the Covenant, right? Yes. And you have the great right. Ritual is to signify the coming together of the High Priest and the High Priestess, the God and the Goddess. And when you say come together, you mean sexually. Yes. Now, this can be done either symbolically. Sure. Using an FM. Yeah. Sort of like a dull knife. Yeah. It's a pretty wicked looking ceremonial knife. Yeah. Not used to cut things, though. No. That represents the phallus. Sure. And the cauldron represents the womb. So the high priest might be like, oh, here comes the half of and then the High Priestess is like, I got the cauldron right here. And then that's the main part of the ritual. Right. I got one word for that. Boring. Right. And so a cousin may opt to actually have the high priests and the High Priestess engaged in the sexual act yes. To really just kind of identify the deal, get the ritual going. Yeah, sure. Now, here's the really cute sentence that I thought came up in this article. Leanne Obringer, who wrote it, points out that often the high Priest and the high Priestess are married. Very cute. It is very cute. And they actually do not perform. The whole coven has to agree to the literal interpretation where the sexual act is performed. Right. And they have to all be in agreement. And it does not actually take place, like, Caligula style in front of everyone. No, they do do that in private. That's another misconception, is that they have orgies and things like that. They do have the sexual act once in a while, like, say, for the great. Right. But again, coven. Apparently from this article, I've come to learn that covenants are fairly democratic. Sure. And everyone has to be in agreement that they're either going to do it symbolically or they're going to do it literally. Same with skyclad. Right? Yeah. Which I'd never heard of that. That means naked. Yes. That's what Wickens call being naked. Skyclad. Skyclad. I'm going to use that at home. Yeah. I'm just skyclad, Dave. I'm going skyclad. But again, you can perform a ritual skyclad, or you can do it clothes and robes. And again, that's up to the covenant as a whole, whether they do that. Chuck, josh, what's the point of the great ritual, the Great Wright ritual? Well, it can bring good harvest. That's one reason they'll do that. And to continue the circle of life so that a new god can be born at Yule. And Yule, Y-U-L-E we found out, is the first day of the Wicking year is Sabot, or holy day, called Eule. Is that right? Yeah. And that sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it? The Yule log? It does. Josh. It's funny that something from Christmas would have to do with a pagan tradition. Interesting. Weird. So Yule is one of the is it Sabat or Sabbath? I'm going to say sabot. I'm going to go with Sabbath. You say coven, I'll say coven. Okay. That way we got our bases covered. No one can write in, so we set it wrong. Right? Exactly. We should do that for everything. I agree. Okay, so Sabbath is one of the holy days, and the Wickens observe eight throughout the year. Like Chuck said, yule is the celebration of the winter solstice, and it's the time when the Goddess gives birth to the new god. So the great Wright hastens the yule birth. Right? Correct. After that, you have imbalk. Imbalc, which is celebrated on February 2. Right? Yeah. That's when the spring crops are planted. Yeah. Like with most of these things that we've heard, they're not even wicked in, but their rights to the gods usually has to do with harvest and growing things. And that's what most religious holidays that we still observe today, that's where they find their roots. It was all agrarian. That's what I was trying to say. You just said it a lot smarter than me, though. And then there saw one right. Which had something to do with Halloween. What was the deal there? Actually, the Wicker believed that on this night, the gauze between life and death is virtually removed and the dead can communicate with the living. But here's what I find very cool. The debt is not like, go get me some cigarettes, or anything like that. It's a time of celebrating with your dead family members, having a feasting with them, basically just hanging out with the people in your life who died. That's nice, isn't it? So much of this, you think it's some dark satanic ritual, has nothing to do with any of that. No, it. Doesn't. Not to say I'm going to run out and become a Wicked or anything, but back in high school, my friend Stevie Cohen and I started looking into it. That when the ninja thing didn't work out. This was after okay. I was like, Wait, how many rocks do we have to paint different colors? And we have to arrange them. What? This really involved stuff. Like, there's this article that Obringer wrote is pretty detailed. We've only kind of hit the surface of it, but there's even more detail to it than this. Greatly. Yeah. It's a really detailed religion. Yeah. And they have a book what's that called? The Book of Shadows. Yeah. Which, I got to say, doesn't really help their case to people who don't understand what they do. Sure. They could call it the Little Wicked Handbook, and it'd probably be like a sweet. The book of Green fairies. The Book of Unicorns. Why not? The Book of Shadows is the Witch's guidebook, and it is coven specific. So your own coven would write, like, the spells and the hexes and the rules and the regulations, what you got to wear, what time you got to show up, whether you're going to go skyclad, whether you go skyclad, who has to bring the sticky buns and the coffee to the meetings, who has to clean the cauldron, that kind of thing. Nice. Cauldron is a real thing. We should talk about just a few of these implements, I guess, and whether or not they really use them. Like the broom? Yes. Do they fly around on it? No. Why not? Because which is can't fly. Okay. They do use them to purify the circle where the rituals take place. They cast a circle, and they have to purify the area first. They're using the broom to literally sweep out I don't know if literally was the right word. They use the broom to sweep out the energy in the area. They may also use sage, or if they want to go for double whammy, they might use a broom that features sage woven into it. Right. And you just said casting a circle, that's a big part of most Wicked ceremonies. And they will cast a circle. It's very important at the beginning with the north, south, east, western points, and at the end of every ceremony, they will close that circle, kind of by reversing what they did when they opened it or when they cast it. And the points represent the elements earth, water, fire and air. Yes. Right. Yeah. Let's talk about the pentagram, because you probably think it's, like, the symbol of the devil, right? I don't. Okay. So, Josh, let's talk about the pentagram. Okay. Often seen on Satanic singer band album covers. Sure. Judas Priest. Yeah, exactly. They worship the devil, right. As far as the courts in the 80s were concerned. Yeah. Right. Turbo Lover clearly is a song about Satan. Dude. Judas. Priest was bitching. Yeah. They were awesome. Still are. Sure. So the pinnacle, josh, is a five pointed star enclosed within a circle. Right. And the five pointed star is called the pentagram. Right. But when you put the circle around it, that's the pinnacle, right? Yes. Okay. And so if it's upright, which is the one point up, two points down, it is a symbol of witchcraft and represents earth, fire, water, air and spirit. And the circle represents the gods and goddesses that allow the energy to be focused on the pentagram. Right. And the circle brings all these things together into a cohesive unit. Yeah. So that's like on the cover of rush's upright, if you flip it upside down, that's when I think satan comes into play, because it's like the goats head or something. Isn't that right? Yeah, but even that's just propaganda. That's what I thought from that used against the knights templar. Jeez. I know. So he mentioned they use cauldrons, and they do have certain knives, but they're never used to bloodlet or anything like that. They use that one dull knife to draw shapes in the sand and things like that. Or to represent the phallus. Yes. They have wands. They use wands? Yeah, they do. The wand represents fire and the life force of the witch, and it is a symbol of wisdom and healing. They can also use a staff usually about shoulder high. Yeah, I guess that's probably like the mega wand or something. Sure. You know the eye wand. Sure. Is that it? You got anything else? I do have something else. I was doing a little additional research, and I came across a book review of a book called caliban and the witch by author sylvia federici. Let's hear it. Basically, she chronicles what happened to witchcraft, to witches, why hundreds of thousands of people were killed. And basically, she says that it was part of a larger grab for power of the ruling classes from, I believe, the 15th to the 18th or 17th century. Okay. All right. So it's rooted in money. Well, yeah. She makes the point that she believes that, first of all, women had much more power. Even though it was still a patriarchy prior to this, women still had much more power socially. They were basically unionized. They did a lot of the work, and without them and their reproductive abilities, sure. Things would get all screwed up. So basically, to show women who was who the church and state, which were virtually indistinguishable at the time right. Said, you know what? You're a witch. We're going to kill you. And they did it in that way that we described at the beginning with the whole town watching as much to punish the witch as to send a message to everybody else. You don't go against the male patriarchy. You don't go against the patriarchy, or else we will literally burn you to death at the stake and whip your daughter in front of you while this is going on. And they did it over and over again. And from this brutality, they basically were able to consolidate their power. They also simultaneously were exploring the world and subjugating other people. But at home in the Middle Ages no. Medieval times I'm sorry, serfs each had their own plot of land. They could do whatever they wanted. Right. Even if they worked for somebody else, they still had a certain sense of certain measure of self sufficiency. Right. This stuff was taken away to wage labor was created. And you have the roots of capitalism and basically what Federici calls the housewiving of women going on at the same time. Right. So the division between men and women that we still have today and the roots of capitalism find their place back at this time in the Middle Ages. Right. Yeah. And then one more thing, too. What you got? I thought this was awesome. She compares the witch scare to the terrorism scare that we're under today. Really? Basically saying, like, people a lot of times think that the witch scare was just carried out by ignorant hicks. Not true. It may have been carried out by ignorant hicks, but it was very much encouraged and supported by the ruling class, which was the church in the state. Right. So there were witches everywhere which kept people afraid and occupied and kept what? You were able to keep them down through this. They were too busy chasing shadows and killing innocent people. Same thing is going on with terrorism. It's not a perfect analogy because there really are terrorists in the world. Sure. But the amount that the proportion that it's grown to is similar. Wow. Good stuff. Thanks. And that's a new book, I guess. I think the review I read was from early November. I have to check that out. Yes. Anything else? Josh? That's it, man. Good stuff. Thanks, Chuck. Josh like I said, we just kind of glanced the surface. There's so many more rituals and so many kinds of covens and witches and potions and hexes. And we'd spend hours talking about that. I think we have okay. You can type witchcraft in the handy searchearchpart houseworks.com to get a lot more information on that. And now, I guess, then, it's time for listener mail. I call this ninja teenagers. Hi, chuck and Josh. Basically, let me set this up because it's kind of long. This kid grew up in Southern California I'm sorry, in the suburbs of California. And he and his in the 80s, like we did, he and his buddies were really into ninjas. So they decided to do what you did and train as a ninja in the suburbs of whatever. I guess you were in Ohio at the time. And so they had a house next door that was just randomly occupied. Like, people would be there and then they wouldn't be there. They never knew anything about it. But it was usually empty. So they decided to go into that backyard ninja style and creep around. So picture this three preteen nerds ninja walking, shuffling and crawling silently along the neighbor's side yard with homemade weapons in hand. They made like, munchk's and stuff like that. And just as we pass the sliding glass door, the lights spring on. We are completely bathed in light locked eyes with this nice Asian family standing there, suitcase having just drive from the airport. I swear no one moved for at least a five count. And we all just stood their surprise, and we were frozen in our perfect ninja poses. Then we jumped up, ran off in a very non assassin like panic to our homes and our rooms, waiting for the inevitable knock on the door. So it turns out they're an Asian family that spend most of their time in Asia. We just come back to the States for weeks at a time. And so they came up to the three ninja team. He has no idea what this poor family must have thought. Still known with jet lag having just arrived in America to flip on the light and be met with the sight of three diminutive ninja. And it still makes them laugh. And that's from Jeremy. Jeremy also says, tell Josh when he says recidivism is one bonehead word. I get it. Nice. And Josh, while we're on ninjas, I just wanted to bring up during that episode, you said something that you called Pudda puta Pudda. Right? Which in Japanese means very fluent. We got a lot of emails that they had no idea what this meant, including this email from JUP in Shanghai, China, that is. And JUP was very enthused because he works with a Japanese person. Okay, so I was going to say, how does that qualify him? Yeah, he tries out the Japanese phrases here. So he went up to her and said no. And she followed that with impersonating a bird, including elbow movements, telling me she thought I was talking about shaky things. So he wants to know, what the heck? Why did you embarrass him like that with purple pudding? I feel like my work here is done. Now you have to explain. Actually, purple, as you found out, does not exist. I made it up. The real word is Periphere. It's annamanapia in Japanese for fluent, the way people talk very quickly when they're fluent in something. Right. Got you. So I just started to call it and as a result, we got a couple of self created Japanese pronunciation guys from very concerned listeners who are worried, like we were either having or I was having a stroke or was that off? Or maybe you were a witch. Maybe we have a phone number for a guy who works with the Japanese consulate in San Francisco anytime we need pronunciation. And my long suffering half of anwen girlfriend is always a good source of information, although I like to learn it my own way. Of course. So pera. Pera is upon your home. I like it. Okay. Puerta puerto puerta upon all of your homes. We just decided that's our own little bit of Pennsylvania Dutch hexcraft. Which means it's a good thing, right? If you have your own little version of hexcraft or a blessing for Chuck and I that we can share with other people, put it in an email and send it to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Want morehousedufworks? Check out our blog on the Houseofworks.com homepage brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry, it's ready. Are you?" | ||
447da850-53a3-11e8-bdec-839a0174eb2a | John Lennon and the FBI | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/john-lennon-and-the-fbi | Did you know that Richard Nixon had a FBI case file open on Beatle John Lennon? Well he did! Why? Listen in to find out. | Did you know that Richard Nixon had a FBI case file open on Beatle John Lennon? Well he did! Why? Listen in to find out. | Thu, 03 Dec 2020 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=338, tm_isdst=0) | 40565521 | 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 out there. Jerry's here, special guest. Jerry, this is stuff you should know. The Super Subversive Edition. Yeah, I mean, it's subversive, but not coming from who you'd expect in this case. The subversive people, Chuck, are two of the crookedest, worst Americans to ever take a breath of life in the United States. Yes. Hoover and Nixon, right? Yes. Herbert Hoover and Charles J. Nixon. No, not those two. Was it Jay Edgerhoover and Richard Nixon? Richard Millhouse, I think. Right. That's right. So you picked this one, right? Yeah, I think we got help from our buddy. It was a Grabster article, right? This is a Grabster. So why did you choose this one, Chuck? I'm just a Beatles nut. I'm reading a massive Beatles book and I'm always thinking about the Beatles. So this is something I knew a ton about, so now I know more. What are you thinking about the Beatles right now? They could write a song. Like, they could like they're really good at writing songs, you mean? I think so. I know you're not a Beatles guy, but they're regarded as good songwriters. Sure. I'm willing to concede that at least I'm a grown person. I can concede when I'm wrong or when I've been vested. I think we differ on Yoko Ono, though. So that's where the tables are turned. Okay. Because you like her singing, isn't that right? I appreciate it. I don't know, like is a pretty strong word, but I definitely appreciate it. There are some songs like have you ever heard I Love You, Earth? Sure. That's a pretty sweet song. I like her singing on that. But have you ever heard her cover of Katy Perry's Firework? No. I bet that's something she did it at maybe MoMA or the Met or something like that. And she's just standing there wailing. She's not singing words or anything like that. Just wailing. And it was her cover of Katy Perry's firework. And it's pretty great to see, I'm sure, if you look it up on YouTube. But I appreciate a lot of her stuff. How about that? I appreciate her as a human. And it's always fun to look back at performances, live performances with linen when she would do a full, like, four or five songs in the row in the middle of Madison Square Garden concert. And you could kind of see his backing band just kind of like, oh, boy, I can't believe we're doing this. I can't believe she's really doing this. Right? And she's actually pretty strongly implicated in this whole thing. We're talking about John Lennon being pursued and surveilled and basically harassed by the FBI, I believe, for a very specific reason. And it was at a time when John Lennon and Yoko had just got married. They got married, like two, three years before. And were a very famous couple. The Grabster argues that they may have been like the first genuine celebrity activist couple who actually use their celebrity as a way to help influence or help causes, that kind of thing. And by the time 19 71 72 rolled around, richard Milhouse Nixon was actually running for re election again. And he decided that he didn't like people like John Lennon running around conceivably, swaying the vote, particularly among newly minted voters in the 18 to 21 year old block. Yeah, he and Yoko had been contributors to causes, working class causes. It's sort of the notion that Linen was always known as the working class hero, but of all the Beatles, he grew up more solidly middle class than any of the rest of them. And not to say that that was a false persona, but he definitely jumped and sort of leaned into that, as Noel Brown would say, as far as his persona. And I think a lot of people that don't dig deep kind of think that John Lennon grew up with a very hard scrap of life there in Liverpool, which is not the case. But as a result of that, he championed the working man. He and Yoko contributed to causes. He became, along with Yoko, very much pacifist activists. And if you're a pacifist activist in the early 70s, you're not going to be a big fan of Richard Nixon, and he's not going to be a big fan of you because he was not shy about war. No, he really wasn't. He'd even campaigned, I think, in 68 on ending the Vietnam War and then actually went the exact opposite direction with that. There was a lot if you were pacifist, there was a lot to be upset about in the early 70s because of Vietnam alone, you know? Yeah, for sure. One of the ways, I think, that got the most pressed that when people think about John and Yoko's activism is the bed ends that they had. That is, bedins. If you don't know what those are, that's when you lay around in bed and you invite the press to come to your room and talk to you while you lay around in bed and why you're laying around in bed. And it looked kind of ridiculous to a lot of people, especially people on the right. But John Lennon's whole kind of point, and he was very tongue in cheek, had a great sense of humor, but I think it all sort of stemmed from that, which is like, hey, all you got to do is stay in bed and not go and start wars. And this is a pretty ridiculous way to drive that point home. Yeah. Rather than having to go out and oppose violence, you could oppose violence just by laying around in bed and doing nothing. Letting your hair grow, I think, is what they were saying. Sure. Which is pretty awesome. And the thing is, it's John lennon and Yoko Ono, and they're sitting around in bed with the press in their hotel room, and that in and of itself is getting pressed. And then if you say, what is all this about? And you read a little further into the article, I don't know, maybe it kind of gets you in just the right way, and all of a sudden you start thinking that way, too. The people who were running the whole military industrial complex, that's a threat, even if it's just a threat of the threat of saying, like, just don't you don't even have to oppose war. Just don't do anything. And that opposes war in and of itself. And that was kind of the way things were at the time. Like, there was a lot of people in power who are really opposed to that kind of thinking, who were opposed to people who were opposed to Vietnam or war in general or violence of any kind. There was a big opposition to that. And the people who were running the show in the United States were chief among those people. Like we said, Nixon as President, and they're running for reelection. Then J. Ogar Hoover, who was not shy at all about doing whatever he needed to to quiet dissent, like, he would generate dossiers on elected officials, especially ones who are more liberal, to basically keep them in line by threatening them with blackmail or even the threat of blackmail. There were plenty of hippies who got their heads cracked in. There were people who were surveilled. We did an episode on the Black Panthers. If you remember. We talked about co intelpro, the whole program to basically undermine and smear the Black Panthers in the public's mind. Jr Hoover was a vicious, terrible human being, and he ran the FBI for decades and was still running the FBI when they started to target John Lennon. Yeah. So to set the stage here of kind of how this all worked out was John Lennon. The whole thing kind of boils down to whether or not he would be allowed to live in the US. Or whether or not, if he was eventually allowed to live in the US. If they could legally deport him. So he was able to enter the US. On a work visa in 71. And concurrent with this, Yoko Ono had a custody battle going on. She had a daughter from a previous marriage in the early seventy s, and she wasn't going to leave at all. She was legally there. They did try and deport her. They didn't know that she had a green card already, which was sort of the first foible in this thing. Right. But they knew that they had a lot of leverage over Linen because if they deported him, he would be without his wife, who was going to stay there. So they have this leverage. Linen. Loved living in New York City. That's where he wanted to make his permanent home. So much so that was also leverage that they had, too. Yeah, absolutely. And so Nixon's up for re election in 72. He would go on to win in a big, big way against McGovern, but they were supposed to call them an organization. They were an administration that was very paranoid. They would obviously, with Watergate, they showed that they were willing to do anything to ensure their victory. And that included being really worried about people like John Lennon. I don't think he was at the top of their list of things to worry about, but he was on their list, thanks to Strom Thurman, of all people. Yeah. So strong. Thurman the horrible segregationist senator from South Carolina. Right. He actually kicked this whole thing off because I guess he noticed that John Lennon was a left leaning rock star activist. He seems to have been one of the first people that notice the activism that was developing among John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and to perceive it as a threat to the establishment. Because all those recently in franchise 1819 and 20 year old voters who hadn't had the right to vote until the 26th Amendment had been passed. I don't remember exactly when it was passed, but it was between 68 and 72, because 72 is the first election those younger kids were going to be able to vote in. And he apparently saw Lennon as among a group of people who could speak to those kids and sway them to the left and potentially unseat Richard Nixon, which it would turn out. It's just a total laugh because Nixon beat McGovern in a landslide. But at the time, they didn't know this, and Richard Nixon wasn't going to take any chances. So the note from Straw Thurman was very well received in the Nixon administration. Yeah, I think what I want to know is, who told Strom Thurmond? That's what I want to know, too, because that's his biggest mystery here. Yeah. I doubt if Strom Thurman was too hip to any of this, but somebody probably got in his ear and he sent a note that specifically said they try and get him deported as a strategic countermeasure. Right. And that's really kind of what got the ball rolling. We should also mention this other guy, John. I don't know if it's Weiner or Whiner. In this case, it's pronounced Weiner slave. Oh, it is? No, do you remember there was a 30 Rock episode where there's, like a HR mediator, and he's like this very soft, rosy cheeked, very calm, mild bannered man, and Liz Lemon says, Well, Mr. Weiner slav. And he goes, no, it's pronounced Weiner slave. I missed that show. That was a really good moment. They had such great fun with dumb jokes like that and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, right. No, that was the rest of development. Oh, that's right. That was the rest of development. They kind of had the same DNA, though. Yeah, for sure. So We're Slave was a writer, or is a writer and historian still, and he is why we know so much of this. He was writing a lot about John Lennon, writing a lot about the Beatles. He decided to file Freedom of Information Act request to get a lot of these documents uncovered over the years. And eventually it was successful in a big dump in 1997 and then in another smaller one in 2006. And if it had not been for his tenacity, I don't know if anyone else would have picked up this manzil, because in the end, it's not the most interesting story in the world. I say that in a whisper. It's not like some huge, like, oh, my God revelations. It's sort of one of those things that's, like, just another example of the small things that authoritarians do in this country in the back rooms and the whispered rooms of the White House. Well, you know, I think that's really true, and that's a really good point, is that if you just look at it on his face, like, the FBI followed around, john Lennon kept tabs on them, and if you read the files, it's really pedestrian, boring stuff. You might miss the real story here. And the real story here is that a sitting president directed the FBI to get dirt that he could use against a political rival, an activist, rockstar, to help get him deported or to figure out what leverage he could use against him so that sitting president could get reelected. That's the real story here. And that the FBI acted as basically a Gestapo type agency on behalf of Nixon. That's the real story that I think kind of gets covered up by John Lennon and Yoko Ono celebrity and the FBI kind of wackily following him around. Yes, it is funny, because if you look at some of the files and some of the reports, like, they would go to his concerts and undercover agents would go to the concerts and report things like for his encore, he's saying, Give Peace a Chance. And we all know about that song, right? They would take notes on song lyrics and stuff like that. So it's all just kind of silly. But, yeah, I definitely agree that it's just an example of the links that Nixon would go to. To be a dirty thief. Yes. Well, Chuck, I think we should demonstrate the links that will go to to bring everyone a message break. What do you think? By just shutting up for two minutes? Yes, I started eventually. It wasn't clear what was going to happen. But the real thing that kicked all of John Lennon's big problems off was that he was arrested in 1968 in London for possession of narcotics. I'm making air quotes you can't see because he was busted with some pot, I think maybe some hash and, like, rolling paraphernalia, some really BS beef that they got them on in London, there was some true believer, zealous antidrug cop named Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher, who was later jailed, actually, for committing perjury as a police officer, but he was alleged to have planted the evidence. That may or may not be true, but it was like a rap that Lennon shouldn't have had on him or Yoko shouldn't have had on her, that they just wanted a high profile bust. And that happened in 1968, and it turned out that that would follow Lennon for years to come and really kind of be the fulcrum that the US. Government had on him to try to keep him from staying in the US. Yeah, he wasn't even doing heroin at this point, I don't think. So they should have waited if they wanted a real case. Well, it makes you wonder. I remember hearing in, I think, our Black Panther episode that the FBI was not above addicting activists and dissidents with heroin. Like, turning them on to heroin and then getting them addicted and then just taking them out of the game like that. Yeah, I think he went and never shot heroin. That was his jam. Okay. So early 71, as I said, he was able to enter on a tourist visa, and then when Nixon and his cronies get going on the deportation, the whole thing was based on the fact that he had overstayed his visa. But along with that, it was very valuable to them that he had a drug conviction under his belt at that point. So they were surveilling him. They were surveilling other artists around the country, too, who they thought were subversive and sending messages. Lenin, speaking of getting busted for pot linen, very famously wrote a song called John Sinclair in Support and did a tribute or not tribute, but a concert. And I don't know if they were raising money or just awareness. Both. Okay. For John Sinclair, who was a poet, he was the manager of the MC Five great rock band, and he offered two undercover cops a couple of joints, and he had already had a couple of minor pot offenses, but he went to prison for ten years for this. And a big refrain in that song, John Sinclair, which is a cool song and very rootsy and bluesy, not like very linen at all, is ten for two, is what they keep saying. Ten years for two joints. Yeah. He sold to undercover cop, right? Yeah, but it worked. He actually was sprung from prison shortly after this concert. Yeah, like, two days after. And some people say I think that indicates he was already going to be sprung, that the Michigan Supreme Court knew this was a trumped up charge, but other people say, no, the concert surely had some impact. But Sinclair is the point about Sinclair and John Lennon is john Lennon performed the song. He was the headliner at this concert in Ann Arbor, and he had been coordinating with other people in Johnson Claire's orbit that were prominent figures in the New Left. And at this time, in the early seventy s, the sixty s had ended. It had become clear that flower power hadn't worked. The evil people were still in charge. So what was next? Maybe nonviolent coordination and resistance wasn't the way to go now. Lennon and Yoko were dedicated pacifist. They didn't want anything to do with violence. They didn't condone violence, they didn't like violence in any way, shape or form. But there were elements in the New Left who weren't necessarily convinced that that wasn't the only way to change the course of the United States and get rid of people like Nixon and his cronies. And so if you're watching this from the outside, like your Jared Hoover and Richard Nixon, you're watching the people on the New Left and you don't know which way they're going to break. Violent, nonviolent, who knows? But you're treating all of them with suspicion. And all of a sudden John Lennon, one of the most recognizable and popular people on the planet, is suddenly hanging out with some of these New Left cats that you don't know which way they're going to go, violent or nonviolent. And that really drew the attention of the FBI to John Lennon. And it wasn't necessarily he and Yoko and their pacifist stuff. Some people think that it was his involvement with genuine bonafide. New Left activists like Johnsonclair or Bobby Seal, like Johnsonclair founded the White Panther Party, which they had a ten point platform like the Black Panthers platform. And the first platform in the White Panther platform is that it's fully in support of the Black Panthers ten point platform. So he's hanging out with a bunch of people that had proven themselves as died in the wolf faux of the Nixon administration. That definitely caught the FBI attention. Yeah, and they had big plans. They got together, and I think their first meeting was at the Alamoki Township that's how I'm going to pronounce it, the scaramucci township in New Jersey. And initially called themselves the Alamoki Tribe, but Wisely changed their name to the election year Strategy Information Center. And their plan was in 1972 is to host and Lennon gave the money, he gave them like 75 grand to kind of get going and said, here, let's do a bunch of concerts with the help of John Lennon all across the country in 1972, we can have different artists performing different speakers, like pounding home the anti war message. And then as these concerts roll closer and closer to the election, it will culminate in a big protest at the RNC in Miami. This is all very legal stuff. They weren't staging riots or anything. These were just concerts, awareness, trying to keep Nixon from winning. And Nixon got worried, and he knew that, like you said, the influence that someone like John Lennon could have was like he didn't have anyone on his side. There was no Scott Bayo at the time. Wooing the youngsters Bob blah, blah. To the right. Oh, he was Bob Blah blah, wouldn't he? That's funny. So this is all going on, and this is kind of what ramps up the pressure to get Linen out of there. The custody battles going on. They know about that. And so their first step was to instruct Immigration and Naturalization to try and say, hey, you've overstayed your visa. You got to get out of here. And Lynn knew this was coming. This is no secret. He had gone on TV shows talking about being followed by the FBI being having his phone tapped, which we still aren't sure if that really happened. I think it says officially that there was no legal phone tapping in the FBI documents. But throwing that word legal in there just kind of makes you think, like, well, were there any illegal ones that you're not going to tell us about? Yeah, I read an interview, so this is like the depths of my depravity. I didn't even listen to the interview. I read a Fresh Air interview with John Weiner, or Weiner about this, and he said that the FBI responded and said they found no evidence of illegal wiretapping by the FBI or no legal wiretapping by the FBI. Does that mean they were doing illegal wiretapping, or does it mean that they didn't look very hard for evidence? It doesn't mean that they weren't tapping his phone, is what he's saying. Right. At least made Linen paranoid enough. He wasn't not sweating. This made him very paranoid, and with good reason. But he took to going next door at the Dakota building. So he would let Lennon use his phone in his apartment to make phone calls and I guess assist with the calls at the same time a little bit. And then the FBI said, you know what could really help is if we could bust them currently for narcotics in the United States, if we have an active charge, drug charge against them. And Hoover sent it out himself. He said, quote, for info on a bureau. NYCPD Narcotics division is aware of the subject's recent use of narcotics, which is like, every day, and are attempting to obtain enough info to arrest both subject and wife, Yoko, based on PD investigation. Yeah. By this time, I'm thinking he was using heroin. I think that's what they were referencing as his recent use. Oh, really? I didn't think that started till later. I thought it was the early seventy s. I thought it happened during his Lost Weekend. But I may be wrong in that I'm not that far along. I'm going to err towards you then, because I'm just surmising here. I'm not the one who has a big old Book of Beetles history, so I don't know. They never actually busted them. Right? This is all just like they were planning on doing this, but they never needed to. I don't think he was arrested in the United States, was he? Yeah, I didn't know. I didn't get that impression. But it seemed like everything was kind of barreling toward that. And even like you were saying, the FBI was like, we've let the NYPD know to go do this, and if you take a step back, this is some heat, this is some pressure that they're putting on John and Yoko. They're basically saying, we're going to split you guys up by deporting John because we know that Yoko is not going to leave the country because of this custody battle. She can't afford to, so she has to stay here. So if we threaten deportation to John Lennon, it might actually keep him in line. And the FBI used the word neutralized that they were seeking to neutralize Lenin. And I guess some people who don't dig very deeply into the story are like, they were going to assassinate John Lennon and John Weiner or Weiner has pointed out, like, that is not at all what they meant. They meant, like, basically making him ineffective, like taking him out of the game, basically, one way or another. But not killing him, just convincing him through, putting this undue, unfair, undemocratic pressure on him to drop his activities with the New Left. Yeah, and by the way, I think he probably was using her when in the late sixty s and had an on again, off again. But either way, that makes sense because I did see that guys like Jerry Rubin and I think Rennie Davis, a couple of, like the Chicago Seven, they didn't even hang out with him because he was doing too many drugs. And I'm guessing that it wasn't like he was smoking so much pot we can't even talk with them anymore. Like, I think he was shooting dope and they weren't yes, well, he never shot it. He always smoked it or smoking dope. But I think he and Yoko were doing here actually before the Beatles broke up at the end okay. When they were sort of estranged with the Beatles. Not John, Yoko. But at any rate, like I said, these investigations are going on and they're going to his concerts, and they're not even sending back information that really means much. They're even saying some of these informants, like, you know what? They're not even really down with like the New Left isn't even down with them because they think they're just quote selfgrandizing rock stars or there's a little chance that they'll accomplish anything because they spend all their time doing drugs. They're kind of sending the message like, you really don't need to worry so much about John Lennon. He's not much of a threat. Kind of one of the funny things about this investigation was when Lynn was one of the most famous people in the world, one of the most recognizable faces in the world, on planet Earth, along with Yoko, ono, and the FBI passes around a sheet with Lennon's picture on it so they can recognize him. But it was the wrong photo. It was of a different human being. It wasn't even John Lennon. Yeah, it was a street busker from the West Village named David Peele so funny, who had a record that I guess John Lennon helped produce or something, and he looked vaguely like John Lennon. But that was the picture that the FBI passed around at the cops of the wrong guy. The FBI also put out an all points bulletin searching for John Lennon and said that he's at the St. Regis at 150 Bank Street. St. Regis Landscape Supply. That's right. I guess that's what they meant, because the St. Regis Hotel is on Central Park, and John Lennon was indeed living on Bank Street at the time, but he was at Five Bank Street. So that all points bulletin was all kinds of wrong. But this is the level of coppery that the FBI was conducting trying to get John Lennon. All right, well, let's take a break, and we'll come back and talk a little bit about Lennon's official defense right after this. All right? So John Lennon is not going to take this lying down. He was paranoid. He was going on like The Mike Douglas Show and talking about the FBI coming after him. The first thing he did was probably what any really rich person would do, is he hires a top rate bulldog attorney to try and defend this or at least delay this. And this guy's name was Leon Wilds, and he really did delay this. He was sort of a master at filing these motions and getting it extended and extended, and Lennon was able to stay in the country longer and longer and longer, but he was also kind of instrumental and kind of letting Lennon know that this was a real situation that he was involved in. Right. The thing is, if you are an immigration prosecutor for the federal government in the United States, you know that there is not a ton of resources allocated to your division, right. Or traditionally, there hasn't been. And so, customarily, the Justice Department or I guess Ins has left it up to each prosecutor to determine how hard they want to prosecute the case. And so if you are an upstanding person who's never posed any sort of threat to the United States, and maybe you own a business or you're a productive member of society, there is a chance that the Ins is going to look the other way and not actually deport you. Even if you are here illegally, you have overstayed your visa or you came to the country illegally. Who knows? And that's actually where the Dreamer program came from. DACA it basically said these particular immigrants were brought here as children, and they posed no threat. Most of them are going to college or college boundary. They're in the. Military, so we're going to not deport them. And what Lennon's lawyer told him was like, all of this is true, and yet they're putting the heat on you like I have never seen. This is clearly coming down from on high, like, they want to get you out of the United States, and it's not just this prosecutor. Yeah. And the other thing that happens when it comes to a case like this is they have to weigh, or they can be decided basically on the value that an immigrant might bring to the US. By being an American or living in the United States. It's kind of funny to look back now and think that there had to be a case made that John Lennon brings any kind of value, but they did. And there was a series of letters written by Bob Dylan and John Bayes and Joyce, Carol Oates, Leonard Bernstein, John Uptike, just a series of very famous artists kind of arguing in favor of John Lennon being allowed to live here. It was sort of a flood of public outcry, like what little was known back then. At least. There's tremendous value to letting John Lennon stay in this country, right? Don't forget, John Cage wrote a letter, too. And I'm sure it was kind of like, well, do you want me to write a letter for you, John? He's like, yeah, sure. I'm sure that would help a lot, John Cage, because I'm sure no one in the Nixon administration has ever heard of you. Yeah, probably. So the upshot I'm just going full on using this word now. The upshot of that letter writing campaign was not even just so much to demonstrate the value of John Lennon remaining in the United States. It was if you kick them out, like, there's going to be a public outcry and you're going to be held to account and asked to explain why you guys kicked him out. So it did have a bit of that combined with his attorney's tenacity. It kept John Lennon in the country. He was actually never deported, even though he had he lived for, I think, two or three years. You have 60 days to leave the country. Order. And his lawyer kept getting it extended and extended and extended, but for three years. That was the threat that he was living under. And again, he was deported. He would leave without his wife, who had to stay in the country for her own custody battle. So that was a lot of strain on him, actually. And the worst part about this whole thing is not that the FBI did this and that the Nixon administration single mountain that it all came down to Strom Thurman writing this memo to kick things off. It was that it worked. They sought to neutralize John Lennon and his political activism, and he stopped. He actually did. He gave in in August 1972 by announcing that he was not going to take part in that series of concerts that was going to culminate at the Republican National Convention or engage in any kind of activist activities any longer. Is this going to go back to being a musician again? Yeah. And by this point, Hoover was dead. L. Patrick Gray was the acting director of the FBI. And then that same month, that August, before the election in November, the FBI's New York office reported to Gray that he's no longer going to be involved with these concerts. He's no longer with the new left. We don't really need to worry about him anymore. We're going to basically settle this case and close this case after Nixon wins the election. And as we said earlier a couple of times, by landslide, said, this is all sort of for not anyway. Gerald Ford ended up overturning Lennon's deportation order in 1975 that was already filed. And in 76, he got his green card and lived in New York, very famously, in the Dakota for the last four years of his life before he was murdered in the street, which I think we should do an episode on that at some point, maybe in a couple of years. Once this one is well in the rear view mirror, you bet it'd be a good one. So if John Lennon, apparently before he died, he gave a couple of interviews, and he said of this time that it nearly ruined him as an artist. He wasn't just not sweating it like he sweated it every day. It was a big, hairy problem in his life all the time and a source of great stress. So in addition to the stress, it stole his focus. It made him think about that and how much he hated the Nixon administration and how terrible the FBI was for how they were harassing him and possibly tapping his phone. And it just took his mind from his art. And he later said that it almost ruined him as an artist because the work he was producing at the time was journalism. Not poetry. As he put it. Which is a very sad effect. But it's a really real world effect when you've got something just looming in the front of your mind that you can't get out of your mind. Especially if it's dealing with badness that has a terrible effect on you and your life in general. It can produce an entire bad period of your life. Yes. He was like, I had to let Yoko sing a lot. I have something I have to say. I don't want to forget it. In one of the FBI notes at that Johnson Claire concert, the FBI informant reported that the song Johnson Claire was not up to Lennon's usual standards, and Yoko can't even remain on key. That was an FBI informant. Yeah. He had a good ear, but I like the song. It doesn't belong up there with his greatest songs. But it was very clear it was sort of in the tradition of protest songs. It's got this acoustic slide dobro guitar, and it fits in with the great folk songs of all time, I think, but not necessarily one of the great Linen or Beatles songs. Is it as good as john Henry was a steel driving man? I think it's better. I like it better. Really? Yeah. And like we mentioned earlier, the reason we know all this was because of Wiener's reporting. And he eventually got those documents released. And in his circle, there was a big hubbub like, what's going to be in there? What secrets will be revealed? And really not much. What was revealed was embarrassment for the FBI. Embarrassment that they released a picture that wasn't even John Lennon. Embarrassment that they had a very unethical and perhaps even illegal motivation behind trying to get this person deported. And it was just egg on the face. And that's why they tried to keep it under wraps for so many years, hoping that it would not get out. Not because there were some big revealing documents, but they were just like, can we just sort of act like this didn't happen? Yeah. So we'll classify everything as a national security risk. And they did. And actually, that last trove of documents, the little handful that trickled out in 2006, was an Mi Five British Secret Service file on lending that the US said that that last bit of document contained a file from a foreign government that had trusted the US to keep it and that it could result in economic, diplomatic and military action if they were to release it. Like the UK was just going to bomb the US for releasing their document or their file on John Lennon. That's why the FBI held onto it until 2006, and then they lost a court case. If there's a hero of the story, it's John Weiner or John Weiner. I don't know how he says his name, and I'm sorry either way because he was the one that really stood up, not just for John Lennon, but for the First Amendment, you know, and people's ability to be politically active without the threat of being intimidated. So good for him. Totally. You got anything else about this? Got nothing else. I have an article to direct everybody to on pop matters. John Lennon colon revolutionary man as political artist. And it's about all this sorry, history, but also just a pretty good critical evaluation of him as an activist. And it's just a really good, interesting article. So check it out. And since I said, check it out, everybody, it's time for listener mail. This is in reference of our haunted real estate. I guess that was a short stuff, right? It had to be. Yeah, it was. Please tell me we didn't do 45 minutes on that. We could have, hey, guys, been a listener for years and finally have a good reason to write you. I was listening to the episode on whether you're supposed to disclose whether a house is haunted or not, they hit close to home. Two years ago, we bought our first house, and I made a point to run a report to see if anyone died in the house. The previous owner had just died within a year, but it didn't say where. I wasn't really worried about someone actually dying in the house. I was really just trying to get a big discount. However, the agent said he did no, so no big discount. Cut to two years later. I found out from neighbors and research that the previous owner did not die. However, he was a creep who actually had multiple abuse charges. In fact, I found an article stating that he had a woman tied up in our basement, man who he tortured until she was luckily able to escape for weeks. That's, like, almost worse than just a regular just somebody dying of natural causes. It's a million times worse. Well, no, I was about to say worse than a murder. I guess they're on par. Yeah, well, let's debate that at Link. I don't want to rank awful crimes. Right. But I think that might creep me out just as much. Let's just say that, sure, the police searched the house and found oodles of weapons. The charges were eventually dropped. Apparently, he had money and he redid the entire basement, which is beyond creepy. I don't know if this qualifies as info that should have been provided to us at purchase, but it sure seems like it. Yeah, that is from Andy, and okay. Well, thanks a lot, Andy. Is there a heart over the eye? No, but it's typed. It could be Andy McDowell. I think she spells her name like that. I can see something like this happening to Annie McDowell. Can you? Sure. I love Annie McDowell. Well, whether it's from Andy McDowell or not, we appreciate the email. Thank you. And, yes, I agree. I think the realtor should have disclosed that, if you ask me. Totally. If you want to let us know about some way a realtor wronged you or anybody did, we want to hear about it. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is production of iheart Radio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
c44d5004-5460-11e8-b38c-ab6f3625ecea | SYSK Selects: How Fire Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-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, in this classic episode. | 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, in this classic episode. | Sat, 16 May 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=137, tm_isdst=0) | 26979345 | 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. Hi, folks. From October 4, 2012. My Saturday select pick is how fire works. Yes, you can light a match. Sure, you can use a magnifying glass, and you might be able to rub two sticks together or use a flint and stone, but that is all. Just starting a fire how fire actually works is much more complicated and very, very cool. So give it a listen, why don't you? Welcome to stuff you should know a production of. Iheartradios How Stuff Works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, as Charles W. Chuck O'Brien. TADA. And this is stuffy snow. Josh, will you let me stand next to your fire? Sure. Okay, come here. Come over here right now. Okay. Sorry. It's nice and warm over here, isn't it? I'm feverish and it's smoky, and I feel like there's chemical reactions taking place before my very eyes. There are. That's why there's fire. If fire is nothing if not a chemical reaction. Yeah, I got some. Okay. Have you heard of the Wine, Coffee Hotel? Yes, but for a bell born and raised here yeah, the Ellis Hotel was at the hotel fire. Yeah. You know, that it's. Now the Ellis Hotel. It's the corner of Peach Tree and Ellis. Yeah. 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. Yes, 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, coffee, 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. Yes. 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. Yeah, those two episodes are great. Agreed. This will seal up our triumphant. Now we're going to explain how fire works. Yeah, I do have a couple of quick stats. We're talking about the deadly nature of fire. Yeah. It does kill more people than any other force of nature. I couldn't find 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. 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 that are over 2500 people died that year. And that's sort of in the wheelhouse. It fluctuates between 2200 and about 3200 a year from building fires. Well, cooking is far and away the leading cause of a building fire. And arson is number two, which I would have thought like falling asleep with a cigarette would be above our system. And then total in 2009, and I guess this 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 kilowatt 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 5 minutes before. And so it would have just completely disintegrated in my imagined man. What did he say? I don't know. Holy crap. Did you just 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 happened. 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 degrees Celsius. Yes. 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 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's ignition temperature of a combustible fuel, there's volatile gases. Nice. Way to go, Chuck. All right, thanks. So, yeah, heat, decomposes fuel. We'll just say wood. And in the case of wood specifically, it decomposes the volatile gasses contained in the solid matter. Right. So these volatile gasses 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, and then you can just take it 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. It's what you make paper from. That's where you make cellulose. The Catholic from, too. And it's what you make cellophane out of. Did you know that? No. 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 manmade, 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. I was 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 cellophane. 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 this picture for me. Awesome. I did not know that about cellophane. Back to the podcast right there. I don't know about that. Hats off to you. All right, back to charge. I know what the fact of the podcast is. You got to save it for when it comes to save it. Okay. 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@city.com Adventure and travel on with City Advantage. Today's episode of Stephanie Chando 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 Simply Safe offers comprehensive protection not only against intruders and burglary, but against expensive home hazards, from flooding to fires, you can customize the perfect system for your home in just a few minutes at SimpliSafe comStuff. Go today and claim a free indoor security camera, plus 20% off with interactive monitoring. Just go to SimpliSafe. comStuff. Okay, so you've got the cellulose, the solid matter of wood separating now from the volatile gasses that are starting to lift off that's 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. 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. Yeah, or not much at least. Yeah, because the gases have already been burned off. Yeah. And charcoal, too. That kind of got me on charcoal filtering, because these charcoal is a filter and I think they used it as a scrubber, too, on smokestacks. And 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 gases. So it's pretty neat. Yeah, 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 gasses of smoke. You have the charcoal, which is carbon, and then you have ash, which is unburnnable minerals like calcium or phosphorus, I believe. Yeah. 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 going to be left over. 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 briquettes aren't as nasty. Are those synthetic briquettes? No, they're made from char and like binding agents and stuff like that and saw diverse hoofs. 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. 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 gasses 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 it weird that fire produces water? I know. That's why sometimes you have steam coming from a fire, right? Yeah. The start 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 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 flame 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 in their constituent carbon atoms yes. 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 ones. 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 fire. It's 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 the 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 at Comic Con. Okay. You mean I had her picture taken with it. With which one? The new one. The Tumbler. That's what they call the new one, is it? Yeah, the crystal one. It's called The Tumbler. Yes, 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 gas that are burning what you're burning right. There are volatile gasses 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, like 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 upwards. 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's 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 fire in geography that we all die? That's right. 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 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 City Advantage. 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's 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 Simply Safe 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. comStuff. 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 tepid toward one another. Yes. 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 will have a piloted ignition temperature and an unpiloted ignition temperature. Basically, the piloted ignition temperature is that point, that temperature where the volatile gases 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 heats it up to the point where now it's on fire, where it comes 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 yes, 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. I mean, 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 than a big 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 his 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, like, frixion? Yeah. 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 and 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 give up. Yes. But, yeah, it's fun. 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 string 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 that. Anything else? I don't think so. Do you feel like we explained this correctly and well? Yeah, it's pretty basic chemistry. Basically, heat breaks down the fuel so that it can combine with oxygen and ignite and then burned. That's right. And it's self sustaining so long as there's fuel and oxygen. And then all you need is a bearskin 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@housetopworks.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 listener mail. Let me call this email Bad to the Bone. So Jocelyn Stone here in Victoria, BC, Canada, apparently hates Bad 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 bad phone. Tim believed in order to slowly get himself ready for the day, he needed alarms at 05:00. A.m. 530 and six. I hate that stuff. 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 err an error and error. 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 look 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? Right? That was a Quantum Leap meeting. Loan star, huh? Wow. Yeah. Look at you. For some reason, no matter how much I begged him, he wouldn't change the song or. Let me turn down the volume. If I secretly change 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 turned 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 a Badge of the Bone in public, I immediately leave the area lest I explode in a muddy, scalding rock throwing rage like the wamangu dicer. Wow, nice breakfast. Yes. And then she said PS. Do a podcast on accordions 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 this news, because wouldn't you rather just sleep that time? No, I'm with you. But I'm saying instead of being woken up every 10 minutes, not that easy to just wake right up. Bright eyed bushy tail. I need to accept others as they are. Let's see, what do we want? Jeez, I don't know. I don't know either. We 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. Comwichnow 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@howstuffworks.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts my HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-06-20-sysk-seed-banks-final.mp3 | How Seed Banks Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-seed-banks-work | Since the advent of agriculture, humans have been storing seeds. But as sea levels rise and climates change around the world, our reasons for banking seeds have become more desperate. | Since the advent of agriculture, humans have been storing seeds. But as sea levels rise and climates change around the world, our reasons for banking seeds have become more desperate. | Tue, 20 Jun 2017 19:18:13 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=19, tm_min=18, tm_sec=13, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=171, tm_isdst=0) | 49124485 | audio/mpeg | "Josh, my friend, if you are listener of ours and you live in Chicago, Toronto, Vancouver, Austin, Brooklyn, minneapolis, Kansas, or right here in Atlanta, you can come see us on tour starting in August and finishing up in November. Is that right? Yeah, that's right, man. It's our 2017 North America Monsters of Podcasting tour. I like the sound of that. Eddie Van Halen is opening. Yes, he is. But not really. No, not really. But you can find out all the information and all the deeds@sysclive.com our Squarespace Live touring home on the web, and we hope to see everyone out there. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. This is Charles, Debbie, Chuck Bryant and Jerry Roland. This is us. Stuff You Should Know. I'm just trying new stuff. I mean, we're coming up on a thousand episodes, man. You got to keep it fresh somehow. So I tried the 18th. You've actually done that like 76 times the same one. Kidding. It's probably true, though. If you were a seed, what seed would you be? I would be a pumpkin seed. Oh, wow. Because you know you won't get eaten. I don't know. I like pumpkin pie. Well, and people toast pumpkin seeds, so yeah, I'm way off base there. Yeah. What else you got? Never mind. No pumpkin seed. Bam. I would be a watermelon seed because they remind me of my grandfather. That's sweet. How do they grow those seedless? Watermelons? You're a watermelon seed. You should know. Or the square ones. Yeah, those are cool, too. They cost like $60 in Japan. Really? Yeah, they're really expensive. I would have one just set have it. I would like, shellac it so it would never die. Right. And just keep it in my fridge for conversation piece. It's not a bad idea, man. Or actually, I take that back. I'm going to start marketing fake square watermelons as conversation starters or refrigerator magnets shaped like square watermelons. What about that? All right. That's a valuable space. They call that running something into the ground. Yeah. I've got something for you. Okay. You in the food fads episode asked me what my go to crock pot recipe was, and I told you. And then I was like, okay, moving on upon listening to it, because I don't know if everybody knows this or not, but you and I all listen to the episodes and Jerry before we release them. Sure. And I was like, I didn't ask Chuck what his crockpot recipe was. Chuck, I didn't. What is your go to crockpot recipe? Oh, wow. Do you know what it is? No, I don't. If it's not no, I'll tell you what it is. It is a turkey goulash surprise. That sounds good. So just some ground turkey and some onion and green pepper and red pepper and all manner of spices. And you can also throw in like, eggplant or squash or kind of any veggie like that and chunk it up. That sounds good. And just spice it up real good. Throw it in that crockpot. Maybe add a little chicken broth or something. Do they have turkey broth? Yeah, they do. Okay, sure. Well, then don't be there. I don't think chicken broth would clash with turkey too bad. But, yeah, probably turkey broth would be better. Well, you may not know. Something in your mouth might be disturbing, and you're just like something's not quite right. So what's the surprise? That you're using chicken broth and a turkey based dish? Or is it like a human thumb? The surprise? I tried the thumb, but I do it twice. Twice? Yeah. Because I only have two thumbs. Got you now. No, the surprise is our lentils. Oh, yeah. That's nice. So then you dump a bunch of lentils in there. Maybe you could throw it all in there at the beginning, but they'll get kind of really gushy. But maybe toward the end of some lentils in there, and then it all just cooks up to a big kind of soupy mess, and then you can eat it for a week. Well, the next time there's a House of Forks weekly book club meeting, you've got to bring that to the potluck. Okay. All right. All right. Because I want to try it. Done. Are lentil seeds? Because that'd be a great segue. But I'm almost 100% sure that I would be wrong in saying, well, lentils are seeds. I think it's a legume. It is a legume. But is it legume? A seed? Well, you didn't ask me that. I don't have any idea. Although they are protecting legumes and seed banks. Okay, well, then they're probably not seeds, but they're pretty close, so we'll use that as a segue. How about that? Yeah. And you know what's funny is we could have sworn that we did this one, or at the very least, did the Doomsday Vault. And I think we covered the Doomsday Vault in a video, but we did touch on it. And will the Moon save humanity? Yeah, that's a good one. But I went back this is when we had transcripts, and it was a funny one to read because we brought it up without researching it off the top of our head, which always gets us in trouble. Sure. And just sort of chatted a minute about the Doomsday Vault and then said, don't hold us to anything because this wasn't supposed to be a part of the show. So we didn't really cover it. No. And we certainly didn't do a whole episode on it. Right. No, and we're not going to this time, because even though the Doomsday Vault, better known as the Svalbard Global Seed Bank, which is in Svalbard Norway, which is close to Long European Norway, which is the closest town to the North Pole. Right. Wow. This seed bank is hands down, the most famous seed bank in the entire world. It's run by technocrats who really know how to work the media, right? Yeah, but it's far from the only one. There are a lot of other seed banks out there, and even the whole concept, it's a seed banking in general, is pretty interesting. So small. Bard will be the star. If we're a band, it'd be seed banks. Featuring the stylings of Svalbard Global Seed Bank. That should be the title of this episode. I thought you were going to say featuring the stylings of Small barred goblestein and that sounded like a small time magician. That's great. Or an accordion act. Yeah. Good stuff. All right, well, let's get to it. This one, by the way, it was written by my friend Debbie. I noticed. You remember Debbie? Debbie Ranka, my buddy from new jersey. Yeah. And supplemental material. You found a really great article on the Doomsday Vault. What? Was that from the Guardian or yeah, that was by Suzanne Goldenberg in The Guardian from May 2015. Yeah, that's one of my favorite kinds of articles, is when they profile something, and then it's set up as, like, the sunrise is early in Norway, and Spin gets out of his yurt and trudges across the glacier. And so it's sort of couch in this story of the duty who works here, one of the guys. But then you get all the deeds along the way. It's very cool. Yeah. It's called long read or long form. Yeah. And actually, there's two really great sites. One is called long form and one is called longread. One's ACOM and one's aorg. I can never remember which. But if you like that kind of writing, that's all those sites are just page after page after page of links to articles like that. Yes. And in fact, our buddy, Joshua Bearman, great writer of law enforcement, he has his own little shingle called Epic Magazine. If you're looking for those really great, basically, people. Mine that site to make movies. There's such good stories. Yeah. Well, he wrote the magazine article that Fargo, the Ben Affleck movie, was based on. Pretty cool. The funny part about that slip up is the Coen brothers at the beginning of Fargo, say, like, this is based on a true story. Right. Which is not true at all. Right. He also wrote a really great one about California surfer gang that smuggled pot out of Coronado Island in the is just begging to be made into a movie. If it hasn't been yet. I think it's options. Surely it is. I mean, coronado High. Is that right? Coronado High, yes. And I'm pretty sure Berman wrote that back in 2013. Says the Internet. Yeah. So put down your streaming TV shows, for God's sake. And I would say read a book, but at the very least, read a long form article. Yeah. Can I get on a soapbox for a second? We'll talk about seeds eventually. Everybody just be quiet. So the whole concept of there being TV everywhere. And, like, you can take TV to the beach now. You don't have to talk to anybody. You can watch TV on the subway. That bothers me, Chuck. It bothers me to my core. And I know that makes me very unpopular. I don't care. I stand with Josh. You know, Emily and I have been listening. We've been sitting around in a room at night together in silence and listening to S Town. Oh, cool. Which I've forgotten how fun it is because I usually listen to podcasts on my own, like, in my car. But just to sit around with your loved one and listen to something that's kind of neat, too. Yeah. You have somebody to look at and be like, can you believe that? All right. I'll bet everybody thinks we sit around and listen to podcasts together. Can you believe that? All right, Cbank. Sorry. Yes. So, Debbie Ronka makes a really great point that you think of C. Banks as this probably something new from the environmental movement, probably something from the as far back as that. But she says, no seat banks are a concept as old as agriculture. Basically, that in the cradle of agriculture, Mesopotamia, which is present day Iraq, they have found seed banks as old as 8750 years. So the seed stores back then were protecting the seeds from animals, from weather, that kind of stuff. Pretty basic stuff, right? Yeah. The concept is the same. It's that you need seed from one harvest to create the next harvest. And so even back then, there's evidence that it was highly ritualized collecting seeds and then protecting them in important places. Yeah. And weather is certainly something that we're still guarding against to the extreme. That's one of the reasons we have seed banks today. But one of the main reasons is crop diversity. If you think that corn you're eating is just corn or rice you're eating is just rice right. Or even bosmati rice or jasmine rice or the big two or sushi rice, you'd be in for a big surprise if you knew that there were thousands and thousands of varieties of all of these crops, these staple crops. And diversity is the key, because we've seen throughout history when bad things happen, when there's blight, if there's a fungus, if there's just anything that can kill a crop, you want something that is diverse on your hands so you can try something new. Right. Remember in the famine episode where we talked about how one of the reasons that Ireland suffered so tremendously was because the potatoes they had were all basically the same throughout the whole country? It was the same variety of potatoes. Right. So when that potato blight came, it was a pathogen that all of the potatoes in Ireland were susceptible to, where if they had had multiple varieties of potatoes, sure, a lot of the potato varieties would have been wiped out, but there would have been some that survived too. Right, yeah. You know whose fault that was? Who's? The English. Well, they definitely didn't make anything easier on them, if I remember correctly. No, of course, but I'm just poking fun, but the idea that there are just tons and tons of different varieties out there. There certainly are, but if you take another order of magnitude, step back and look at the global food system, there's really like 30 crops that make up basically all of the food supply. Right? Yeah. And that's not too bad. 30 is fine. We could survive on just one. Really little scary, though. The problem is if you go the opposite direction and zoom in a little further, those crops are fairly homogenized these days. And it's thanks to our buddy Norman Borlaug. Remember him? Norm so he fathered the green revolution in large part, which was there were a lot of predictions that the world's carrying capacity was going to be reached by the 1960s and a billion people were going to starve to death. And that was because the agriculture that we had at the time was capable of producing only so much crop yield. So Norman Borlaugh took it upon himself to say, I'm going to save the world. And he came up with these new techniques and new varieties of crops and said, here, this variety is going to get you way better yields. It can survive flooding, it can survive drought. Go plant this. And his varieties that he bred were so successful. Number one. He won the Nobel Prize. Yeah. And is widely credited for saving possibly a billion lives with this work. But secondly, it was so successful that it became basically the only varieties of those crops that were planted. And in the 1970s here in the United States, we came just running smack dab into what a problem that can be when this Corn Blake hit. Yeah, there was a big fungus in the didn't say what I wanted to say. It cut the corn yields in the United States in half. And luckily, we did have some more varieties at our disposal. We had a relative. It was a wild corn. It's just crazy, right? And it was fungus resistant. So in that case, we were able to save the day, which is kind of the whole point of crop diversity in seed banks, is to have something on hand in case the worst case scenario happens. So all your potatoes aren't in one basket or all your corn isn't in one basket. Right. Literally with that Corn Blake, too, we learned the hard way something like one quarter to one half of the corn yields in the United States were lost during the because something like, I think 80% of the corn being grown in the US. Was identical in this way that the Corn Blake could manipulate and kill. So we said, oh, well, we need to diversify a little more. It was a hard lesson learned, but it was a lesson learned. And since then, this idea, like you said, of crop diversities become more and more important. And people have said, well, we'll start banking seeds so we can protect the genetic line and protect varieties from dying out in the meantime. Yeah. And so that's diversity is a big deal. Climate change is another reason we bank seeds, because we're not too certain what's going to happen in the future with the weather or actually not with the weather, with climate. Those two different things. Nice, safe, natural disasters like a tsunami or really kind of any kind of natural disaster could cause great harm to crop yield. Right. Or disease, which you would think would be considered a natural disaster, too. Well, now it's disease. Well, sure. You got to delineate here, manmade. Disaster. And the point the example Debbie uses here is war, which you don't really think about war. As you'll see, even with seed banks during times of war, especially in the Middle East, a lot of the seed banks in the Middle East have been looted and rated during war. So that sort of compounds the problem. Well, plus, also, one of the other things that war does is it uproots populations. Right. You have to move because there's a war going on in your town, and you can't live there anymore. So if you're a farmer, you may never go back to farming anymore, and you may be one of the few indigenous people who were farming a specific variety of something, and now that variety is lost forever because you moved and stopped farming. Yeah. And that can happen in more mundane, pedestrian ways, too, where, say, a family that's farming an indigenous variety of crop just moves to the city for better work or something like that. Yeah. And then the final way that she lists that we might want to use the seed bank is for research in the future. Plant based medicine has always been around. One in every six wild plants is used for medicine, and we don't know I mean, we know so very little still about the uses of plants for medicine. So we don't want to wipe out something that could be the cure for cancer one day. Right. And that's kind of like the cornerstone of the idea of seed banks these days, is that we need to take the seeds from every plant we can get our hands on today, every variety we can get our hands on, and just store it. Just basically put them in suspended animation, under the idea that eventually, because of climate change or because of war or because we may figure something out in the future and need those plants or need access to their genetic information. And so if we have the seeds stored away in suspended animation, dormant, then we will say, thank you, people, 100 years earlier for being so smart as to create seed banks. That's right. Thousands of years earlier, in fact. Maybe, but there's problems with seed banks as we'll talk about you want to take a break? Yeah, let's do that. And we'll get to that. All right, so as far as what kind of seeds are chosen, it depends. There are more than 400 or right around 1400 seed banks in the world, so I know, Swarbald. I really think you can say it either way. I know. I keep wanting to say he sounds like a dude from there. Oh, it does. Who's into, like, Viking metal. Yeah, he gets all the coverage, but ballpark got so wasted they lost all the seeds. There are about 1400 seed banks so all over the place. And it depends on which one you're talking about, really, as to what kind of seeds they're going to preserve. Smaller seed banks are probably going to concentrate more on more local indigenous varieties. It seems like in all cases, any kind of endangered plant is probably looked after first. Yeah, they tend to take priority, from what I understand. But there's a great group called the Global Crop Diversity Trust, and their whole jam is to concentrate on priority crops that benefit everyone around the world the most. So those are the people that runs Vaumart, and from what I understand, they've kind of come in and said, we're going to be setting the standards for seed preservation in the world now. Someone had to. Yeah. And there's a guy who was interviewed in the Guardian. He was one of the founders of this trust, and I think he was the first director of this Vaumart Global Seed Vault. His name is Kerry Fowlers from Tennessee. And he said, we didn't create the seed bank to prevent because we saw this catastrophe coming with, like, climate change or whatever it was called. The Doomsday Vault. Right, it was, but again, I think the media kind of latched onto that. He was saying the original intent with why they founded this vaulted seed vault was because the current seed banks were doing such a terrible job of keeping their seeds alive or intact that we were losing varieties every day from ones that were stored at seed banks. They were just going away. So he was basically like, let me do it. He was like the It guy. Yeah. Well, it is kind of scary, though. Like when you talk when he was interviewed, he was to say, like, you know, nuclear war was in our biggest threat. It's underfunding and sloppy work. Right, or yeah. Budget cuts, malfunctions, and the equipment, like badly maintained equipment. There's a lot of stuff that can go wrong with the seed bank. And so the point behind the small Bard seed bank is to serve as a backup repository to where yeah, you keep your seeds there in your country, and we'll show you the best ways to manage your seed bank, but also put a duplicate set with us, and we're just going to keep it stored. We're not going to do the science or anything like that. The whole point of the small barred seed bank is to just keep it stored under the right condition so that when you need it, it will be here for you. That is correct. So this Global Diversity Crop trust, they work under a treaty? It's called the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, or Progrfa, was ratified in 2004 by 40 different governments. I imagine since then you're probably some more on board, right? I believe so. Although I wonder how much that has kind of fallen to the wayside since Crop Trust created this wallbard seed vault. They seem to have kind of taken over, from what I understand. Well, I mean, I think this treaty is just part of good practices, too. Yeah. So what they do is they do permit access for these seeds for research and stuff, not from Swallbard, because, like we said, that's the bank that doesn't allow withdrawal, but it has to be a benefit to everyone. Basically, you can't just go Willynilly on a whim and pull seeds out and start experimenting. Right. Well, for the other seed banks, that's kind of like the process where those are the ones that they're keeping so that somebody can come and grow some stuff and check out the genetic material of the plants or whatever. With Svalbard, it's like you put it in, it stays there, and you can get it out, but it's only you, the depositor, that has access to it. Correct. And so apparently they agreed to that, or they set up that rule that only the group or the country that put those seeds into the vault, barbara vault, can get them out. Because there was a lot of worry when they were creating the global seed vault that the whole thing was basically just a ruse for big agriculture to get their hands on heirloom seeds from around the world. Which, I mean, I can kind of understand that. From what I understand, the big agriculture seed companies are fairly shady. Yeah. We should do an episode just on that. Sure. I love email. So if you go to one of these banks, and again, they all can be very different, but they all have the same kind of concept at heart. And I think the one Debbie used as an example was the Department of Environment and Conservation in Australia. But like I said, they kind of all operate in a similar fashion. What you first need to do is to decide how much room you have and what seeds you want to collect to begin with. Right. And we mentioned priority goes to threatened plants, obviously, first and foremost. But again, their whole mission is to preserve every bit of the crop diversity of the global crop supply, which that Kerry Fowler dude says is about 1.4 million varieties. And last I saw they were coming up on a million. I think they had like about 940,000 varieties in their care. Correct. So once you've decided what you need in your little local seed bank, you collect seeds. It seems like the most obvious place to start. And when vegetables and fruits are ripe is probably the best time to collect and store these seeds as fruits. They release their seeds when they're ripe, so that usually works out pretty well. But then it kind of depends on the plant. Some plants don't give up their seeds so readily, which can be good thing and a bad thing. Maybe they have a longer time to retain their seeds, which allows for a longer collection time. But if you're in that position, you know when the best time is to get the seed from each plant. Sure. And then when you're collecting it, you're also making notes of the soil quality and type, the growing conditions, the ecosystem, like, what kind of ecosystem it's growing in. That's like the most important part, almost, besides the seed. It's extremely important. We read this one article. Did you see the one from Barry bay? Barry Point? The one in Portland. Barry Botanic Garden. I wanted to add something extra, but they basically had a rundown of how they do it. And they were saying important record keeping is about as important as having the seed itself, because if you don't have the information you need, including what kind of seed is where, it's just basically useless as far as the seed bank is concerned. Yeah, well, I wouldn't say useless, but you would certainly have to grow it and take those records and kind of start over and then just be like, what is this? It talks. So you've recorded all this information? They're going to assign it a sample number, very specific number, obviously, for that seed. So everything is the record keeping is a huge part of it. So you know what everything is. You don't want to get stuff mixed up in case of a nuclear apocalypse. It sucks so bad. Wait a minute, wait a minute. I had the wheat in my left hand. I think it just stink. Or we thought we were growing corn, but we're growing papaya and we're having a papa party. Actually, that wouldn't be so bad. No, that's why you'd have a party. That's right. Because you'd be like, oh, I thought it was going to be corn. And it's a papaya. What a treat. Thank you, God. All right, so you've got these seeds, you've got all the data recorded. Everything is super organized. You've washed your hands, very important part. And then you also want to wash, you want to clean these seeds. You can't just take a wet watermelon seed and throw it in a tiny manila envelope contest to see who can get it in the manila envelope. No, you have to clean everything. You got to make sure it's a really high quality. Some of this is done by hand, some of this is done by machine these days. And then you want to get the moisture out of it. Like I said, moist not only is a gross word, but it's not good for storing seeds. No, it's really not. Because they will start to germinate, which is not what you want going on in your seed bank. Yeah, I guess only for storing seeds. Moisture is really good for seeds. Sure, yeah. For storing seeds, it's not good. Right. Or they can search a rot, too, depending on the condition. So you want to dry them. And apparently there's a rule of thumb when you're preparing seeds for long term cold storage, where you dry them at about 15 deg Celsius, at about 15 deg relative humidity or 15% relative humidity. It's so easy, a child could remember it. That's right. So you dry them out like that, usually in the presence of like a desiccant or something like that. Silicon gel. Once they're dry, you put them into cold storage and that's where they stay. And then cold storage, I think you get it down to 0.4 degree, which is negative 18 degrees Celsius. And they can stay there for decades, sometimes, depending on the seeds. A century? Yeah. But we should say, Chuck, these are specific types of seeds. There's basically two kinds of seeds in the world as far as categorizing seeds goes. One is the orthodox seed, which can undergo the process we just described, in which if you go to a seed bank, those are the kind of seeds that are there. It's what most people think of as seeds. Yes. Right. Then there's something called recalcitrant seeds, which are things like a tuber or acorns or a lot of the fruit out there in the world, typically tropical plants, the way that they seed, you can't do what we just said to a recalcitrant seed. It will destroy it and it won't be viable. So seed banks don't typically tend to store recalcitrant seeds unless that's their specialty. Yeah. In that case, you can't use all these. You got to go low fi. Yeah. It seems like a more old world method of storing a seed if you're working with the recalcitrants. Right. I was just thinking of a Twilight Zone episode or something. Like you break into the Doomsday vault because everything has been lost and at least we got these seeds. Like the guy with the library and he sits on his glasses. I love that one. That was Burgess marriage. Yeah. But in this case they would find that they had all gotten moist and grown and died. So the seed vault is just full of dead plants? That'd be the worst. That'd be pretty sad. Why am I such a downer? I don't know. Did you talk about cryopreservation yet? No. I was going to say, with recalcitrant seeds, you might want to use cryopreservation, which is. Where you take the living tissue of the plant, like, say, a banana, and actually freeze the banana and liquid nitrogen. Well, yeah, that's in vitro storage. Okay. That's not cryopreservation, it's using cryopreservation for in vitro storage. Is that right? Yes, because in the case of a banana, like you said, there is no seed. So you just got to get a piece of that bad boy, right. In vitro style. Right. Because so there's this really great, damn interesting article from years ago that is about how bananas are all clones of one another, that they're all asexual, and like every banana in the world is related to other bananas. Yeah, we've talked about that before, but I feel like we have. I think I'm worried about bananas and other people are too, about how they're not actually healthy. Yeah. I mean, there's a banana problem, right? Is there? I think so. What's the problem? For some reason I think there's a shortage, or maybe I'm just making that up. I think they do that from time to time to get people to pay like an extra fifty cents or something, you know what I mean? All right. So with these seed banks, like I said, each of them stores different things, but you might think they wouldn't store things like poisonous plants or places, species, but you can kind of find a home for any seeds that exists somewhere because you just never know. Kudzu was an example. Debbie used that. It's a very famous invasive plant species here in the south. But now it was always just like nothing but a problem. But now there are moves to maybe try and turn it into a biofuel. So it's just trying to not be so short sighted. Right. Things that you think you can't use now, because you never know what it's going to be like in 500 years. Well put. It turns out they also have marijuana seeds and seed banks as well. Yeah, dog. Because who's the judge? Well, plus it's medicine and they're trying to keep all kinds of plant based medicines, so they're not going to discriminate against marijuana. You couldn't be. There you go. It probably has its own little room with beaded doorways. It's all blacklight macrame owls on the wall. Man, Mcmay owls are the best. So Chuck, once you have all your seeds in the bank and everything, you just leave them for decades, right? And then that's it. Maybe they'll stay forever. No, you got to manage and you got to have a caretaker. You do. There's a few things you need to do. One thing is that when you let seeds go for a while, they're a dormant little package waiting to become a plant, right. But they can die. Even though they're in a state of suspended animation, especially at zero degrees Fahrenheit height, they can still go bad, they can still die, they can still age out of being able to produce crops. So every once in a while, you want to come in, grab your seeds, take them, plant them, grow more seeds, and then Rebank the seeds from the plants you just grew from the seeds you had banked originally, yes. It's kind of a pain, really, if you think about it. But seeds are worth it. Yeah. That's what they have on their front door. And then so when you're doing that, you want to test the plants DNA eventually. Apparently, they don't really do this very much, which I was kind of surprised. You want to basically scan the genome of the plant and maybe store that information. Hey, you got to write it up. You want to create a database so that all of that genetic information can be accessed so you know what genes are and what plants and where those plants are and what seed bank. And apparently that's the steps that small bard is taking, but they're nowhere near that now. And I was really surprised to hear it's really supposedly pretty low tech that the seed banks in the world are just tasked with keeping seeds alive and aren't doing terribly much else unless it's, like, a research station that their seed bank is attached to. Well, yeah, I mean, out of the 1400, I'd say the vast majority of them are the super high tech organizations. Yeah. All right, well, let's take another break, and we'll come back and we'll talk a little bit more about Svalbard and his black metal band, as well as the fact that could there be anything wrong with this plan? So, Chuck, that was quite a teaser. Should we go and talk about that, then? Yeah, I mean, like, you think, what could possibly be wrong with seed banks? What's your problem? Just let small bars have a seat. Right. Yeah. And I kind of was surprised to know that there was any downside. But there is a school of thought that is very much from people that are hands on with farmers themselves where they say, it's great that you're doing this, but in 1000 years, those seeds might be worthless. Right. It was like I was saying, you have to come in and plant those seeds and get new seeds from those plants. Right. You can't just leave them. Correct. Right. But they could also be worthless, Chuck, in that when you take seeds out of the world and bank them, put them in suspended animation, you're halting evolution as well. Well, yeah, that's kind of the point. Like, plants are well, they're literally growing things, but they're also evolving things. And like these farmers are saying day to day and year to year and crop to crop, they see changes. So these seeds that you've got for decades and decades may end up not being anything like the seeds that you're growing or that you may lose. Right. I guess as long as you're keeping it up, though, I mean, I side with the seed vaulters for sure. Yeah. Okay, so there are two schools of thought. One is banking seeds, right. And just protecting the genetic information of every variety of plant you possibly can. Right. It can't be for future use. Yeah, right. The other school of thought is, no, we need to be working with farmers out in the field to protect crop diversity and protect it by making sure that those varieties are still being farmed and that there's a bunch of different varieties, and that these farmers stay farming, that they can make their living doing this farming. That's the way to protect biodiversity is to keep evolution going, not take the seeds and ultimately the plants out of evolution for a while. Yeah, maybe do both. You would think so. But as far as Suzanne Goldenberg says in that Guardian article, there's just not the funding to do both. So there's a big division in crop sciences, in botany, and in biology about which route do you take. And Boulevard has been getting a lot of the money lately, so the seed banking way is kind of the way that people have been going. But there's a lot of people are saying, I don't know if it's such a good idea after all. Maybe we should be protecting crops in situ in the fields and supporting indigenous farmers instead. So there's a big debate about which way to go still. Yeah. And then, like you said at the very beginning, seed banks, and of course, the one in Norway is very about as sexy as seeds can get. As far as the media goes, especially when you have backers like Bill and Melinda Gates and these very wealthy philanthropists kind of backing the idea of these seed banks, I think hopefully that doesn't divert so much funding from the other that it's a wash. Well, that's part of the problem. It is? Very much so. It's diverting a ton of funding away from the stuff, the campaigns that are carrying out in the field. And I think part of the reason is because this division has become pronounced. It's one or the other. So people are saying, okay, well, I'll choose this side over this side or something. I don't like that black and white line of thinking. I don't either. And it does seem like this is important enough to try both approaches. But I guess the will's not there. The finances aren't really right, so it's becoming a battle. But I'm with you, man. I think seed banking is good. I also think working with farmers is good. So let's try both, is my thing. Agreed. The other thing that I'm starting to kind of see about the crop trust in Svalbard is that, like I said, they're coming in, they're saying, here's the standards for seed preservation. And they're kind of carrying out this social Darwinistic mission where it's like, if you're not up to snuff to our standards, you're not getting any fun anymore. You're going to wither and die. And we're just going to support the ones that we feel are up to snuff the seed banks around the world. Yes, which is fine. But it's also I get it on the one hand, right, where you're just kind of like, this works, these standards work, but it's the same thing as saying, like, this strip mall works. You put an Old Navy here, a TJ maxx here, and a grocery store in the middle, that works. Build it everywhere, you lose something. And the irony of it is that we're trying to protect crop diversity by standardizing the way that they're protected, and it just seems like one point is missing the other in that sense. Yeah, I get it. Swallbar gets all the headlines. But there are some other fairly high profile seed banks around the world. One. It's Q gardens in London. Well, it's a little south of London. A couple of hours south, I think. No, I've been there, buddy. Is it really on the map? It looks like it's pretty far south. Well, I mean, it's South London. Okay, well, London is huge. Yeah. Emily and I went and it was the Royal Botanical Gardens. It's just one of the loveliest gardens I've ever seen. I posted pictures on the stuff you should know while I was just so blown away. But there they have the Millennium Seed Bank project, and their goal here is to obviously store plants for the United Kingdom, but they really want to protect the 24,000 global species as well. And I think right now they have all the native plant population covered. It's pretty amazing. England. Oh, just of England. Not the UK as a whole. Maybe it is the UK. As a whole. It probably is the UK. As a whole. Careful. Yeah. Really? There's one in Russia which I believe is the oldest seed bank. Yeah. So that one is the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry. It was established in 1894 in St. Petersburg. Right, yeah. And St. Petersburg was known as lendinggrad for a while while Stalin was in power. And if you'll remember correctly, there was a siege on Len and Grad that lasted, like, three years, I think. And the plant scientists, apparently large number of the plant scientists who worked at the Institute of Plant Industry starved to death, died of starvation rather than grow the seeds into food because they were so bent on protecting it. And the guy that they named the place after, he was a great seed banker as well. Very smart guy, who figured out that genetic diversity was of paramount importance as far as crops go. He died of starvation as well, because Stalin made him escape goat when his collectivist policies caused a famine. So imagine being a guy who's banking seeds to protect against famine and then dying of starvation as a result. No good. No, it's no good. So you got anything else? No, I say hats off to seed vaulters. And good luck, farmers. Yes. There you go. You got them all. Oh, man. We almost left out the big thing, the big news about Svalbard. So what happened? Well, back in May, there are reports that there is this due to climate change. The permafrost melted and Svalbard became flooded, and the Sea bank was threatened. Well, it turns out that that was wildly overblown, that there's water intrusion just about every year in Svalbard. But it's so cold that the water makes it a couple of meters down toward the vault, which is 100 meters long. The tunnel is and then freezes solid. And the world found out about this, and they said, no, you need to do something about that. So apparently they're waterproofing it, but it wasn't necessarily climate change. It was in part, but it was the fact that they built the seed vault into the permafrost. And when you cut into permafrost, you allow for heat intrusion, which keeps the perma part from becoming permanent. So it's not always frozen. It will freeze and thaw. So by creating the seed vault, they messed up the permafrost. Man but it wasn't flooded. The seeds weren't an issue, and it's all under control. It's basically just the media finding something ironic and running with it. I do have one more interesting little tidbit I don't think we covered. This is about Svalbard. It is such a serious deal there that there's no one person with, like, the key. Like, you have to it only opens for deposits three times a year, and sort of like war games. Like, you have to there are multiple people that have to be there to even access this thing. You have to beat it at tic TAC toeh before it will let you in. Pretty neat, man. It is. It's very neat. And the idea behind it is pretty awesome, too. I say do it all. Do everything we can to protect crop diversity. Yes. If you want to know more about seed banks, you can type those words in the search bar athoustofworks.com. And while you're at it, go read the doomsday vault. Colon the seeds that could save a post apocalyptic world in The Guardian. That was a good article as well. And since I said as well, it's time for listener mail, I'm going to preface this email with an offer to you to revise your statement on the magnificence of the aurora Borealis. Man I want to preface that with, I'm never going to read The Independent again. Certainly I won't mention anything I read in the Independent again. So it turns out I read the one article about how the aurora Borealis actually stinks, and it turns out that something around 97% of our listeners have seen the aurora Borealis, and all of them can tell you that it does not, in fact, think in real life that this is just the one article on the entire Internet that says that. Yes, you are well intended, but, boy, did we hear about it. This one ranks up there with emails that we've gotten in the past. So I'm going to read this one example from Maya Uric. And Maya is in Minnesota. In Minneapolis, in fact. All right, so maybe Maya and her husband can come to our show there. I hope they will. In fact, Maya, write us an email and I'll put you on the list. How about that? Yeah, you like that? Sand is coming to town. All right. I feel like we've all been friends for years, guys. After drawing your episodes every week, we shared so much together, it was definitely time to share something with you. My husband and I are in our twenty s oh, forget it. Nothing free for you. Kidding. Living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he's a band teacher, and he plays in a funky rock band called the Confused Brothers Band. That's a great name. The bass and the guitar players are brothers. Confused? I guess so. The brothers parents have a large tract of wild land, a huge tract of land in central Minnesota, where each year, over Memorial Day, the brothers invite 300 of their closest musician friends, camp out in the woods, put on a music festival. Boy, I want to play in this festival. Yeah, man, that sounds great. This year, they were walking from the tent to the main stage, and a couple of people asked us to look up and said, do you see those flickering lights, or are we just tripping too hard? Sure enough, the northern lights were dancing across the sky. The wilderness. With no large towns nearby, the Aurora Borealis is moving in sharp relief. Imagine a laser show, but a little more alien and way more breathtaking. It's a mesmerizing moment that made me really be glad to be alive in this amazing world. Your episode Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis left me so sad that you believe Julia Buckley's experience to be generalizable. Is that a word? It is. Now, she may have had a poor experience ofancing the northern lights, but that doesn't mean they always appear as a foggy shadow. Here to attest that a site can be powerful reminder just how beautiful this planet can be. Thanks for all the knowledge and laughs you've given me over the past few years, Maya. Yurik. Maya, send me an email. Just respond. See? I want to go to your show for free. That is quite an offer. Skeet Ulrich. Take him up on it. If you want to get in touch with us, like Maya Skeet did, you can tweet to us at S YSK podcast. I'm at Josh Clark. Also on Twitter. You can chuck on Facebook at Charles w Chuck Bryant or stuff. You should know you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. And be sure to say hi to Jerry, too, because they go to her as well. And then, as always, hang out with us at our luxurious home on the web stuffyoushineo.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com." |
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